Category: Data-Labor-Technology Stories

NBC Sports and Refinery29 are embarking on a yearlong social editorial and marketing partnership focused on telling stories about female athletes and other women in sports. It’s the latest instance of NBCUniversal working with a platform or digital publisher to create digital content.

The partnership kicked off this week with a new Instagram account, @onherturf, which will promote women in sports through videos, photos and graphics. With the Winter Olympics still happening, broadcast exclusively in the U.S. by NBC Sports, the account mostly features highlights from the games, as well as quotes and illustrations spotlighting different athletes.

Refinery29 joins BuzzFeed, Vox Media, Snap and Apple News as digital companies or platforms that NBCUniversal has invested in or partnered with for digital content. NBC Sports and Refinery29 declined to comment on whether NBC Sports is funding On Her Turf, with Storms reiterating that it is “both an editorial and marketing partnership.”

“We feel there’s a real opportunity here to showcase powerful women in sports and tell these inspirational stories,” said Jenny Storms, CMO of NBC Sports Group. “At the same time, we recognize that it would probably work best if we created a partnership with someone that’s already in the space and speaking closely to millennial women. That’s where Refinery29 comes in.”

While the Olympics provide an easy opportunity to cover female athletes, other sports leagues and competitions broadcast by NBC Sports, including the NFL, the NHL, the English Premier League and NASCAR, are male-dominated. In these instances, NBC Sports and Refinery29 will focus on female fans of the sports and top female executives and personalities at the leagues themselves. Content also won’t be restricted to the sports that NBC Sports has broadcast rights to.

On Her Turf, which might eventually expand beyond the Instagram account, will also focus on how issues such as equal pay and mental health affect sports.

NBC Sports’ tie-up with Refinery29 is reminiscent of its other digital publishing partnerships. With BuzzFeed, in which NBCUniversal has invested $400 million, NBC Sports has programmed two Olympics-themed Snapchat Discover channels during the last two games. NBCUniversal also recently teamed up with BuzzFeed on a new millennial parenting channel called Playfull. With Vox Media, which NBCUniversal invested $200 million in, the  media giant formed the Concert ad platform. Across its various divisions, NBCUniversal is also the biggest producer of Snapchat shows. (NBCUniversal is not an investor in Refinery29.)

NBC Sports will handle ad sales for On Her Turf, centering on custom videos and images and sponsored editorial pieces.

“This will be beyond spots and dots,” said Storms. “And sponsors will be interested in this because we’ve seen partners attach themselves over the past year when it comes to stories of female empowerment.”

“There’s an opportunity for brands here, particularly those marketers looking to align their brands with the idea of female empowerment,” said Josh Spiegelman, managing director of Spotlight, Mindshare North America’s sports and entertainment practice. “I’d be interested in seeing what they do next with custom content solutions for advertisers.”

Refinery29 has three people dedicated full time to On Her Turf and six more helping part time. The publisher will take the lead on packaging and programming the Instagram account and any other platform On Her Turf expands to. NBC Sports is supplying Refinery29 with its live sports and other sports-related video, including archival footage, and assisting in programming and distribution with the help of its 10-person social team.

“We’re looking to highlight the role sports plays for women, and partnering with NBC Sports gives us access that helps us extend even deeper into this space,” said Amy Emmerich, chief content officer at Refinery29.

With On Her Turf, some of the intention is to drive people to tune in for NBC Sports broadcasts, but the companies don’t want to hit people over the head with it, according to Storms.

“The kernel of this idea is that we offer more women’s sports in prime time than anybody else,” said Storms. “We want to engage our female base.”

The post NBCUniversal adds Refinery29 to its growing list of digital publisher and platform partners appeared first on Digiday.

With digital ad revenue harder to come by, a growing number of publishers are considering micropayments again, albeit from different angles.

In the past several months, a slew of micropayment-focused startups, including Scroll, Invisibly and the Brave browser have all been leading charm offensives on publishers, who have been mostly receptive.

Scroll, Tony Haile’s paid ad-blocking startup, has gotten subscription-focused news publishers like Gannett and The New York Times as well as digital natives including Slate and Fusion Media Group to commit to yearlong tests. Jim McKelvey’s startup, Invisibly, says 73 percent of the U.S. publishers tracked by comScore have verbally committed to testing their product when it launches in the fourth quarter of 2018.

Publishers are more than aware that micropayments haven’t worked in the past. But the problems this new crop of companies are vowing to solve – ad-blocking, lousy user experience, low revenue per user – are intractable. And the solutions, where the nitty gritty of micropayment are hidden from audience view, look novel enough to hold promise.

