Month: January 2018

When you stack different Pringles flavors on top of each other and eat them all at the same time, crazy fun things happen to your taste buds. At least that’s the premise of the brand’s 30-second Super Bowl spot, “Wow,” which debuted today. The ad will run during the first half of Super Bowl LII…

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Twitter is a company that always seems on the verge of flight. The potential is there, but the question remains: Will the platform ever be able to fulfill it? Instability in Twitter’s C-suite doesn’t help. On Tuesday, COO Anthony Noto – second in command to Jack Dorsey – became the most recent top Twitter exec to fly… Continue reading »

The post Twitter: The Not-So-Little Engine That … Might? appeared first on AdExchanger.

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“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Tim Ware, vice president of advanced television at Telaria. In my last column, a little more than a year ago, I outlined the philosophical differences between programmatic TV and digital video buyers. While both… Continue reading »

The post Targeting, Fraud, Viewability And Completed Views Will Shape The Next Generation Of TV appeared first on AdExchanger.

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Settle An Old Score Changes are afoot at comScore, but it’s unclear if those changes are for the better or the worse. Bloomberg reports comScore has enlisted Goldman Sachs to explore a potential sale, though no formal talks have begun. The measurement firm also… Continue reading »

The post ComScore Allegedly Exploring Sale; NBCU’s TV Advertising Holds Steady appeared first on AdExchanger.

Fitness magazine Self folded its print edition at the end of 2016 as part of a consolidation of Condé Nast’s magazines. But since then, editor-in-chief Carolyn Kylstra has found new life (and younger readers) for the brand on Snapchat.

Self launched in May on Snapchat’s Discover section for publishers with a weekly frequency, which increased to three times a week in July. Self now reaches 8 million unique users a month on Snapchat, making it Self’s biggest platform, followed by its website, which had 6 million uniques in December, according to comScore.

From an engagement and loyalty perspective, Self is performing well, according to Snapchat parent Snap. Its audience has grown steadily since May, and the percentage of its audience that returns to its Discover Stories at least three times a week is more than 50 percent.

That loyalty is notable. Snapchat has moved to make Discover more of a video destination, which can make it hard for text-based publishers like Self to compete. “Video provides more value for ads and keeps people inside the platform longer,” said Nick Cicero, CEO of Delmondo, which provides Snapchat analytics to Discover publishers. “It might be harder for a text-based publisher to break out. But the audience is so young, just to be on there is advertising for a lot of publishers.”

Founded in 1979, Self has carved out a name with women in their 20s, 30s and 40s as a positive, inclusive fitness brand, but it wasn’t as well-known to Snapchat’s teen and college-age audience. On Snapchat, Self avoids topics that are risky or irrelevant to teens, like weight loss and child rearing, but the subject matter is essentially the same as Self.com’s.

“When it comes to health and wellness, everyone cares about feeling better, no matter how old they are,” Kylstra said.

There’s not a publisher out there that’s not thinking about how to diversify their traffic sources, especially in the wake of Facebook deprioritizing news in its news feed. Self was already moving in that direction, cutting its daily story output in half last year to 10, to focus on longer, more differentiated stories; and increasing traffic from its newsletters, search and Instagram. Snapchat doesn’t let publishers link to their sites from their Discover editions, but Self still considers it a good way to build its brand with a new audience.

Publishers have their own issues with Snapchat, with some saying it’s hard to make money there, but the app has been cozying up to publishers lately, building a partnership team to serve them and planning a publisher summit.

Condé Nast said it wouldn’t discuss the details of its partnership with Snapchat, but it said that as a standalone channel, Snapchat is profitable for Self. Kylstra said she’s not super concerned about converting Snapchat users to Self.com. Self has three people dedicated full time to the Discover edition, supplemented by freelancers, which is smaller than many publishers’ Snapchat teams, and Self’s team often repurposes Snapchat content for Instagram and Self’s own site.

“My biggest focus is to establish the brand as a trusted resource in wellness,” said Kylstra. “The broader goal is to build brand affiliation and create really loyal audiences who, when they see [our products] at Target or Bed Bath & Beyond or go to one of our running clubs, they’ll be excited about us because they know us.”

