Month: September 2019

“It’s something that we’re just testing right now,” said Masterclass CMO David Schriber of working with Amazon. “I would expect we would find success there and start to grow our investment in reaching consumers that way.” 

So far, the results have been “positive” but “as with any brand testing into a new media channel, there’s a learning curve for us on the creative side,” added Schriber. The company is known for pitching its 65 instructors — including Ron Howard on directing, Gordon Ramsey on cooking and, most recently, Anna Wintour on how to be a boss — through longer-form trailers which have performed well on social channels like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. 

“But a three-minute trailer isn’t the way to market within Amazon’s environment,” said Schriber. “We’re just starting to figure out the types of creative that work. Here’s a hint to anybody trying to figure it out: It will sound like common sense, but getting the message to be very clear, concise, brief and in the first few seconds is proving to be the best way to reach people when you get outside the social media platforms digitally.” 

With Amazon’s ad business maturing, brands like Masterclass and Ally Financial that don’t sell products via the platform have been more interested in ad buys on Amazon. The data and audience targeting capabilities are responsible for this growth, explained Kevin Simonson, CEO of Metric Digital, in an email, adding, “If somebody was buying books to learn about something, you could use Amazon’s DSP to target and advertise to those people on and off of Amazon. We’re doing this for some of our [e-commerce] clients.” 

“The same audiences you can target on the duopoly, you can through Amazon on/off its network,” wrote BJ Cook, CEO and Co-founder of Digital Operative, a D2C digital commerce agency, in an email. “With Amazon’s trove of data, the loyalty of its customers and ability to target audience segments, non-endemic brands will be tapping into the sweet honey of Amazon moving forward.”

In 2018, Masterclass spent $1.9 million in media, down slightly from its $2 million spend in 2017, according to Kantar, which also found that during the first six months of 2019, the company spent $137,000 in media. Kantar doesn’t measure social media spending, where Masterclass allocates the majority of its budget. 

Outside of Amazon, Masterclass’ media budget is generally focused on social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Google and YouTube. Schriber declined to share the company’s exact budget or break down how it allocates it to each channel. “With 65 instructors, each one of those is a very different marketing plan,” said Schriber. “There’s probably at the end of our year some aggregate that we could look at of those percentages, but it would probably be like describing the average of weather. We’re testing and evolving [where we spend] really quickly.” 

 For the launch of the company’s most recent class with its new instructor Anna Wintour in September, the company maintained its typical spend in those social channels; for this campaign those channels included Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. In addition to those social platforms, Masterclass doubled its overall media investment to add out-of-home and digital channels into the mix, including Vogue, Teen Vogue, Glamour, Vanity Fair, Bon Appetit, The New Yorker and The New York Times (digital, print and The Daily Podcast), with the help of media agency Exverus. (Typically, Masterclass handled buying for the social channels in-house.) 

In general, Masterclass has been testing media buys outside of its typical Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Google. Other than testing on Amazon, the company has been testing advertising on podcasts and will likely continue to do more in that space, according to Schriber, who noted that there’s an intersection between the audiences of people who want to learn while listening and people who will want to learn from instructors through Masterclass videos. 

“What a lot of the test channels represent for us right now is a non-algorithmic way of finding audiences that have these special interests,” said Schriber, adding that Amazon, podcasts and websites for specific hobbies allow Masterclass to find people via specific interests. “It’s a little different than the approach you might take on a Facebook platform.”

The post How Masterclass is using Amazon advertising appeared first on Digiday.

The publisher initially decided to take drastic action when ad blocking reached crisis levels in 2016, when ad-blocking rates had peaked at around 30% of publisher traffic, according to eMarketer. Although ad-blocking rates have since stabilized — they dropped in Germany to 20% in 2017 — the loss in revenue is still significant.

Reducing the number of ad impressions available took time to sell into the C-suite, according to Luetgenau.

“The first response was to add more ad impressions in order to increase revenue,” said Luetgenau. “But we knew if we did that, we’d just get even more ad blockers. We were at a dead-end street. That’s when we started on this user-first strategy.”

Burda dropped intrusive banner ad formats such as those that take over a large proportion of the screen, and obscure editorial content in the process. Just removing those formats alone lost the publisher a chunky amount of revenue overnight.

“We knew we were taking a risk. We saw seven-figure revenues disappear pretty much immediately just from dropping that one [ad] format,” said Luetgenau.

The publisher also introduced a smart ad-loading process, where ads would only load after a user had started scrolling down a page. That caused viewability rates to increase, and the publisher set up a 25-person branded content team to start generating commercial native ad partnerships for the first time due to increased advertiser interest.

