Month: April 2018

In China, e-commerce live streams starring key opinion leaders (the equivalent of the Western influencer) have serious selling power on platforms like the Alibaba-owned marketplace Taobao. Now, these influencers are using the format to put smaller U.S.-based brands on the map in a market they otherwise wouldn’t be able to break into.

About 40,000 people tune in every week when blogger, former fashion designer and influencer Zoe Zhang hosts a new live stream featuring a product she’s discovered. Of those 40,000, there is a group of 1,500 loyal customers who reliably purchase everything Zhang endorses over the course of a live stream, which lasts between five and 10 minutes depending on how many samples she has to show. She gets commission through Taobao Global for purchases made, but declined to share how much.

“We know them by name,” said Zhang, who noted that these highly engaged customers once ordered handbags through the live stream even though the selection of samples sent by the brand got stuck in customs, and all Zhang had to show of the product was an image in a look book.

Zhang’s show is centered around Western brands that are, so far, undiscovered in China. She got her start as an influencer blogging about small brands she’d find after moving to New York, where she currently lives. Taobao Global approached her when it was getting ready to launch its live streaming tool in order to help recruit more international brands to the Alibaba-owned marketplace. When working with brands, she and Yuan act as the middleman to the Chinese customer: They plan a live stream and ask the brand to lock down an order of a certain size, and then orders are placed during the event. The brand then ships everything that was ordered through the Taobao Global platform, where shipping and delivery logistics are handled. So far, Zhang and Yuan have worked with 30 brands to sell their products through Taobao Global.

“What we’re doing is helping small- to medium-sized American brands that don’t have a lot of resources, and can’t afford heavy investment in building a customer base in China, test the market in an inexpensive and risk-free way,” said Yuan. “The live stream is a 3D, interactive experience where the customer is engaged.”

When Zhang and Yuan first featured Welden, a small handbag brand based in New York, in a Taobao Global live stream in September, the brand sold $300,000 worth of products in five hours — around 600 bags total. Over the past six months, the brand’s sold 3,000 bags to customers in China.

In China, influencer live streams are becoming a bigger brand opportunity across social networks like Taobao Global, Weibo and YY. According to a report by Deloitte, live streaming will drive $4.4 billion in direct revenue in China this year, an increase of 37 percent over 2017, and reach 456 million viewers. Big events, like Alibaba’s Singles’ Day commerce show and the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, drove direct e-commerce purchases from live streams to the Tmall marketplace.

For young brands, working with people like Zhang and Yuan offers a leg up in a tricky market. Two years after launching Welden, and spending a lot of money up front on marketing pushes that largely failed to drive sales, co-founder and former Kate Spade designer Sandy Friesen decided to switch gears. Welden began selling its bags through retailers like Nordstrom, Farfetch and Shopbop to gain traction.

“It was impossible to scale as a direct-to-consumer brand,” said Friesen. “I dumped a lot of money up front, but I was competing with huge retailers, established brands and other small competitors. Unless you have a lot of investors behind you or hit a stroke of luck, it really feels like you’re just spinning your wheels and spending money.”

The brand hasn’t sought out outside investment, because Friesen said it wants to grow “step by step.” Now, it plans to use the sales from its Taobao outlet to fuel growth in other regions. Customer feedback from the live streams has also played a role in product development at the brand. In the first live stream, Zhang said she received about 3,500 comments from viewers saying they would buy the bag she was featuring if it came in red. The orders were placed for an item that didn’t exist yet and wouldn’t ship for another month, and Friesen got to work designing the bag in a new red shade.

“That exposure led to us stepping up our game, to be honest. The live stream customer pay attentions and looks at things at an intense level of detail,” said Friesen.

Now, the pressure is on for the brand to establish itself on its home turf. Friesen said Welden’s shifted its focus from direct sales to wholesale and boutique networks in order to drive faster exposure.

“We have to be just as big in the U.S., if not bigger,” she said. “They’re buying into an American brand, so we have to build here and work just as hard.”

The post How influencer Zoe Zhang drives retail sales on Alibaba’s Taobao appeared first on Digiday.