The post After folding in print, Self’s 8 million Snapchat users are more than on its website appeared first on Digiday.

Pop-up shops offer brands, especially e-commerce brands, a way to form lasting relationships with consumers. These pop-ups operate as experiential retail spaces that merge entertainment with retail, allowing brands to sell and generate buzz around their products.

The problem is, spaces for pop-ups can be expensive. As a workaround, ad agencies are using their own offices as sites for their clients’ pop-ups. This accomplishes two things: Agencies can eliminate their existing clients’ real estate costs and show off their experiential talents to gain new clients.

Take digital agency Grow, for example. This spring, it will transform one of its two office buildings at its headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia, into a pop-up space. The 1,500-square-foot area will serve as the lunchroom for the agency’s 45 employees during the day, but it will be redesigned and reconfigured at night to fit the experiential needs of Grow’s individual or prospective clients, whether it’s for a night, weekend or several weeks.

Drew Ungvarsky, CEO and creative director at Grow, said a “massive” need exists for more spaces where brands can experiment with a brick-and-mortar presence, but many companies cannot host pop-ups because of the high price. A 1,000-square-foot space in Norfolk, for example, can cost around $24,000 a month, according to S.L. Nusbaum Realty Co.

The cost of renting a space is even steeper in larger cities. A room in New York City’s Nolita neighborhood under 1,000 square feet can easily cost $35,000 to $40,000 a month.

For this reason, Ungvarsky said, Grow plans on renting its pop-up space out as cheaply as it can, if not for free. Grow itself plans to spend around $50,000 for the initial renovation and operating costs, according to Ungvarsky.

“We want to help our clients find out what works today, so our intent is not to make money off of this,” he said. “We’re thinking of it as a space where our partners can innovate.” He added that the effort also helps the agency show off “the different way it thinks about [experiential].”

Hawke Media already has experience in building its own experiential pop-ups for clients in a co-retail space it bought last year called The Nest. Several companies sell their products in their own shops within the 1,100-square-foot space on Abbot Kinney Boulevard, one of Los Angeles’ trendiest and most expensive streets, a few minutes from Venice Beach.

Between March and May last year, Hawke Media hosted e-commerce brands such as Ridge Wallet, Sweat Tailor and BaubleBar at The Nest to boost their brand awareness, throw branded events and test new concepts. Hawke Media’s experiential team managed the daily operations, including staffing and inventory; promoted the shop on social with paid media; and threw events featuring influencers, live music and activities like yoga.

“We wanted to create a turnkey solution for brands looking to dip their feet in pop-up shops, especially if they are only e-commerce,” said Erik Huberman, founder and CEO of Hawke Media. “It’s really hard to survive in a retail presence in LA just because it’s so expensive.”

Companies aren’t necessarily driving revenue from these pop-ups. In fact, every brand at The Nest, as well as Hawke Media itself, broke even. Every month, Hawke Media would rotate the spots among 10 e-commerce brands, half of which were existing clients. These brands would split the operational costs, which Huberman would not disclose, making the overall cost much cheaper than it would be if they rented their own spaces.

“With The Nest, brands can test something out in a short-term basis and see if they would ever want to go into retail permanently, rather than committing to a five- to 10-year lease,” said Karolina Swietoniowska, experiential marketing producer at Hawke Media.

If anything, these pop-ups are effective marketing plays, said Huberman. “From a brand-equity standpoint, it’s so valuable to have a physical presence,” he said. “E-commerce is great, but it’s missing a lot of that touch-and-feel aspect that you get from having that direct presence.”

Huberman said Hawke Media will continue to operate The Nest. The agency is thinking of bringing the activation to large events like Art Basel, South by Southwest or even Cannes.

The growth of marketing technologies like artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality and voice is also driving this need for temporary brick-and-mortar spaces. Brands use these technologies as new ways to interact with their customers, but they need room and audiences to test their approaches. Some agencies are using their in-house pop-ups as temporary areas for brands to demonstrate their latest technologies.

