Month: June 2018

In IPG Mediabrands Cafe last week, a table was lined with mini Greek yogurt doughnuts, raspberry almond pound cake bites, frozen yogurt fruit kebabs and other petite treats. The spread wasn’t the work of a passionate marketer or a bribe from a particular vendor. Rather, it was the introduction of Pinterest’s agency roadshow.

This hourlong event on June 5 was the Pinterest partnerships team’s most recent in-person visit to an agency to explain new product features and walk through insights it’s gained in the previous quarters. At Mediabrands, Pinterest announced it’s making its Audience Insights Tool available to everyone later this month. The tool, previously in beta, will be available in Pinterest’s Ads Manager and can help strategists and buyers see what’s happening on Pinterest without having to make a phone call.

“Agencies and clients know we have unique insights, but they don’t have easy access to it,” said Yolanda Lam, Pinterest’s head of agency partnerships. “They need to call a salesperson to understand what is available. Now, you can go in there to pull those data sets.”

The tool is just the latest step in Pinterest’s effort to win more media dollars as it competes with the likes of Facebook (and Instagram), Google, Amazon, Twitter and Snapchat, all of which Pinterest partnerships lead Vikram Bhaskaran mentioned during his one-man-show presentation at Mediabrands. A tool doesn’t solve everything, of course. Pinterest still needs to remind buyers why they matter, and that’s where the roadshows come in. To Bhaskaran’s team, Pinterest’s unique value, in part, stems from its authentic and actionable data on its 200 million monthly active users, who make purchases based directly on what they do on Pinterest.

“This data is not abstract. It’s real data on people’s lives. This is the database on identity and intent,” Bhaskaran said toward the end of his presentation. “Amazon might know about intent, but they don’t know who you are.”

Yet the idea of “not exactly knowing who you are” also plagues Pinterest. It’s been difficult for users, buyers, investors and reporters to categorize it. Pinterest’s CEO Ben Silbermann said in 2015 that Pinterest is not a social network like Facebook or Instagram. A slide in Bhaskaran’s presentation described Facebook and Instagram as “I hosted a party,” Twitter and Snapchat as “I am currently hosting a party,” and Pinterest as “I am going to host a party.”

“When I land in any city, the first thing I see is everyone is on Instagram. God bless Instagram,” Bhaskaran said. “On Pinterest, what we see is you’re here to get a job done. You’re not just leaning back. Their whole lives are being planned on Pinterest. We almost started calling Pinterest a personal productivity tool.”

Pinterest users search for items, and the site doesn’t just provide a list of options like Google and Amazon do. Pinterest is visual, and users are actively subjective. That’s one reason why Pinterest just released full-width — but not full-screen — video ads. There’s daily user activity on Pinterest for an assortment of topics, such as cataloging movies to watch or puppies to pet, but Pinterest’s sales team emphasized potential ad buys timed with events like Valentine’s Day and Halloween. On Pinterest, holiday planning starts early. Bhaskaran presented a slide and offered pamphlets that described the event planning cycle.

McCormick is one consumer packaged goods brand that has worked with Pinterest’s insights team, called Pinsights, to plan campaigns prior to the release of the Audience Insights Tool. This year, McCormick bought promoted pins that included recipes with Frank’s RedHot and French’s for Super Bowl parties. Those ads ran during spikes in Super Bowl saving and searching by users from Jan. 1 to Feb. 4, the day of the Super Bowl. McCormick also ran a campaign timed to Easter and is planning one for the Fourth of July.

“The McCormick brand on Pinterest is a natural fit. Users are actively exploring a discovery-based platform for family meal ideas, recipes and food and drink inspiration,” said Sara Tehrani, director of paid social at IPG’s Reprise. “Because the Pinterest user base skews toward moms, millennials and foodies, the opportunity for scale and accuracy in targeting was a perfect match.”

Of course, not every campaign needs to be directed toward millennials or moms. Bhaskaran’s presentation noted dads and men as active users as well. Bhaskaran himself was one of the first male users of Pinterest.