Condé Nast said it would launch multiple consumer revenue projects this year to diversify its revenue streams. Its first swing at one, Golf Digest All Access, which launched April 2, offers more than 200 instructional videos, live and interactive coaching clinics, plus a print subscription to Golf Digest, for $9.99 per month or $100 per year.

All Access was two years in the making and fits Condé Nast’s overall strategy for pursuing consumer revenue, where each title is responsible for growing this business, be it through paywalls like The New Yorker’s and Wired’s, content or commerce. In typical Condé Nast fashion, the corporate office is mostly hands-off, though centralized digital strategy, consumer marketing and product development teams all pitch in.

“The ideas will come out of the brands,” chief digital officer Fred Santarpia said. “The folks that are living and breathing the brand every day almost always have the best ideas of what’s going to resonate.”

Chris Reynolds, Golf Digest’s digital gm, said All Access was shaped by the fact that instructional content attracts the most engaged readers. Seventy percent of the site’s audience reads at least some instructional content, but the most engaged audience members would look at it four to five times every month.

Some of that content is free to visitors. But last year, Golf Digest began selling instructional video courses a la carte for $10 apiece. The first course, “12 Days to Better Golf,” was released in April 2017. Since then, Golf Digest has developed almost 60 classes, and it’s sold individual courses to 10,000 customers. Reynolds said Golf Digest is raising the price of individual classes, eventually to $24.99.

Golf Digest priced All Access lower than the courses to encourage people to subscribe, which drives recurring revenue. The low price point was meant to make it easy for people to subscribe and for Golf Digest to later add on and charge for other services, such as exclusive photos or tee times.

Golf Digest also opted for a subscription model based on a 2017 survey of amateur golfers that found that 75 percent of respondents said they did not have a favorite golf instruction subscription; the company with the highest share, Revolution Golf, had just 5 percent of the market.

Santarpia said whatever progress All Access makes will be shared across Condé Nast titles.

“We’re going to be tracking what the conversion rate is against those loyal users,” Santarpia said. “We’re going to try and superserve them, and white-glove it. It’s not about broadening it out to a mass product.”

The post With Golf Digest, Conde Nast tees up first of several consumer marketing efforts appeared first on Digiday.

Facebook Watch might have ambitions to take on TV, but many of the successful shows in the video-viewing section still owe a ton of debt to the short, news feed videos that Facebook initially popularized.

Take, for instance, “Destination Debunkers,” a travel show from Insider that is one of 10 Facebook-funded Watch shows so far from Insider Inc. With episodes running between six and 10 minutes in length, the show profiles exotic locations such as an island of 1,000 dogs in Costa Rica or the Blue Lagoon in Iceland. Still, the influence of the short videos that historically worked in the Facebook news feed is apparent in each episode, from striking visuals early on to an emphasis on Facebook-friendly topics.

“When we work with any platform, we’re going to study what’s previously worked on that platform and invest more in that to make it a more prestigious, polished product,” said Nicholas Carlson, chief content officer of Insider Inc. “We’re using the same philosophy here. … There’s a string from the simple, shorter news feed videos that inform how and what we do in longer form [on Watch].”

We reached out to Facebook for comment; we’ll update this if it responds.

News feed videos, but longer and more polished
Other publishers on Watch have found that shows that hew closer to what people have come to expect in the Facebook news feed tend to perform better. Tastemade, for instance, has a Facebook-funded show called “Struggle Meals,” a cooking show about meals on a budget. It employs similar tactics to the popular hands-and-pans news feed format with shots of ingredients and dishes, and it has collected 15 million video views across its first season, said Oren Katzeff, Tastemade’s head of programming.

“My theory is that in the first incarnation of Facebook Watch programming, a lot of the shows that did well were shows that felt a lot like what people were doing in the feed anyway, but now five or six minutes long,” Katzeff said.

