Month: November 2018

WPP’s Grey announced today that it has signed an exclusive partnership with Betaworks, a self-described “startup platform” that invests in seed-stage technology companies with the goal of helping bring their products to market. Grey will be the sole marketing partner for the group, which serves as both an accelerator and a venture-capital firm and which…

Some WeWork locations are going back in time. In partnership with National Geographic, a handful of WeWork spots in L.A., New York and San Francisco will be transported to the 1990s at the beginning of next month, to promote the network’s upcoming show, Valley of the Boom. The partnership promotes National Geographic’s upcoming show, Valley…

Worried about traditional TV networks’ increasing ad loads? We may need to keep an eye on some digital platforms, too. Let’s start with YouTube running two pre-roll ads instead of one.

Madison Avenue often acts like video, audio or even static content is the dominant reason people use the Internet, but when asked, Americans cite interpersonal communications as their top activity.
That’s what the equities research team at Raymond James affirmed when it conducted a national survey of consumers as part of its ongoing tracking of the video and TV marketplace. While the
consumption of over-the-top video programming (Netflix, Hulu, etc.) is indeed a primary activity (cited by 73% of respondents), email is far and away the reason cited by the most (88%) Americans.

Partisan differences are modest among Americans who mention family, career, money or friends as aspects that make their lives meaningful.

The post Members of both parties find meaning in family but differ when it comes to faith appeared first on Pew Research Center.

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Erik Requidan, vice president of programmatic strategy at Intermarkets. In a recent podcast, Chris Kane explained three ways that buyers navigate the complex programmatic supply landscape. The hardest: direct-to-publisher integrations. Some of the biggest names in media… Continue reading »

The post How Direct Deals Are Evolving In The Age Of Programmatic appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Sell Me A Story YouTube is expanding its Stories feature to all creators with over 10,000 followers. YouTube Stories launched last year as “Reels” and was only available to select creators. Now, in an effort to capture some of the traffic that its creators… Continue reading »

The post YouTube Expands Stories; Facebook Considered Selling User Data appeared first on AdExchanger.

Procurement executives are often feared as the agency bogeyman driving down prices. For the latest installment in our Confessions series, in which we trade anonymity for candor, we spoke to a procurement director who admitted those fears are real and believe the practice has pushed agencies to make money behind their backs.

Excerpts lightly edited for clarity and flow.

If procurement executives are to blame for the current woes of agencies, how can they help them?
It’s procurement’s fault to a degree that agencies have shifted their income model. That’s basically a result of forcing down margins. It shouldn’t be that way. The team I work in is more advertising and marketing-focused than others I’ve worked at, so we’re able to draw up contracts with partners that aren’t always trying to secure the cheapest price and are more about how we get value and better return on investment. We don’t want to overpay our agencies and ad tech vendors, but we really don’t want to do the opposite because we see them as partners and if those businesses aren’t profitable then they will not work with us.

Does that mean you’re looking at different remuneration models?
No one jumps straight from paying the more traditional commission-based remuneration models to the more progressive outcome-based models. There’s a bit in the middle you have to adopt first called full-time equivalent payments, which is where we are. It’s one way of approaching a fair remuneration — at least when it’s done right. Ideally, we want to work with our agencies on a performance-based plan to give them the margin they need and a bonus.

How have agencies responded to the plan?
It took me three months to get our agency to give me access to the demand-side platform they used. I brought it up every time we went through negotiation periods with the business. Our legal team was involved. When the agency did relent they only gave me access to new campaigns that were set up and ready to go. I had no access to the previous campaigns. I still don’t have that transparency into all of those campaigns now. Transparency isn’t fully lived by the agency despite the fact that I have the contractual rights to get it.

How has your procurement role adapted to ad tech?
There’s the politics between agencies and ad tech vendors that, while doesn’t directly impact me, is something I have to be aware of to manage the category within my business. We joke about the politics in ad tech but these are things you can’t ignore when you operate in a market where traders that pre-buy inventory, stick into an exchange to be traded programmatically with three levels of commissions

Can you expand on that point?
Advertisers usually pay for a DSP on a commission model but that incentivizes them to buy cheaper media. To avoid this, we’re thinking about changing the way we remunerate programmatic bids. The first option is to pay for the DSP as a SaaS (software as a service) model. The advantage here is the DSP gets fixed revenues and so its income is no longer tied to the investment made. For advertisers, the approach works because it gets the cheaper to use the tech the more they spend, which doesn’t happen with the commission model. The second approach is to look at a fee that remunerates an auction that’s won. It would mean that you incentivize the transaction and no longer the investment taken into the supply chain. We’re speaking to vendors about this now.

