Month: February 2018

As sexual harassment issues sweep the ad industry, some heads are rolling. But in many cases, it feels like agencies aren’t getting ahead of the problem. In this edition of Confessions, in which we grant anonymity for honesty, a female agency veteran who has worked in both human resources and public relations at major agencies discusses why HR is often the problem. This conversation has been edited and condensed.

How do you view #MeToo and its arrival to the ad industry?
It comes down to size. The bigger you get, the harder it is to maintain a culture. And the culture agencies have maintained is one of trying to be cool. The ad industry is the one industry where everyone acts like little kids. Everyone wants to be cool. The white middle-aged guy in the suburbs who talks like a hip-hop artist is the CEO.

That’s awkward.
Of course. It reeks of so much white privilege. I feel like with the heads of so many agencies, it’s probably one of the most liberal, democratic places. For the most part, they’re really social justice types. But they speak with white privilege. Just look at how everyone got their jobs. They went to great schools; their dads knew someone in the industry. They say they get it when it comes to diversity, but I don’t think they do. They might know what’s politically correct, but I don’t think they understand what’s correct.

How is that expressed?
The ad culture is all about sexual innuendo. And joking around. And dropping the F-bomb. It’s inappropriate, and our culture as a whole has gotten this way. But what’s happening now is that it’s going the other way. But not in a good way. People are now afraid to speak at work.

How does HR play into that?
Two things. One, the culture of agencies is changing because on the face of it, people are afraid to joke around. Two, I think because of [Instagram account] Diet Madison Avenue and #MeToo, I think that HR is paying attention, but not because they should, but because it’s a liability. But the fact is, if you’re putting a complaint against a senior-level person who is more important than you, they will take the senior’s side.

Explain.
HR is really siloed, as much as they say they’re not. I know it’s siloed. I don’t feel like HR works in tandem in with corporate comms.

Give me an example.
Let’s say it’s layoffs, not even harassment stuff. Sometimes, there is an agencywide email that explains the cuts. But usually what happens is people get laid off, and they hear rumors internally. That ruins the culture. People are scared for their jobs and are angry.

Social media has helped a lot of rumors and allegations surface.
People already know the truth. People aren’t stupid. When there are companies who are firing someone at the top, there are usually other people at the top who have protected the harasser or abuser. Once your culture is poisoned by a negative leader or organization, it’s important to adjust it. I don’t think it’s a huge town hall meeting. Not enough agencies do the small-group thing, department by department, floor by floor. Hearing from their boss and senior management is so important. I don’t think enough marketing companies do what they should be doing with PR 101, which is getting ahead of the issue.

How does HR deal with rumors?
They just don’t, and part of it is that PR has to be part of the conversation. I don’t think they often are. Unlike other industries, I think agencies aren’t getting ahead of the story. I work with CEOs who simply pretend it’s not happening around them, that there aren’t rumors about people. You kind of see that they want to pretend it never happened, that it’s going to go away.

Why?
This is speculation, but HR is female. The toughest women are the best gatekeepers when it comes to getting information out. Same with PR. Some of the most respected PR people are really hard on reporters and protect the company no matter what. HR does it, too. Agencies have a problem, but they have an HR problem.

The post Confessions of an ad exec: Ad agency culture problems start at the top appeared first on Digiday.

Concerns about the looming ePrivacy Regulation, not to mention fear of the duopoly, are prompting European publishers to collaborate on joint consumer login systems. So far, Germany and Portugal have led the charge. Now, it looks like France could join the fray.

Leading national newspapers Le Monde, Le Figaro and Le Parisien are among the publishers discussing the potential for implementing a common single login across their sites, through which users can be automatically authenticated each time they visit one of the publishers’ sites.

The talks aren’t limited to newspaper publishers. Radio and TV broadcasters are also involved, as are pure-play digital publishers, according to Laure de Lataillade, executive director of France’s online publishing trade body Geste.

Nothing has been decided yet, but French media companies want to explore whether building a common login system is a feasible way to simplify gaining consumer consent for cookie use. They’re examining the German single-login system Verimi and Portugal’s equivalent Nonio to see if they can be replicated in the French market.

The idea is to pool resources to create an independent, common technology infrastructure that all publishers and other media owners can plug into. A consumer would then upload their email and password, which would automatically log them in to any site that’s part of the partnership. Any other personal data such as social, demographic or location data wouldn’t be collected or shared between the publisher partners, according to de Lataillade. In doing so, all media owners could ensure they have user consent.

Although the ePrivacy Regulation isn’t yet set in stone, European publishers and trade groups are lobbying hard against the current proposal, which, if passed, would block any business from being able to use cookies without explicit consumer consent. Should that happen, it would severely hamper publishers’ ability to make money from advertising.

“The media business model is threatened by the future ePrivacy Regulation,” said de Lataillade. “We have so far not found better than advertising to fund free information. The consequence could therefore be the end of free content, which means that a very large part of the population would no longer have access to information.”