Tastemade has six Watch shows funded by Facebook, as well as another six Watch shows the company self-funds and distributes on Watch. Katzeff said shows such as “Struggle Meals” and “Food to Die For,” a docuseries that profiles those who risk their lives to catch animals for people’s dining pleasure, closely resemble the type of programming Tastemade is known for on Facebook. Those shows have historically performed better — one episode of “Food to Die For” has 12 million views — than more TV-like episodic programming that Tastemade also distributes on Watch.

This doesn’t mean that more traditional, TV-style projects can’t work on Watch. The Tom Brady-starring “Tom vs Time” had 51.5 million views across its six episodes; the LaVar Ball-starring “Ball in the Family” has routinely grabbed millions of views per episode across its two seasons. Soon, Facebook will debut the scripted drama “Five Points” from producer Kerry Washington. It’s also been pushing Watch partners to produce longer, TV-style programming. Yet the news feed’s influence on Watch is clear.

News feed is still the biggest traffic driver for Watch
A big reason these news feed-like formats are working is the news feed is still the primary way Watch publishers get people to watch their shows. Katzeff said Facebook encouraged Tastemade to create individual Watch pages for its shows and to promote new episodes through the publisher’s main and vertical brand pages — which it does with every new episode of every new show.

“[‘Struggle Meals’] is a show that naturally fits with the other stuff we are doing in-feed, so it makes sense to promote it there,” Katzeff said.

Facebook is also pumping up Watch programming in its algorithm, according to two publishing execs who asked to speak on background due to potential and ongoing deals with Facebook. One exec said that while the organic reach on his company’s main Facebook account has declined in the past four months, the amount of organic reach on its Watch pages has increased so much that it now has more total reach than pre-Facebook Watch. A second exec with multiple Facebook-funded Watch shows previously told Digiday that whenever his company shares a Watch video through its main Facebook page, the video has triple the reach of standard, non-Watch videos.

“Fundamentally, discovery [for Watch] is still being driven by the news feed,” said David Spiegel, CRO of Inverse, which is distributing two self-funded shows on Watch. “People are getting exposed to videos through news feed promotion, not the Watch tab.”

There’s some evidence for longer watch times on Watch
One of Inverse’s shows, “Your Brain on Blank,” is a science and comedy explainer show hosted by neuroscientist Shannon Odell, who demonstrates what happens to your brain in different states of duress. The series, which has 56.2 million video views across its first five episodes, has an average time spent of 30 seconds per episode. That’s nearly double the 16.7 seconds that Facebook reported last June as the average time spent for videos in the news feed. It’s also higher than the 23 seconds Watch videos were averaging two months after Watch’s launch.

“In Facebook land, 30-second average time spent is strong, and 36 percent sound on, which we do, is huge,” said Spiegel.

Insider Inc. and Tastemade also said time spent on their Watch programming is longer than the time spent on their own typical news feed content. The average minutes watched of Insider’s “Bonkers Closets,” which is one of the top shows on Watch, is 10 times higher than standard Facebook videos published to Insider’s Facebook page during the first season of the show. And Katzeff said Tastemade’s Watch shows are retaining, on average, 70 to 75 percent of its audience beyond the first 30 seconds of the video — and once viewers have watched for 30 seconds, they typically end up watching the full video.

Ultimately, the true success of Watch programming will be driven by whether or not Facebook users are choosing to go to Watch and spend real time with the programming. For Inverse and other publishers, including companies that spend a greater amount of time and attention on YouTube, this means focusing on statistics such as time spent, completion rates and view-through rates.

“We’re not trying to do dumb, three-second scale because it doesn’t mean anything,” said Spiegel.

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The post Facebook Watch is still tied to the news feed appeared first on Digiday.

Duracell has come up with a key way to translate business metrics into success in the programmatic advertising ecosystem — a global digital scorecard.

Having one clear scorecard to measure all the brand’s online marketing outside of North America is a way to take the guesswork out of programmatic, said Jon Ones, head of digital for Duracell’s international markets. With one scorecard, Duracell hopes to effectively evaluate performance between different digital touchpoints, creatives and markets.

Still in its infancy, Duracell’s scorecard consists of what Ones calls “relatively simple” metrics that can be applied globally based on data from analytics and measurement company Moat.