In a GDPR and post-Cambridge Analytica world, Pinterest executives showcased why users voluntarily provide data about themselves and how media buyers, like the ones at Mediabrands, can provide a value exchange. Bhaskaran compared Pinterest’s personalization, powered by individual user data, to Netflix’s curated movie lists and Spotify’s Discover Weekly. Pinterest personalizes beauty searches by skin tone, for example.

“I think Pinterest actually knows me better than my wife,” Bhaskaran said. “This is stuff that I’m interested in versus my Instagram identity. All of this amounts to [Pinterest’s] taste graph.”

Another benefit Pinterest has over other platforms is that people can save ads. Bhaskaran said 75 percent of the pins on Pinterest are branded.

“There’s a whole industry of social consumption … teaching brands to be thoughtful, but [Pinterest’s] whole use case is, I’m coming here for ideas, and the content here is being fueled by brands,” Bhaskaran said.

The post How Pinterest is wooing ad buyers with a consumer insights message appeared first on Digiday.

Since October, Hearst UK has focused on growing video views and revenue on its site, rather than catering to the ever-changing whims of social platforms.

Hearst UK has a video editor for Good Housekeeping and Cosmopolitan, and since last year, it has hired an additional three video editors for a centralized video team. Investing more time and energy in creating original video led to a refocus on distributing on Hearst’s own platforms.

In the last five months, on-site video views have grown by 200 percent year over year, surpassing the number of views Hearst UK amassed in 2017 by the end of May, according to Betsy Fast, executive director of digital edit strategy. This is partly due to growth in audience traffic numbers. In the last three months, monthly traffic on desktop and mobile has nearly doubled to 17 million total visits, 67 percent of which come through search, while 15 percent come from social, according to SimilarWeb data.

Embedding a contextual video player on Hearst UK’s pages has also contributed to this increase in on-site video views. Editors can also choose which videos appear next, so audiences watch more video during each visit.

Typically, the Good Housekeeping or Cosmo editor film on location, while the central team edits and distributes video across a number of brands, but there are exceptions. This four-minute documentary set in Puntland, a region in northeastern Somalia, where rape isn’t criminalized, was a marquee Elle UK video; other brands didn’t distribute the video. On Facebook, the video had 72,000 views.

“Views are something we care about, but we’re taking watch time data seriously,” said Fast. “The longer they watch, the more they care.”

Digital media casualties warn that seeing Facebook revenue as anything other than inconsistent is risky. As on-site views have increased, the inverse is true for Facebook video views. On Cosmopolitan UK, where Hearst UK has previously focused most of its video efforts, Facebook video views have halved from 29 million to 14 million from February to April, according to Tubular Labs.

But Facebook still plays a part, thanks to revenue from mid-roll ads, and the Hearst UK team still creates videos that are quicker and cheaper to produce and tend to do well in this environment. May was Hearst’s most successful month for Facebook revenue, helped in part from coverage of the royal wedding.

“Facebook revenue is still something. Audiences still engage with us on Facebook,” Fast said. “We focus on using video as a means of storytelling. All content has relevance and a fun angle.”

Hearst UK’s Facebook audiences favor gin recipes such as this gin trifle with 1 million views and this gin and grapefruit tonic cake recipe, which were printed in Good Housekeeping magazine. Jaffa cake recipes also whet viewers’ appetites.

In the U.S., Hearst has scaled up its video output, with Kate Lewis, svp and editorial director of Hearst Magazines Digital Media, saying a third of its content is video. The U.K. is a way off that, according to Fast. “Our entire scale is smaller. We are very nimble,” she said. “We were very considerate in hiring a team to concentrate on one thing, and we found a bigger opportunity somewhere else so we can pivot really quickly. Velocity isn’t as important as quality.”

The post Hearst UK refocuses its on-site video strategy appeared first on Digiday.

For years, employees at 270 Park Ave., the modernist skyscraper that is the headquarters for JPMorgan Chase & Co., have had a choice in company-provided swag: two kinds of tote bags.