“We know there’s an appetite for our audience to not have ads,” said Ryan Brown, svp of business development for Gizmodo Media Group, which will be testing Scroll. “And there’s a substantial appetite among publishers to explore alternatives to pure-play advertising.”

The idea of funding digital content through micropayments has seduced many before. Steven Brill, the founder of The American Lawyer magazine and Court TV, took a swipe at it first in 2009, with Journalism Online. In 2012, Next Issue Media, a joint venture between Time Inc., Condé Nast, Hearst, News Corp and Meredith, launched the app that would eventually become Texture, which gives subscribers access to 160 magazines for a monthly subscription fee. Startup Blendle, a Dutch pay-per-article startup launched in 2014, gained popularity in the Netherlands before launching a U.S. beta in 2016.

Some of these ideas are still around — Blendle is still technically in beta in the U.S., and Texture, which said it had attracted “hundreds of thousands” of subscribers a few years ago, is still marketing itself — but they suffer from common flaws.

Building audience is the biggest challenge. Most of the older startups, including Blendle, Texture and Inkl, were apps, which are tough to build audiences for. “Being app-based, historically, limits the size of the audience,” said Kim Lau, vp and gm of The Atlantic’s digital operations.

Invisibly is positioning itself as an ad network, and Scroll relies on user cookies, so neither will have that problem. But Scroll requires readers to get out their credit cards, which could interfere with publishers’ other goals of trying to forge direct connections and sell subscriptions and memberships of their own.

“They’re making it worth publishers’ while to do it,” Lau said. “But we have a bunch of other areas we’re trying to focus on.”

The other issue is that publishers have only so much time and human resources to experiment with. “The Invisibly model sounded good, and it may work,” said David Stern, Slate’s vp of product and business development, “but we have a finite amount of dev time and legal time, so we prioritized Scroll.”

Yet faced with declining revenues, many publishers have looked at these things because they need to find something else. “We’re all struggling with the ad model,” said Kai Hsing, svp of marketing and operations at Bustle Digital Group, which has signed a letter of intent to participate in a beta program with Invisibly. “They said, ‘Join us on this leap of faith,’ and I thought, ‘Let’s see what they come up with.’”

The post Like the changing of the seasons, publishers (again) turn to micropayments appeared first on Digiday.

At the Digiday Retail Summit, taking place this week in Austin, Texas, retail executives came together to hash out the most daunting challenges facing their businesses: the massive amounts of data they’re collecting and what to do with it, changing consumer behavior, an inability of internal structures allowing them to move quickly, and the small problem of Amazon taking over, well, everything.

“The world is changing. Consumers are changing,” said Brian Kavanagh, the senior director of retail experience at The Hershey Co., during a presentation on Feb. 21. “We have to throw the old playbook out and listen to our shoppers.”

We gathered the best overheard moments from candid conversations about working with platforms, struggling with internal silos and dealing with a ton of data that in some cases can be misleading.

Breaking down barriers
“The biggest thing we’re struggling with internally is how to be partners and not competitors with people in our company. It’s crazy how territorial people can get when we’re dealing with new products and technology that didn’t exist when our departments were created. We need to work together, not against each other.”

“The amount of micromanaging my team experiences is insane. There’s no way to flesh out strategies on our own.”

“We’ve been working to move our brand into the digital realm, which means we’re in flux, which means there’s a ton of miscommunication and internal breakdowns. You’re basically in a car and trying to fix it at the same time — it’s fast but slow. To me, the biggest problem is that leadership roles act as if they’re in a vacuum. The ideas can come from anywhere if you listen.”

“They say change comes from the top down, but what are you supposed to do when the top isn’t driving any change?”

“As a legacy brand, it’s really hard to remain relevant with all of these newcomers in the space and a customer that no longer cares about legacy. For me, the most frustrating part is watching the executive leadership carry on based on some delusion that’s so far off from where the customer actually is.”

“Working for an apparel brand and coming from CPG is like going 20 years into the past. I can’t believe how slow we move.”

Navigating platform relationships
“It’s not inexpensive to produce the content in all the different formats we produce it, so the fact that we’re investing this much into platforms like Facebook and Instagram and getting nothing in return is incredibly tough.”

“We’ve been able to track actual conversion to YouTube. It will give you the data; Facebook doesn’t. Comparing the video experience on YouTube to Facebook is like comparing apples to oranges.”

“Our customers now know to research directly on YouTube when there’s something they’re interested in buying. Not Facebook, not Instagram, not Pinterest.”