Would it help your role if more media buying was done in-house?
There’s no value in an agency grading their own homework. It’s not our intention to buy everything — at least not yet. When you try and set up to buy everything, there will be times when you don’t need all those fixed costs in-house because it might be outside of campaign season, for example. You’re then faced with all these traders that don’t have anything to do.

We license a DSP that’s managed by a trader internally but we also have an internal team for performance marketing. That means our retargeting is all done internally but search is split between our team and the agency. The plan is that more of our performance marketing will be taken in-house. There are six people in that performance team and seven who work on our media team which works directly with the agency. I want to take ownership of the verification software our agency owns the contract to.

The post Confessions of a procurement director: ‘We don’t want to overpay our agencies’ appeared first on Digiday.

In 2016, the video team at millennial-focused news site Mic was forced to float a bunch of crazy ideas in meetings.

Facebook Live video was just entering the media world’s consciousness, and BuzzFeed’s infamous exploding watermelon video had turned Mic executives green with envy. Suddenly, the publisher’s video team was asked what its live video strategy was. The entire newsroom soon found itself brainstorming up ideas for a stunt of its own, eventually landing on, among other things, a widely ridiculed video where it tried to lift a small toy house out of Central Park using balloons.

That scramble wound up being emblematic of Mic, which through its nearly seven years of existence embodied the digital media pivot, changing focus and strategy a startling number of times in order to serve the whims of platforms, advertisers and investors. At various stages, Mic has been all about politics, millennials, verticals, Facebook video and streaming programming. Mic ran out of pivots this week, facing dire financial straits that led to a fire sale to Bustle Media Group in a deal pegged at less than $5 million — a fraction of the “hundreds of millions” that Mic’s co-founder, Chris Altchek, claimed the site was worth just one year ago, after it raised a $21 million Series C round of funding. The vast majority of its staff — some 60-70 people — have been laid off, with only members of the site’s branded content operation and a handful of product staffers, headed to Bustle Media Group.

As 2018 nears its close, Mic joins former high-flying publishers like Mashable, Little Things and Upworthy in meeting a rough end. In most instances, Facebook has been a contributing factor. But in all cases, blaming Facebook is too easy, obscuring strategic errors that came back to haunt these publishers.

The art of the pivot
Mic has pivoting in its roots. Founded in 2012 as Policy Mic, a progressive policy site dedicated to making wonky governmental matters palatable to young people, the company dropped the Policy in 2014 and expanded its mission to be the “premier news and media company for young people” — one of a handful companies looking to corner the purported “millennial media” market.

Like many publishers, Mic benefited from the Facebook traffic wave. At its height, the millennial-focused news publisher, which ultimately raised $60 million in venture capital over several rounds, was attracting 65 million monthly unique users across platforms, and had at various junctures positioned itself as a Facebook success story, a stable of sub-brands aimed at millennials, and, most recently, a developer of high-end video series that it would sell to platforms including Facebook and Netflix.

Today, things look very different. Mic drew 5.5 million unique users in October 2018, its second-highest monthly total in 2018, and a fraction of the nearly 18 million unique users that visited in November 2016, according to Comscore. Its Facebook video views, another one-time linchpin, are down more than 90 percent over the past 12 months, according to CrowdTangle data. 

Mic’s many pivots also contorted the brand into something that couldn’t easily distinguish itself from its competition, which made the site harder to monetize and advertisers harder to attract, according to multiple ad agency sources.

“It’s a huge bummer,” one former editorial staffer said. “But people have been fearing this day for a long time.”

Pivot One: Facebook-first
Mic’s early success was fueled by Facebook distribution. By focusing on social justice issues in addition to national affairs and politics, the millennial-focused news publisher grew quickly in its early years. By 2015, the year it raised $17 million through its Series B round of funding, Mic was attracting 30 million unique users per month, more than 70 percent of whom were coming from Facebook.

That growth, combined with an earnest focus on issues including racism, LGBTQ rights and other social justice issues, put it on the media radar screen and earned it a substantial degree of early credibility. The site even snagged a video interview with President Barack Obama, which focused on topics including the United States’ relationship with Iran.