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Jaguar Land Rover may spend hundreds of millions a year on ads, but it will be some time before the advertiser can take ownership of that money in the way Procter & Gamble, L’Oréal and Unilever can. That’s the view of Ian Armstrong, the brand’s global head of advertising, who believes Jaguar Land Rover isn’t as “sophisticated” with its budgets “compared to lots of other organizations.”

Armstrong, whose work with British advertiser trade body ISBA gives him a good read on how proficient his peers are with their money, is trying to change that — albeit by asking the basic questions first. These questions are leading Jaguar Land Rover to address the following issues: moving away from click-throughs and impressions as a standard, enforcing anti-fraud initiative ads.txt, coming up with a new agency model to retake control of its media budgets, building a deeper understanding of the context and impact of its ads, and establishing direct relationships with media owners and ad tech vendors closest to them.

“Some might argue that what we’re doing is basic, and it probably is to a degree, but we don’t have 200 people sitting in the analytics team going, ‘Have you realized this is all wrong?’” Armstrong said. “We’re trying to encourage a bunch of our markets to become more sophisticated, which will probably yield a bit of a surprise.” Armstrong added that he presides over some markets that just run display when “we know that shouldn’t be the place, either.”

Further details on how Jaguar Land Rover will get more transparency are hard to come by. However, the advertiser will eventually take more in-house as it spends more on the duopoly. The company is hiring more experts with data and programmatic expertise, which would lead to it managing the bulk of its relationships itself with the likes of YouTube and Facebook. That would leave Jaguar Land Rover’s media agency to manage the advertiser’s traditional offline channels. Armstrong would not comment on if such moves factored into its revamped $500 million (£360 million) media account, which has reportedly moved from Mindshare to Dentsu Aegis Network, but he did hint at changes.

“I think we will take the opportunity to cast a different lens [on our media] and look at how we set ourselves up for the next few years,” Armstrong said. “We’ll make some changes that support that part for us, which will include increased reliance and increased working practices on the analytics people.”

That analytics expertise can’t come soon enough at Jaguar Land Rover. Armstrong said he was “happy” with the ad tech vendors and measurement firms he already employs, but said explaining why to other parts of the business is a challenge. Having all those partners means the “value chain is now even longer because of all the required components, and therefore the perception could be drawn that the money is less effective,” he said.

“If all you’re doing is feeding the components in that chain, then that money is not necessarily going to a consumer, and so that then begins to influence the relationship between the marketing community and the finance community in the client organization,” Armstrong added. “So we’re putting all of the expected checks and balances in place as many others are doing.”

Part of the solution could also come from Jaguar Land Rover’s work with media-buying platform Iotec, which involves the advertiser encouraging its peers to take action against dishonest ad tech vendors via a recently launched manifesto.

In the absence of internal expertise, Jaguar Land Rover has followed insights into transparent ad buying shared by P&G and relied on ISBA’s and trade body the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising’s work around effectiveness and agency remuneration. “Everyone is making a margin somewhere,” Armstrong said. “No one is in the [ad] business to lose money. But I don’t want it [the margin] to be unfair or unreasonable.”

Armstrong’s insights no doubt helped shape the second version of ISBA’s media services contract, a list of checks advertisers such as Sky, Barclays and the U.K. government have used to review agency deals. Released Feb. 28, the update is based on feedback from advertisers, the IPA and the big agency networks, which were not consulted for the first version of the contract.

“Put simply, if rebates and other sources of margin are going to get returned back to clients,” said Phil Smith, director general of ISBA, “then the fee structure needs to get back to a place where an agency is incentivized to help the advertiser grow its business.”

The post ‘Everyone is trying to make a margin’: Jaguar Land Rover on its search for honest ad partners appeared first on Digiday.

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When Stitch Fix CEO Katrina Lake took her company public in 2017, her pitch was a little bit rusty.

“We hadn’t raised money in a long time, and we’ve kept quiet about the business,” said Lake. “I was actually out of practice, when it came to introducing the business to investors to help people understand it. It was a double-edged sword: People were shocked and impressed with how big the business was, and that we had been profitable for so long, but it was a lot for people to wrap their heads around exactly how the business worked.”

Stitch Fix’s IPO, which valued it at nearly $2 billion, was the biggest exit for an e-commerce company last year. Now, the company has to prove it can continue to recruit new customers — on top of the more than 2 million who use Stitch Fix already, according to its S-1 — if it wants to keep growing. For the first few years of business, Stitch Fix did little paid marketing, relying on word of mouth and organic growth to bring in new users. That’s changing, as the company figures out the best ways to reach potential customers, and it’s top of mind for Lake as she navigates her first year at the head of a public company.

Lake joined the Glossy Podcast to discuss Stitch Fix’s category expansions and marketing push, plus the changing customer behavior it’s both leading the way for and adjusting to. Edited highlights, below.