One reads JPMorgan. The other, Chase. The JPMorgan bags have always been more popular — one longtime employee who preferred not to be named says he’s always picked up that one, despite working on both parts of the business. Until this year, when the Chase bags seem to be flying off the shelves.

The post Taking control: How Kristin Lemkau is turning JPMorgan Chase into a marketing force to be reckoned with appeared first on Digiday.

Just hours after Anthony Bourdain was found dead of an apparent suicide in France on June 8, the internet was swimming in two things: remembrances about the celebrity chef, author and journalist — and search engine-optimized clickbait about his girlfriend, his friend Eric Ripert and his television shows, as publishers trawled for easy traffic.

Journalists and media organizations have to run toward tragedy whenever it occurs. But when it comes to celebrity deaths, digital publishers have made an art form out of turning them into easy traffic, cranking out whatever kind of content they think might satisfy audience search queries. In some cases, that involves original reporting. In others, it involves repackaging old content, picking off exploitable search terms and redistributing older material on social platforms. In this case, many noticed it was happening and called it out.

To get a feel for what it’s like to pounce on the death of a celebrity, we spoke with a digital reporter at a legacy newspaper and an editor at a digital lifestyle publisher about how much content they’ve cranked out around a celebrity death, how (or if) they toe the line between opportunistic and tasteless, and what they think happens to the strategy in the future. Their answers have been condensed.

What’s the most content you’ve ever published on a celebrity’s death?
Reporter: When this guy from an old MTV show died, it did so well for us trafficwise, I was on the phone with his wife every day for like two weeks — from the time he passed away until that body was in the ground. People were so into it, so I was checking in with her every day. It was sick.

Editor: We’re generally pretty restrained. Two to three stories max, and we’re not in the obit business. We generally search for more celebratory angles. A legendary actor died? Here are his or her best movies to watch now. But if you factor in repromotion, it can be much more. At a previous company I worked for, close to 10 stories would not have been out of the question.

What happens when a celebrity dies? Is it a total fire drill?
Reporter: I’m working a later shift, so I woke up to bunch of Slack messages about how the news team was working with my team to cover it. They really took the reins on Kate Spade. And we were taking their information from out in the field and putting it toward our audience on our site. The news team was on the ground and talking to her people.

Editor: There are a lot of emergency conversations about what level of news coverage is appropriate for us and a lot frantic work behind the scenes to position relevant legacy content for tasteful repromotion on email and social. Working at a lifestyle site, we’re a little slow to pull the trigger on stories or angles that don’t feel appropriate. As with any breaking news event that brushes up against our coverage areas, I’ll dig into the data to quickly figure out where the conversation is going from a search prospective. Google Trends never fails to surface the same usual suspects of exploitative opportunities — net worth, relationship status, family status. Events like these things are low-hanging fruit, guaranteed traffic in some cases, if you’re willing to write the story.

But in those meetings, it’s more a question of how, not if, to write about the death.
Editor: Exactly. Day in and day out in digital media, you’re hoping for something you can jump on to create a viral traffic day and help meet evermore ambitious traffic goals from management. In cases like this, it becomes a trickier calculation where you’re basically figuring out to what extent you can “take advantage,” for lack of a better word, while still being tasteful and delivering something your audience expects from you and will appreciate. You don’t want to forfeit being a part of the conversation, but you don’t want to incur the internet’s wrath, either, and deal with the hit your brand can take from that.

Was there a lot of emphasis on turning content around quickly?
Editor: Speed does not often equate to good judgment calls. Although what I do think is interesting about the criticism of Newsweek here is that part of the reason they look so bad is the impressive speed with which they executed here.

Do you think the negative reaction will change the way publishers respond to these situations in the future?
Reporter: No matter what, publishers will try to get the top result on Google with stories like this. It’s just that people are more aware of it. People were able to fly those stories more under the radar to boost their traffic. I don’t think it’ll ever stop, but people will be more aware.