But Mic’s success, and the systems put in place to replicate it, also created tension within its editorial ranks. The site’s reliance on headline and article formats it had found effective in the past, for example, called “frameworks,” frustrated writers who felt like they were churning out clickbait rather than covering sensitive issues with appropriate nuance. “We trafficked in outrage culture,” a source told The Outline last year.

Pivot Two: Searching
Eventually, that upward surge began to slow down. A Facebook news feed update made in 2015, designed to punish clickbait, began to affect referral traffic, which prompted Mic to lean into search traffic instead to shore up the losses.

Before long, keyword-stuffed, search-focused stories, which were mostly kept off the site’s homepage and the publisher’s Facebook pages, comprised the bulk of Mic’s editorial output. By 2017, SEO-focused content comprised over 90 percent of the publisher’s daily output, according to a second former editorial staffer.

Mic made an attempt to own this strategy, when it broke the site into verticals, such as Slay, focused on beauty, or The Payoff, which focused on personal finance, and expanded its coverage out past its original areas of focus; shortly after raising a $21 million Series C round of funding, it launched a new vertical dedicated to video games, a topic that was already delivering more than a third of its monthly visits.

But that strategy didn’t stick, either. On Aug. 17, 2017, the site laid off 20 staffers, most of them from the SEO team, and formally announced a new plan: to become a leader in visual journalism.

Pivot Three: Video
Though the phrase “pivot to video” became infamous in 2017, Mic was years into it, as of the first publishers to capitalize on Facebook’s interest in it. Series like “Flip the Script,” hosted by Elizabeth Plank, were early success stories, piling up tens of millions of views back in 2015.

In 2017, Mic cut staffers devoted to text and declared its future lay in video. By that year, Mic was gathering hundreds of millions of video views per month, and it had stood up a branded newsroom that it used to generate short-form video content for advertisers, which saw the newsy coverage of topics important to brands as highly differentiated at the beginning of that year, according to a source at one advertiser that executed a six-figure deal with Mic’s branded newsroom.

But Facebook’s changing taste in video proved tough to navigate. Facebook’s decisions to deprioritize publisher content and focus on longer videos crushed the reach of Mic’s videos. Between December 2017 and October 2018, Mic’s monthly Facebook video views had dropped more than 90 percent, according to Crowdtangle data.  “Short-form video just died,” one former video editor said.

Pivot Four: Dispatched
To respond, Facebook sought to work on a longer show for Facebook Watch. The final big Facebook bet Mic made was on a news show, Mic Dispatch, which Facebook reportedly paid $5 million for a year’s worth of coverage, part of a bigger investment Facebook made in weekly news shows this past spring. Mic hired multiple staffers to work on the show, amidst a hiring freeze on the writing side of the business.

The staffers that worked on Dispatch were inspired, and they worked hard at it. According to one staffer that worked on Dispatch, its cameramen would often spend more than a week at a time on the road, flying from shoot to shoot, as a team of over three dozen people worked to meet Facebook’s content demands of 30-40 minutes of content per week.

The show amassed a decent audience, pulling around 100,000 viewers per episode, that staffer said. But Facebook wanted more than that. In a meeting between Mic and Facebook, representatives of the platform told Mic that it was looking for an average view count closer to 500,000 views per episode, that staffer said.

Months later, Facebook told Mic it would not be renewing Dispatch, cutting off a valuable lifeline of revenue.

Pivot Five: IP
In the first half of 2018, co-founder Chris Altchek went on a charm offensive, visiting with media and tech press to talk about how it had moved on from an obsession with Facebook News Feed, and had instead committed to premium video. Mic had launched a new outfit, Mic Productions, a five-person team that would conceive and pitch new shows to platforms like Netflix or Hulu. It produced dozens of sizzle reel-type pitches, which it sent out to companies, a source familiar with the matter said.

But Mic staffers weren’t producing those sizzle reels. While Mic had sold a show to Netflix and had produced pitches for channels including Comedy Central, it was farming out most of the production work to outside companies, a move that unnerved many staffers on the video team.

“The business model was, we create the intellectual property,” one former video staffer said. “But all the people on our video teams were wondering, ‘Then where does that does leave us?’”

The post Pivoting to nowhere: How Mic ran out of radical makeovers appeared first on Digiday.

With cable viewership down and streaming services rising, agencies and brands are challenged with the world of OTT. And of course, video marketing isn’t just commercials during TV; there’s pre-roll on YouTube, ad breaks on Facebook and “Stories” on Snapchat and Instagram. At Digiday’s Video Marketing Summit in Nashville, Tennessee, marketers shared their biggest challenges. Here’s some of what was said.