On post-IPO priorities
Lake said that a few years ago, when the business was growing at around 100 percent year-over-year, it would have been an exciting time to share that growth rate publicly. But she knew it wasn’t sustainable. By the time the company actually went public, it was growing at a rate of 25 percent year-over-year.

“We had to reach a point of stability first. As a result, our strategy didn’t have to change,” said Lake. “The engines we’re focused on are improving and innovating on the client experience: how to be deeply personalized, how to use data science to get clients more of what they want. The second engine is new launches; we launched plus sizes, men’s and premium, and we’re excited to see those grow.”

On applying the data science behind women’s clothing to menswear
When Stitch Fix launched a menswear category, the business goal was clear: to open up services to the other half of the population to fuel more growth. But deciding where to get started, and finding out whether or not men would take to the customer behavior that’s critical to Stitch Fix’s model — answering personal questions, providing plenty of feedback — was all up in the air. Luckily, according to Lake, Stitch Fix’s men’s business got to a stable path of growth six months in, when she had anticipated it would take a year.

“What works with women seems to work with men. The first day we started considering a men’s business, everything was on the table, including whether it should also be called Stitch Fix at all,” said Lake. “But as we tested and got to understand men, from a psychology perspective, they were a lot more similar than we were expecting. To be able to feel like what we figured out with women translates to men gives us a lot of confidence, as we figure out the future.”

On Stitch Fix’s positioning in a new retail market
Lake said that part of Stitch Fix’s key to success is that it improves its own service by offering brands the data they need to improve their inventory. If customers consistently report that a brand’s size XL isn’t working, the brand can adjust their fit specs accordingly. Working with brands to take Stitch Fix’s wealth of data, and make decisions based off of it, can change whether or not a customer intends to buy from a certain brand, no matter the retail channel.

“The current shift in customer behavior is permanent,” said Lake. “There are a lot of companies out there doing innovative, authentic things with loyal clients. For us, we’re proud that we can be part of a positive brand ecosystem. When brands win, we win, and the clients win.”

The post Stitch Fix CEO Katrina Lake: ‘The current shift in customer behavior is permanent’ appeared first on Digiday.

Facebook’s recent algorithm change has claimed a casualty. LittleThings, a 4-year-old site that scaled an audience by sharing feel-good stories and videos on Facebook, shut down today, putting 100 out of work, after Facebook decided it wanted more user posts and less publisher content in its news feed. The change, announced in January, had a “material” impact on LittleThings, said Gretchen Tibbits, president and COO of the company, and killed 75 percent of the site’s organic reach, the company told Business Insider.

LittleThings isn’t the only publisher to have built an audience on Facebook, with its billions of users, but it was more heavily dependent on the platform than most, making almost an art of riding Facebook’s algorithm changes. It started out shoving out viral clips and then pivoted to live video once Facebook decided it wanted to make that a priority. At one point, fully 75 percent of LittleThings’ show views came from live viewing.

But it wouldn’t last — and LittleThings is hardly likely to be the last social publisher to meet this fate. Facebook remains a huge source of publisher traffic, but over the past year has been continually curtailing the amount of traffic it sends publishers. The final nail in the coffin came in January when Facebook said it would prioritize users’ posts in an effort to improve engagement on the platform. Facebook also has been fending off threats of regulation and dealing with a PR crisis over its failure to curtail the spread of fake news and propaganda on the platform, and many saw the shift to users as part of a flight to safety.

“We’re disappointed. It’s their platform,” Tibbits said of Facebook. “But until earlier this month, what we were doing was working.”

One staffer reported being “heartbroken. There are only so many hits a digital media company can afford to take and we exceeded ours.”

LittleThings had other factors working against it. Unlike a lot of distributed media upstarts that chased audiences on platforms using VC money, LittleThings was self-funded, which meant there wasn’t a big cushion when things went south. It largely built its business on programmatic advertising, but then pivoted to more lucrative direct sales. LittleThings’ inspirational stories were a safe haven for advertisers that were increasingly getting spooked by the contentious news climate, but there was a downside there, too. “The brand safety was a huge selling point for us, but the flip is, our audience is women over 30 in middle America, and they’re not sexy,” Tibbits said. The company made some inroads, getting buys from blue-chip advertisers including Procter & Gamble and eBay, but it wasn’t enough, and the first quarter of the year is typically slow for advertising.

Other publishers are looking to Google and Twitter to make up for what they’re losing from Facebook, but for LittleThings, there was nowhere else to go. LittleThings’ comScore traffic had declined to 40 million from 58 million last May, according to Tibbits.

“For our audience, there’s not another platform right now,” she said. “There are 100 great, talented people who were here and doing content that resonated with an audience that’s just harder to find right now.”

Max Willens contributed reporting.

The post LittleThings shuts down, a casualty of Facebook news feed change appeared first on Digiday.

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