After three months of revenue loss, advertisers began to respond to the new set-up, either by increasing their average bid rates if buying the ads programmatically or direct sales, according to Luetgenau. Roughly 60% of Burda Forward’s ad revenue comes from ads bought programmatically, with the majority via open exchanges.

Now Burda Forward plans to overhaul its tech infrastructure and centralize all inventory within a single ad server, in order to create more competition among advertisers bidding on its inventory, and drive up digital ad revenue further. To start this process, it transitioned from Google Ad Manager in April to AppNexus’ ad server, which it hopes will give it more transparency into who is bidding in its auction, and also which vendors are taking a cut, said Luetgenau.

Burda worked closely with the Coalition for Better Ads, a global joint industry initiative, set up in 2016 as a direct response to the user backlash to bad ads, and to establish better standards around what constitutes a good ad experience.

“Many publishers suspect this [approach] will work but worry too much about quarterly numbers to make any serious changes,” said Neil Thurman, director for the Coalition for Better Ads. “Burda has taken it to an extreme, and gone well beyond our standards, to show that better ads not only makes better business sense but make for happier consumers.”

The post How Burda increased ad revenue by cutting ad clutter appeared first on Digiday.

Input, which site founder Joshua Topolsky began publicizing in January, will deliver staples such as device reviews and quick-hit news about tech and software companies — well-trod areas. The goal is to differentiate through voice and distinctive packaging, aided by design and format features originally built for Topolsky’s other site, The Outline.

Input is part of a new constellation of BDG-owned sites it calls the Culture and Innovation Collection, which BDG’s chief revenue officer, Jason Wagenheim, vowed would deliver “eight-figure” revenues in its first full year, while providing a template that the rest of the BDG portfolio could follow as the CMS and design technology that powered The Outline is folded into BDG’s proprietary content management system. The goal is to get the rest of BDG’s portfolio onto that by the summer of 2020, in an attempt to give each BDG site a distinctive look and feel while maximizing opportunities to distribute the branded content that drives BDG’s business.

“This is the next chapter for our company,” Wagenheim said. “We’re going to start to see a maturity in the growth for the core sites. This is where the hockey stick [growth] will continue.”

As falling display ad revenue rates and rising platforms have battered digital media, BDG CEO Bryan Goldberg has maintained that media can still be a good business for portfolio companies that share back-office resources, such as office space, tech and product and sales infrastructure.

In just the past 12 months, BDG has acquired five sites: Mic, Flavorpill, Inverse, Nylon and The Outline. The publisher’s older sites — Bustle, Romper, Elite Daily and Zoe Report — are each individually profitable, and that revenue is helping pay for investment in BDG’s tech and culture group, said Wagenheim.

Some acquisitions, such as Inverse, have been fit neatly into Bustle’s strategy, while others, such as Mic, remain a work in progress. Through the first eight months of this year, Mic’s traffic has slid slightly, from 2.6 million to 2.1 million monthly unique users, according to Comscore. The traffic to some of its other sites, such as Bustle, are also down over that same period, falling from 33 million to 28 million, also per Comscore. Over that same period, Bustle Digital Group’s overall audience has grown from 49 million to 57 million monthly unique users, per Comscore.

BDG’s bet is by bulking up it can compete with other multi-brand publishers, including Vox Media, which last week sealed a deal to acquire New York Media and its portfolio of seven brands. Goldberg, who has long predicted mass digital media consolidation driven in large part by the inefficiency of corporate services, tech and product, and sales teams, called last week’s news that Vox Media had acquired New York Media “good for the business.”

“Mergers like this one are precisely the correct move for the industry and lifts all boats,” Goldberg said.

The new technology is meant to help reduce BDG’s reliance on paid distribution for the branded content that drives most of the company’s business: Today, about 75% of BDG’s revenue comes from direct-sold advertising, 90% of which involves some branded content creation, Wagenheim said. BDG sells ads on a cost-per-view basis, distributing it using a combination of paid and organic social, as well as its own and partners owned and operated sites.

After years of focusing on women-focused lifestyle content, launching a new title focused on technology will allow BDG to compete for the budgets of a new collection of advertisers.

David Tucker, the head of strategy at the media agency Swellshark, said that BDG has turned into a frequent place to spend for clients in beauty, and said the group has done a good job in placing different messages on different titles. Some buyers think that the previous success they’ve had should help them grab more budgets from people they already have relationships with.

“I would give them the benefit of the doubt,” said Jen Mathis, svp and media director at Cramer-Krasselt. “Clients, in general, are more comfortable approving things they’re familiar with. To them, it’s not a bad thing to say, ‘We worked with these folks in the past; we trust their work, so let’s try something else.’”

The post ‘This is the next chapter’: Bustle readies launch of tech news site Input appeared first on Digiday.