Editor: It really is a timeworn tactic. Newsweek just did such a good job of it with this that it was just in everyone’s face in a way it usually is not. These stories usually trickle out over the course of the day, and the nebulous nature of search results usually means you aren’t seeing them all at once if you are the average searcher. Their efficiency here really bit them in the ass, from a PR perspective anyway. I have zero doubts their traffic was stellar this morning. And that’s the thing. They are going to get revenue out of this. There is little incentive not to do it again, especially in search, where compared with email and social, there is a lot more disassociation amongst the audience between brand and content.

The post ‘Low-hanging fruit’: Confessions of journalists covering celebrity deaths appeared first on Digiday.

Everyone is going direct to consumer, even brewers.

Heineken USA’s new e-commerce site, draftforhome.com, will sell Heineken’s line of home tap machines as well as 2-liter kegs that work with the system, and deliver in the same day. These kegs, which keep beer cold for up to three weeks, are not only filled with beer, but also two new product lines for the company: cold-brew coffee and kombucha. Heineken plans on eventually making the site available throughout the U.S., but for now, it will only be accessible to people in New York City.

“People are shifting a big part of their purchases to e-commerce because it delivers a convenient and immediate solution against going to a store,” said Santiago Murphy, director of innovation at Heineken USA. “We are partnering with all tiers in the beer industry to make sure we all catch up to people’s expectations to get access to our products online, for any occasion.”

The U.S. effort began in August of 2017, when Heineken — which also owns Tecate, Dos Equis, Strongbow, Red Stripe and Newcastle, among other beer companies — launched a Heineken-only store at now.heineken.com, as well as a separate site for Dos Equis at store.doseequis.com. Data showed a strong customer preference for having variety online, so in April, Heineken launched a new e-commerce site on which to sell and deliver beer from eight of its companies: Heineken, Dos Equis, Tecate, Strongbow, Red Stripe, Amstel Light, Newcastle and Affligem. Upon launch, Heineken discontinued the Dos Equis site.

With e-commerce, Heineken does not have to abide by the pace of stores. It can be fast to market. “With traditional retail, it takes a long time to get beer from overseas, and you have strict shelf sets. What you put out is what you get,” said Jenna Behrer, senior director of innovation at Heineken USA. A direct-to-consumer service means Heineken can be fast to market, she said.

Both e-commerce sites will make deliveries in an hour or for a specific day, and in order to receive the delivery, a person who is 21 or older will have to sign for the package. Behrer said Heineken is also in beginning talks with other e-commerce sites like Amazon to see what other options might look like in the future, so the company can scale its offerings. Heineken is mostly using Facebook ads to promote the sites in key markets, but there are some event promotions planned as well. Heineken is looking into sending ticket holders of a soccer game at Madison Square Garden on July 8 a digital message promoting the home draft system and new website. Heineken hopes to conquer the soccer market in the U.S.

For Heineken, offering e-commerce is a way to stand out in a market it does not dominate. In the U.S., domestic beers Budweiser, Bud Light, Miller Lite and Coors Light are consistently the top-selling beer brands. So far, competing beer companies have moved slowly in e-commerce, testing markets in specific cities. In 2015, AB InBev made a Bud Light app for people to order beer in less than a hour in Washington, D.C., and MillerCoors worked with delivery service Drizly to provide free delivery there as well as in Boston, New York and Seattle. Most efforts are happening in Europe, where regulations are not as strict. Pernod Ricard, maker of Absolut and Chivas, has two stand-alone e-commerce sites active in Europe.

“We’re not seeing too much of a push into this area from other beer companies,” said Behrer. “Going into areas where our competitors aren’t entrenched is really exciting.”