Tool of North America, for example, owns what it calls a “mixed-reality coffee shop” named Goodboybob in Santa Monica, California, where customers can get a sneak peak of a client’s VR or AR project along with some avocado toast.

The post Agencies free up their offices for their clients’ experiential tests appeared first on Digiday.

Few brands have the fortitude to run marketing on their own without much reliance on ad agencies, but Netflix is an exception. With an in-house approach, Netflix is increasing its marketing spend from approximately $1.3 billion to $2 billion this year, as the company plans to spend around $8 billion on content — including 80 new original films — in 2018.

Netflix declined to discuss its marketing strategy, but analysts and agency executives believe Netflix’s marketing budget increase aligns with its content strategy, and they expect most of Netflix’s ad dollars to go to digital, especially programmatic, as well as to offline events to generate earned media. The streaming service is known to handle most media buys in-house, although MEC is Netflix’s major media shop, they said.

“Netflix is a performance marketer. Data is everything, with which Netflix makes marketing less subjective,” said Brian Wieser, senior research analyst for Pivotal Research Group. “I think Netflix will spend its increased marketing budget mostly on digital media. But keep in mind, most of its growth is international, so I’m sure there will be different [media-buying] choices by market.”

Programmatic is an area in which Netflix is likely to keep spending more. In a letter to shareholders last April, Netflix said it was investing more in programmatic as part of its $1 billion-plus marketing spend, with the goal of improving its ability to “do individualized marketing at scale and to deliver the right ad to the right person at the right time.” Speaking on condition of anonymity, one major ad exchange said Netflix has been among the top 10 brand spenders on the exchange over the past three years, and the streaming service will maintain that position based on its buying patterns. Netflix primarily uses Google DoubleClick Bid Manager to buy media programmatically, according to the exchange.

Of course, Netflix will continue to run programmatic in-house through a team — consisting of multiple former WPP and Publicis employees — in the Bay Area. This is because more and more brands have started overseeing buy-side fees in programmatic, and Netflix can take an in-house approach because it has technical competency, according to Will Doherty, vp of business development for Index Exchange.

“Netflix needs to maintain its content library, recommend relevant content on its platform and support different user interfaces across devices, which requires lots of technical competency. Programmatic is less daunting compared to that,” said Doherty. “If I’m a marketer who is selling candy bars, I don’t have that tech infrastructure ingrained in my DNA.”

Netflix’s hands-on approach is not limited to programmatic. Since the streaming service is a tech-centric company, it has developed its own marketing model and is used to processing internal data on its own. Because of that, media agencies are usually only responsible for campaign execution, instead of developing strategic media planning for Netflix, according to Wieser. “Netflix works with media agencies on something that it can’t do efficiently on its own, like buy TV or out of home,” he said.

Netflix has even brought some creative work in-house. Robert Green, chief creative officer for Ripple Collective, has worked on ad campaigns for Netflix before and said the company is unique because it lets a group of marketers run advertising in-house. “That means you have people who are focused on outcomes helping to craft and create campaigns, rather than having more purely creatives at that stage of the work,” said Green. “And also uniquely — though this is changing more and more — the majority of the campaigns would [take place] on the Netflix platform itself, with some outdoor to augment but very little else in the way of media buys.”

As Netflix plans to create more original films, Green believes the company will need to spend more on TV, out-of-home and digital series to promote its movies, just like other movie studios. Lauren Tetuan, evp and media director for Deutsch, thinks that as a performance marketer, Netflix has developed — and will continue to develop — innovative marketing strategies, from social media to events marketing to offline installations, to reach a broader audience.

“It is a balance of maintaining and attracting new subscribers with driving viewership of new content,” said Tetuan. “Netflix is now competing with the major studios, not just Hulu and other streaming services, so a big piece of the plan is orchestrated around getting people to watch its growing portfolio of original content.”

The post ‘Data is everything’: Netflix is pouring money into marketing — and that should benefit programmatic appeared first on Digiday.