Ones declined to specify exactly what’s on Duracell’s scorecard, but he said customer attention, content targeting and viewability are benchmarks. While the scorecard has the same benchmarks for all of Duracell’s markets, the company will account for local market conditions when assessing the performance of campaigns, Ones said.

For example, some markets are better suited for campaigns due to high levels of viewability and lower ad fraud levels. Other markets with less-developed programmatic landscapes pose a tougher challenge to reach acceptable levels of performance, particularly for viewability, for local campaigns, Ones said.

A good “hygiene” benchmark for the moment is ads that are above 80 percent in view, Ones said. Trying to always optimize for 100 percent leads to higher costs for ads that may decrease overall performance, he explained, but as the industry evolves, 100 percent viewability will likely become more feasible to accomplish. While Ones will pay more for quality impressions, he said both quality and pricing relative to business requirements must be assessed.

Global benchmarks aren’t new, nor are they necessarily innovative. What’s different with Duracell is it claims to have one transparent dashboard for all online marketing, underpinned by the same KPIs, dashboard and scorecard. It also owns the contract with its demand-side platform, and thus owns the data. “We wanted to consolidate everything into one platform, which gives you the reach and frequency management without having a data management platform,” Ones said.

Duracell buys ads through one DSP against a series of guarantees and bespoke metrics. Should ad fraud on campaigns rise above a certain percentage, then Duracell is guaranteed to be compensated, for example. For metrics, Moat is Duracell’s own independent auditor so that it can benchmark buys on its own DSP with those on another, like when it buys Amazon data sets on the Amazon Advertising Platform.

When Duracell has to revert to a platform it doesn’t own, the advertiser relies on its media agency’s contract with the likes of Amazon. However, Ones said the aim is to consolidate the vast majority of the brand’s media buys with one DSP to benefit fully from being in control of how its money is spent. “When you take a direct contract with a DSP, you ensure there’s no risk of media markups or hidden fees,” said Ones.

Consolidation might appear to be the right thing for every brand, but buying inventory varies across DSPs, publishers and market. The decision, therefore, depends on what the advertiser wants to achieve. Duracell wants to drive household penetration, so it tweaks its buys to reach the broadest possible set. “While we can’t customize our buys in the same way [as on local DSPs], as a CPG brand that’s focused on a penetration strategy, it makes sense to consolidate our DSPs into one, which also gives us the reach and frequency management,” Ones explained.

Duracell’s attempt to take control of its programmatic is similar to those of its former owner Procter & Gamble. While not as combative to agencies or as wide-ranging in its business as P&G, Duracell has achieved similar results — increasing reach on its campaigns, while reducing wastage, said Ones.

After an external audit of its programmatic setup last year, Ones said “at worst,” 20 percent of its initial ad spend may have reached consumers as effective media, in line with the rest of the industry. “In the main, we were best in class in terms of media effectiveness,” Ones said. “We want to be strong everywhere. What we’re doing now is more about having the right process in place to make sure that every single campaign is executed with excellence.”

We’ll hear more from Jon Ones at the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit Europe in Portugal from April 25-27. Learn more about joining us here.

The post How Duracell is addressing its programmatic problems appeared first on Digiday.

Chinese internet titan Alibaba, further diversifying beyond e-commerce, said it would acquire the rest of Shanghai based Ele.me, which delivers takeout food as well as groceries and household items.

Investors in Spotify could be in for a turbulent first day of trading as the company uses an unorthodox maneuver to go public on the NYSE.

The founder of Mozido, one of the most highly-valued U.S. financial-technology startups as recently as a few years ago, was accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of defrauding the company’s investors and using their dollars to fund a luxurious lifestyle for himself and his associates.

Investors rushed out of the biggest names in the tech industry, the latest sign that scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators, backlash from consumers and flagging share performance is threatening to undermine their dominance in the stock market.

Users build false online identities—with social media, retailers and other data collectors—to throw off advertisers and muddle databases.

Overstock.com pulled its secondary stock offering, citing market conditions, after shares had fallen about 10% during the session, the latest downward lurch for a stock down more than 60% this year alone.