Agencies don’t know who owns OTT internally
“A lot of times there’s internal politics on who to buy. A lot of agencies are saying they have these video teams but when you really dig into it video isn’t just video. There’s digital and TV.”

“We take the position that OTT is an extension of our television buy. Right now we tend to use it for our niche products. We’ve eliminated as much as possible pre-roll because we really want television programming.”

Who should own video at agencies?
“With media and creative, and who should own video between the two, I once had a client say this: ‘I have a beautiful 90-second spot that runs in my lobby because media cannot accommodate this glorious creative work.’ We get media plans recommending 100 different formats that my creative agency can’t make. There has to be a truth somewhere in-between.”

“I am working with clients who have never been in a scenario where creative and the distribution of creative was attached. They may be doing upfront buys but the creative shop is so disconnected to those decisions.”

“You go to a meeting with middle management, who are in charge of making decisions on how money is allocated, and they have no formula.”

Too many vendors
“Everybody comes in and says, ‘We’re the ones with the best source of inventory,’ and we’re like, ‘Okay?’ It’s challenging for us to — as compared to the normal RFP process — of who is the direct source and who should we be talking to.”

“Best sources? It makes me sweat. The number of people I meet with I’m trying to sort where do they fit. I want to make the right decision but making the effort relies on a lot of assumptions.”

“Anyone coming in that doesn’t have a unique differentiator it’s easy to say no to.”

Brands are unsure of what metrics to focus on
“At the end of the day, what does your advertiser care about? They don’t care about audience. Every time we get them a brief and they’re like our CPM is too high. Okay, then you care about price.”

“I would never expect [our brands] to be a higher performance buyer, but I get they’re trying to achieve awareness.”

Questioning the effectiveness of six seconds
“We have clients that just want the bumper ads, but you can’t really see anything. You can’t show retail offers.”

“At a creative firm, we used to hate six seconds. We love our 2-minute films that would make people cry. When you have clients just interested in performance metrics, you run into trouble. But you can tell [the story] if you’re telling one thing.”

“We approach six seconds as a retargeting tactic. People who engage with 15 or 30 we retarget with six as a reminder. It depends on the channel. Pinterest might be an area where it actually works.”

Facebook’s 3-second ads can work
“Why would you be seeing so much lift on Facebook if people aren’t seeing the ads?”

“Don’t just use the same video assets for Facebook. You’re only getting three seconds so a lot of time we shy away from video on Facebook because you can’t rely on viewability. It’s not for 15s to 30s.”

“Depending on your content, three seconds isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you’re just looking for brand awareness. I don’t think you can compare a certain length on Facebook to elsewhere even if it’s the same price. How we compare ad formats shouldn’t start with price?”

“I think [Facebook pre-roll] is the most annoying and obnoxious ad product. It doesn’t benefit us to have ad products that are annoying to consumers.”

YouTube has really improved customer service; Facebook has not 
“I find them to be very hot and cold. Some are extremely creative. Others are absolutely useless.”

“Each platform’s account teams are a reflection of the entire company. Facebook is big, and they’ve always said, ‘We do it our way.’ Twitter might want to be more collaborative because they’re more scrappy. Someone like Snapchat is still new in the space and has more pressure to yield to advertisers. They feel similar to early days of Facebook.”

“On YouTube, three of our marquee accounts went dark. The customer service effort [YouTube] put in has been incredible, the ultimate damage control, granted these were big accounts. Facebook and others really dropped the ball by not taking advantage.”

Influencer marketing has a lot of energy but hard to harness
“We have natural influencer activity for free. We’re figuring out where to put dollars smartly and authentically and then of course measurement.”

“I think it’s very nascent. Self-serve became a fix and then white-listing. The challenge is that influencers represent content and distribution at the same time.”

“We have some brands that are more conservative so the risk there of someone doing something crazy could tarnish. But they still do want to try influencers. It’s just how far do we go?”

“There’s a lot of fraud there when it comes to their followers. We work with a third-party that vets that out.”

“Some influencers are really shitty partners. They might be a diva, way overpriced, have fake followers. But there’s a place for a lot of added value if you find the right partner. There are two sides. They’re just very extreme.”

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The post ‘Video isn’t just video’: Overheard at Digiday Video Marketing Summit appeared first on Digiday.