The sites not only allow Heineken to give people more convenience, but more variety, even outside of Heineken-owned properties. For draftforhome.com, Heineken will eventually partner with 250 local and international brewers to sell their own mini kegs that work within the home tap system. The idea, said Behrer, is to have a rotating assortment of kegs that consumers can buy, which can help the company adapt quickly to changing consumer preferences, something it cannot do with traditional retail. In the U.S., consumer tastes continue to gravitate toward imported and craft beers. In 2017, dollar sales of imported beer increased 8.4 percent to more than $6.5 billion, as domestic premium brands like Budweiser and Bud Light dipped by 2.9 percent to $13 billion, according to retail data provider IRI Worldwide.

Meanwhile, offering cold-brew coffee and kombucha as options keeps the home tap machine useful all day long.

“We know that in order to command the space on the countertop, consumers don’t want a machine that only does one thing,” said Behrer. “Even for people who love beer, most people don’t drink beer at 9 a.m., so by giving them cold-brew coffee in the morning, kombucha in the afternoon and beer after that makes the machine more relevant throughout the day.”

The decision to focus on draft beer for the new draftforhome.com site comes from Heineken’s findings that 70 percent of consumers prefer draft beer, but that people don’t have as much of an opportunity to enjoy it, according to Behrer. Heineken will sell each home tap machine, which holds 2 liters of beer, for $179.99 and mini kegs for around $19.99 each, but will offer exclusive bundling deals on the site. Heineken is also cross-selling its home taps on now.heineken.com, advertising a special offer on the site.

Heineken also plans on eventually selling its new tap product called Blade, which holds 8 liters of beer, on draftforhome.com as well, which is mostly meant as a solution for bars and other businesses. Heineken is pitching Blade in cities across the U.S., including Las Vegas, Boston and New York, as a solution for companies that don’t usually sell beer, such as barber shops.

E-commerce is not new to Heineken in Europe, where the Netherlands-based company has been selling online and delivering beer and its home tap machines since 2014, according to Murphy, but the U.S. is a different beast. For most companies, starting out selling on e-commerce is relatively straightforward: It’s a matter of learning the space and making sure there’s enough inventory to fill orders. As a beer company, Heineken has more challenges, and ones it does not have to deal with in Europe.

In the U.S., because Heineken is a brewer, legal regulations prohibit the company from selling directly to consumers, unlike in Europe. Heineken must first sell its beer to distributors, which then sell to retailers, which then sell to consumers. For that reason, when consumers buy from the now.heineken.com or draftforhome.com sites, they are actually buying from licensed, local retailers depending on the delivery ZIP code that is entered online, and selling under the Heineken and Draft For Home trademarks the company has created.

Heineken has partnered with companies Hopsy, Drizly and Minibar, which handle the payment, order processing, and ultimately, delivery of the beer. Murphy said the concept is similar to how Drizly and Minibar’s own businesses operate, where consumers go online to their sites to buy beer from stores close to them. Also in the U.S., Heineken has to carefully navigate the laws of each state in order to sell online at all. Currently, now.heineken.com can sell in 19 states in the U.S., but Heineken plans on adding new states as the law permits.

The U.S. push into e-commerce comes as Heineken makes big internal changes. This week, Maggie Timoney was announced as the company’s first female CEO, and eight weeks ago, Jonnie Cahill started as the new chief marketing officer.

So far, Heineken said the now.heineken.com store is selling well, and the company is seeing its orders grow week over week, but would not provide specific numbers. Many customers are choosing to order across labels, which affirms Heineken’s decision to compile products from eight of its labels onto one platform, the company said. Heineken hopes it will see strong interest from its draft-specific site as well, but Cahill said selling home tap machines is more of a brand play than a revenue driver.

“Will we sell tens of millions of them? No,” Cahill said. “But it’s good for the brand image. The people who tend to buy them are people who see their friends have them. We’re a family-owned company, so we can play around with these things.”

The post Inside Heineken’s first e-commerce push in the US appeared first on Digiday.

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Dutch publisher De Correspondent has earned widespread respect from media circles for its unique twist on what a digital membership-driven business model can look like. The 5-year-old title is funded solely by 60,000 members who pay €70 ($82) a month to not just access its articles, but actively shape its editorial product. The publisher is on track to reach profitability this year.

