Month: February 2018

Welcome to a preview of the new Digiday Video Briefing, a new weekly newsletter from Digiday senior reporter Sahil Patel that will take you behind the scenes of an industry in upheaval. To get this in your inbox, sign up here.

Disillusioned by Facebook, some publishing executives are eager to do more with Snapchat — especially as the app prepares to double the number of original video shows it airs this year. One publishing exec, from a media company that has multiple Snapchat Discover channels, told me he’s more confident in Snapchat’s shows effort this year, particularly after it hired TV producer Seth Goolnik to head up its unscripted content efforts. (Snap vp of content Nick Bell runs the content team, with Sean Mills spearheading the original video shows initiative.)

“With [Seth Goolnik’s predecessor at Snap], we’d talk back and forth about shows, but it wasn’t clear if or when it was going to happen,” this exec said. “With Seth, we’re definitely going to do something together.”

One area of concern is that Snap does not subsidize the cost of producing these shows, which has limited the number of publishers willing to make shows for Snapchat. But with Snap mounting a publisher charm offensive, its openness to work with more digital and legacy publishers on video shows and a redesign that makes publisher content significantly more visible within the app, expect to hear more publishing executives praise Snapchat going forward.

As for Snap’s video shows strategy in 2018: Even though the company plans to vastly expand the number of shows it airs, it’s also going to be more focused, sources said. “They tried to replicate the entire universe of broadcast and cable, which made it feel very unfocused,” said one Snapchat content partner. “What we’ve heard from them is that there’s more of a concerted effort to be more focused on the type of programming they do: Rather than be the entire cable universe, they’ll try to be a compelling single cable network.”

Three questions with…
Athan Stephanopoulos, president of NowThis

NowThis has a website again. Why?
The pretty simple answer: We are producing a tremendous amount of content on any given day. This allows us to house all of the great work that our team does. And as we increasingly move into mid-form and longer-form content, the site adds one more distribution point to our sales matrix.

Did your Facebook video views decline after the news-feed change?
We’ve seen a low, single-digit decline over the last month. But that’s pretty standard in terms of how we can look [on Facebook] month to month. There hasn’t been this massive shift. The thing is, everyone else in the publishing landscape is now focusing on engagement. And this change will favor quality content. We’ve been doing both for a long time.

Is the distributed-media model still viable?
It is. There was a huge rush to go that way, and now, everyone’s panicking. But both NowThis and Group Nine holistically remain focused on the distributed model across many platforms, whether it’s a social site or streaming over-the-top platform. In today’s media landscape, you still have to bring content to where the users are.

Confessional

“With Facebook Watch, it’s clear that Facebook was writing checks but unclear on how long they’d be writing checks for. So we went all in, and made a bunch of series and produced them as quickly as we could because it’s Facebook, and you never know if and when they’ll change their minds.” — Publisher on producing for Facebook Watch

 

What we’ve covered
CBS remains aggressive about its OTT ambitions:

• CBS All Access and Showtime have a combined 5 million subscribers.
• An entertainment news streaming channel is coming in the fourth quarter.

Read more about CBS’s OTT strategy here.

Barstool Sports got 41,000 people to pay for an amateur boxing pay-per-view:

• PPV buys totaled more than $550,000 in revenue.
• It’s uniquely Barstool, but the PPV event could lead to other commerce-related revenue in the future.

Read more about Barstool’s latest antics here.

What we’re reading
We have streaming revenue, too, says NBC: According to the media giant, 44 percent of the revenue NBC has earned from “This Is Us” comes through digital viewership. With TV ad sales as a whole down 8 percent in 2017 compared to the previous year, it’s getting more and more important for TV networks to talk up their digital businesses. Expect more of this.

YouTube holds spending on Red originals: Does this sound familiar to anyone? As I reported a few weeks ago, YouTube Red is in the midst of an identity crisis. When the CEO of YouTube calls YouTube Red a music service, it doesn’t matter how much money the company spends on TV shows and movies. There’s still money to be made if you can sell or license a project to YouTube Red, but it’s not going to be a Netflix competitor anytime soon — if ever.

The post Video Briefing: Snapchat cozies up to more publishers for video shows appeared first on Digiday.

When Yasmin Sewell joined Farfetch in August of 2017 as the luxury marketplace’s first vp of style and creative, the former Style.com fashion director had a different challenge in front of her.

“I’ve spent my career trying to either build businesses or push them further. This business is flying in the most amazing way, and it’s growing,” said Sewell. “I don’t have the weight of that on me, and so, in a way, it’s almost less challenging. It’s like the house is already built, and I just need to paint it.”

Sewell is currently leading a full website relaunch that will include a new content portal — and it’s all being done in house, without the help of an outside agency. To help pull it off, she’s hired a creative director and editor-in-chief to support her team, and plans to make more hires down the road. Her goal is that Farfetch — an aggregator that sells products from more than 700 luxury brands and boutiques to customers in every country — will become known for driving trends.