“The medium matters. You have to be everywhere, but it feels like Facebook and Instagram actively block attribution.”

The data problem
“Data can be so overwhelming, to the point you’re scrutinizing individual data points trying to get meaning out of it where there is no actual meaning. Then, you’re paralyzed.”

“Does data matter? What is the data that matters? If an executive can’t answer those questions, they’re not a good executive.”

“The ‘so what’ question is huge. So much data is really just fun to know. So how do you differentiate between what’s color and what’s a key foundation for a business strategy?”

“To me, the scariest part is the potential consequences. People always say, ‘just look at the data,’ and never acknowledge that data can be really misleading. If you interpret it wrong or follow the wrong lead, you’re getting further away from who you are and who your customer is. We can’t really afford to muddy something like that.”

The post ‘I can’t believe how slow we move’: Overheard at the Digiday Retail Summit appeared first on Digiday.

In light of Facebook’s news-feed changes to show less content from publishers, it’s only natural that social-first publishers are making original video a priority in order to maintain their view counts. Facebook-first publisher The Hook, which touts that 70 percent of its content is original, has a head start.

Co-founded by Andy Fidler and Gordon Bennell in 2014, The Hook creates three-minute videos about pop culture, comedy and movies for Facebook, often featuring celebrity interviews, mashups or sketches. Recent successes have been a video on understanding the Scottish accent and one on a mock funeral for the year 2017. Both have over 20,000 shares, thousands of comments and millions of views.

In January, The Hook had around 200 million organic video views a month, according to Tubular Labs, so it’s a long way off from social publisher juggernauts like Unilad or Ladbible that top the Tubular leaderboard. For videos in December, the average engagement rate per video (defined by Facebook as likes, comments and shares) for The Hook was 27,000, according to the company, citing Tubular Labs data. Because audiences are waiting for the payoff at the end of the video, the completion rate is high, an attractive proposition for brands used to Facebook-first publishers that front-load their videos to capture attention quickly.

The Hook is swearing off licensed content for good and is ending the three contracts it has with licensing agencies, according to Fidler. In contrast, around 40 percent of the content Unilad publishes is original, while the rest is aggregated and licensed.

“Building up teams around licensed content has never been our goal,” Fidler said. “It’s worked in the past as an additional content stream, but we don’t need it anymore.”

Since The Hook launched, it has created 15 video series, including “Group Chat,” which depicts WhatsApp chats between characters from series like “Star Wars” or “Game of Thrones.” It’s planning to create more video series that last around six minutes to pitch for Facebook Watch. “Publishers born on digital, rather than social, have tried to fight against how users are interacting, but there’s no point,” said Fidler.

Although The Hook still has a relatively low profile, agencies agree the focus on original content is enticing, particularly while spend to amplify branded content on Facebook is increasing.

Last year, it launched The Hook Labs, its branded-content operation, where it offers creative and production, influencer marketing and distribution. It has worked with 100 brands since launching, including Sony Pictures, Apple Music, Lionsgate, Sega, Groupon and mobile network Giffgaff. While its origins are in gaming and entertainment, it’s expanding beyond those sectors.

According to the publisher, pricing for branded content starts at £20,000 ($28,000), and The Hook Labs guarantees 1 million Facebook views for branded-content clients. Ninety-five percent of its branded-content campaigns have included distribution on The Hook.

The Hook is expanding further in food and drink content, including mashup videos of new products like Parma Violets-flavored gin and Cadbury’s Caramilk chocolate, to encourage comments from engaged audiences.

“Recent Facebook changes will make the playing field around quality rather than gaming the system,” said Fidler. “We’re playing for the long term. Facebook wants publishers with quality content, not just filling up the news feed with junk.”

Image courtesy of The Hook

The post Social publisher The Hook pushes further into original content appeared first on Digiday.

The Facebook Journalism Project and the Society of Professional Journalists are joining forces. The two parties will launch the SPJ Training Program for journalists, and Jennifer Jenkins, who works on journalism partnerships for the social network, said the new initiative “will serve as an extension of FJP’s ongoing efforts to support quality journalism and provide…

Facebook announced Wednesday that it will begin labeling some metrics in its Ads Manager as estimated or in development, as well as removing about 20 metrics that are “unhelpful.” The social network explained in a blog post that the estimated and in development labels will appear in tool tips within Ads Manager’s reporting table, as…

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Twitter made a move to protect brands from having their advertisements appear alongside objectionable content by tweaking the requirements for participation in its Amplify program for publishers. Vice president of emerging content products Mike Park announced in a blog post that in order to qualify as a premium publisher in the Amplify program and be…