The publisher’s 21 full-time journalists and freelancers in the Netherlands give members unusual transparency into the editorial process. The process starts with journalists posting what they’re working on for the next month on their profile pages; topics have included the security industry, bureaucracy in the health care system and power players in the music industry. Each week, readers get a callout for sources and ideas, plus progress reports on stories that might include interview transcripts or salient quotes. Members, for their part, are encouraged to share information and experiences, and ask questions that are relevant to the editorial coverage, provided they use their real names. Some have even been asked to write guest articles for the site.

The theory is that this transparency will build trust in the publisher, something that’s in short supply in the news media. Now, De Correspondent’s founders Ernst-Jan Pfauth and Rob Wijnberg want to import the model to the U.S. market. It’s an idealistic mission, considering the size and diversity of the U.S. market compared to De Correspondent’s. Breaking into that won’t be easy, as illustrated by another overseas import, the Guardian, which ran its U.S. outpost in the red for years until it cut the staff roughly in half to 80 and got contributions from 300,000 readers.

De Correspondent’s goal is more modest. It aims to have a staff of five to 10 full-time writers that’s entirely reader-funded, so it doesn’t need to worry about selling advertising. To test the audience appetite for its model, its founders have relocated to New York and have been working closely with New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen. They’re also in initial talks with potential editor-in-chief candidates. They raised $1.8 million in funding and hired Blue State Digital — the digital agency behind Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns — to promote the member-driven mission to a U.S. audience as well.

“Our goal is to work with our readers to cover global developments. But you can’t really do that with just a Dutch perspective on the world,” says Pfauth. “From day one, we knew we wanted to publish in English. Aside from being the biggest market, we believe that trust in media and journalism in the U.S. is terrible.”

The founders’ pitch is to show how they serve readers, rather than pleading the cause of strong journalism. De Correspondent’s journalists often take a month to work with readers on an editorial project and publish transcriptions of interviews to keep members in the loop. One well-known investigation in 2017 revealed that Shell knowingly ignored the impact of its operations on climate change. In the period between the initial callout to the Shell staff for information and the final investigative article, journalist Jelmer Mommers interviewed 19 Shell staffers and published some of the transcripts, called the “Shell Dialogues.”

The founders acknowledge they will have to adapt the model to suit the U.S. market. “In the Netherlands, it’s easier to talk to the Dutch as one group. It’s impossible to do that with Americans,” says Pfauth. In the Netherlands, the publisher decided ahead of time what topics it would cover; one way the U.S. approach could differ is that it could ask readers upfront to shape how they want to be involved and what topics they want to see covered.

“The model is absolutely transferable to the U.S. media market,” says Aron Pilhofer, who teaches journalism at Temple University and is former chief digital officer at Guardian News and Media. “The Correspondent is a pure expression of what a membership-driven news organization can be. It’s also beautifully designed, which is something a lot of news organizations tend to deprioritize or not prioritize enough.”

One way reader-driven publications can work is when they produce highly specialized journalism that’s essential to people’s jobs (and hence can be put on a corporate card). De Correspondent is different in that it’s for the general-interest reader. It also lets members share an unlimited number of links with others, though.

“Members don’t pay to be members because they’re getting exclusive access to something the rest of the public is denied. That’s not how it works,” says Michael Silberman, svp of strategy for paywall provider Piano. “That’s how Politico Pro works. That’s how The Information works. De Correspondent wants its work to spread freely. It also wants you to become a member. It refuses to grant any contradiction between the two.”

It’s that distinction that makes observers think De Correspondent could be a model for others. “The growth will likely be a slow burn, rather than the big bang it was in the Netherlands,” says Pilhofer. “But they are very different to anything else that exists in the U.S. media market. If they get this right, in five years we could look back at De Correspondent’s launch in the U.S. and see dozens of copycat organizations popping up doing the same thing.”

The post Go Dutch: De Correspondent is coming to America with an innovative twist on paid content appeared first on Digiday.

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