As it stands now, the Farfetch brand revolves around its global reach as a big e-commerce marketplace, rather than as a taste-making force in the fashion industry. Like other aggregate marketplaces in the luxury industry, it’s struggled to find its footing as a source of organic inspiration for customers. Sewell’s position, if she’s successful, will help Farfetch lower the costs of customer acquisition through Google and other platforms as it competes in an industry thick with competitors, including Yoox Net-a-Porter and Ssense. As the company is rumored to file for an IPO this year, it’s a critical time to prove that it can bring in customers on its own.

We spoke to Sewell about the role data does or doesn’t play in her job, the biggest undertaking when it comes to overhauling the site, and how a singular brand vision can emerge from a multi-brand marketplace.

Farfetch relies on data to make merchandising decisions and serve its customers. Does that data play a role in your job?
I’ve come to deliver something else, which I think we were lacking: a fashion-led vision. Fashion authority doesn’t come from analyzing data; it comes from instinct. That’s what I’ve been able to totally, 100 percent focus on. The company needed that, and they knew that they needed it. They built a great thing with great people, and now it’s about adding the flavor. I haven’t looked at anything data-related — I try to avoid the data, actually. [I’m] pushing forward what I feel, what I predict will be big in fashion; it’s all intuition. That’s not a stat telling you a brand is going to be huge. My role is about bringing more of the emotion to the business.

Why is that role so critical in taking Farfetch to the next level, especially in a crowded market?
The curation for a site like Farfetch is so important, and that’s exactly what I’m there to do. [Founder] José [Neves] recognized that. It’s so crucial in our industry. You could have all these brilliant algorithms to predict what we’re going to buy, look at and show, but an algorithm would never have predicted that people would start wearing hoodies with Céline trousers, for example. It would just never show in the data, so without that curation and fashion perspective and emotion, you would never move forward. You would never evolve in the same way. We’re a fashion company, and we need to make sure we think like a fashion company. That’s my job, and that’s why I’m there.

What does a singular brand vision look like for a company like Farfetch?
We’re a truly global business, so my overarching vision ties in that global angle. We’ll shoot in a different country every month and include people who have worked with us, from every single country in the world. You’ll start to see the best of the world come to life much more on the site. We want to own that global angle, because we have people, partners and brands everywhere, and the breadth of what we do needs to be shown.

Overall, I just want the site to come to life. It need to be unashamedly fashion. A lot of people maybe haven’t been going to Farfetch for inspiration. If I hear people are coming to the site because they see it as a fashion player, rather than just one of the big e-commerce players with loads of stuff, I’ll have been successful — because we’re really much more than that. Ultimately, I want people to love us and know us as a brand. It’s as simple as that.

So how do you plan to actually change the way people see Farfetch?
What’s key to my approach is that I have an understanding of the commercial side of the business, even if my role here is fully creative. It lets me never forget that we’re a shop. If inspiration comes first, people will shop. So people need to know how much product we have without being overwhelmed, meaning we need to guide them much more. That will play out everywhere with our rebranding: on the new homepage, on product pages, on social media, in emails, in banner ads, in our apps. It’s my job to translate that vision, so being consistent is critical.

What’s been the most difficult aspect of steering Farfetch to being more of a fashion brand?
I’m overseeing our e-commerce product shots, which are a hugely important part of the business. We shoot thousands of those every day, and I’m working on elevating them. These photos are critical to any creative campaign, because that’s when the moment happens. That’s when someone goes from an observer to a customer, so I can’t underestimate how important it is that they’re done properly, in an elevated and beautiful way. And it’s a huge job. It needs a lot more thought put into it, as we’re doing thousands every day. We have to ask, “What are the core trends this season? What length of jean and what cut will work with all the blazers we shoot? What’s the right heel height?” Those details bring a season to life. That’s the bit that keeps me up at night.

The post Farfetch’s vp of creative Yasmin Sewell: ‘Fashion authority doesn’t come from analyzing data’ appeared first on Digiday.

U.S. Bank is the latest bank that wants to sell you your next car.

The U.S.’s fifth-largest bank by assets has formed a partnership with the startup AutoGravity that lets customers shop for new vehicles and add-ons on the U.S. Bank website, apply for auto financing and get a decision within minutes. The feature is designed to remove the friction from the shopping, buying and loan application process; it even gives qualified customers pre-approval for auto financing to make the decision process at the dealership even easier.

“Perhaps in the past, thinking from a bank-centric perspective, we would have created an even easier loan application system where we would say ‘tell us how much you want to borrow and we’ll tell whether or not you can borrow it,’ rather that truly thinking about what the customer really wants — a car,” said Gareth Gaston, head of omnichannel banking at U.S. Bank.

Read the full story on tearsheet.co

The post Why U.S. Bank wants to sell you a car appeared first on Digiday.

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