Month: June 2018

The industry’s sharp rebuttal of Accenture’s play for media budgets suggested a flawed gambit. But underneath the concerns and the outrage, the consulting firms are showing signs of staying power with brands.

A year ago, the likes of Accenture were deemed a step too far for many brands, whereas now, some advertisers think they could be the right move to make. Unilever, BMW, Maserati and Radisson Hotels all got closer to consulting firms over the period. Radisson, for example, needed to try something different so it could own data and technology while outsourcing the service and buying tasks to partners.

“It cost us way more money to give control of our customer journey over to third parties than doing it ourselves, and that’s why we turned to Accenture Interactive to take back that control,” said Remy Merckx, vp of digital at Radisson. “There’s not a single marketing dollar that I’m going to give Accenture that they will not tell me in advance what it will deliver using a predictive model.”

Not every agency can afford a model that’s funded by fee payments rather than commissions and isn’t dependent on media arbitrage. It’s why Merckx chose Accenture’s programmatic buying service to overhaul its own media model. Revealed last month, the consulting firm’s jump into the ad-buying world promises advertisers a fee rather than a commission model and no media that’s been marked up. It makes online advertising appear safer to marketers like Merckx, and when combined with Accenture’s information technology expertise, could help those same marketers access insights that are often hidden in their data.

Agencies should be concerned by Accenture’s latest gambit, said one senior executive at a trade body. Account reviews are at an all-time high, brands are looking for areas to cut costs and drive better performance, and Accenture has been staffing strategically in advance of this move, the executive noted. It’s made more advertisers take notice of the consulting firms at a time when many are revising their agency setups, said the executive. “There’s no doubt the current disruptive environment is providing consultancies with an opportunity to make inroads into marketers,” the executive said. “We may well be at a juncture in terms of what the right solutions are for the needs of clients.”

Does that mean consultancies will replace agencies anytime soon? It’s complicated.

Even though the value of Accenture’s model is clear, it will be hard to scale. Percentage fees based on media give an “unrealistic” view of the actual income of agencies, said Ruben Schreurs, managing partner at digital media consulting firm Digital Decisions, so when there is “no proper pitch process” in place, the traditional agencies might “seem to” heavily outperform Accenture on fees. “Scaling the programmatic buying arm effectively will, therefore, require proper client education on one hand and a highly efficient buying operation on the other,” Schreurs said.

Marketers working with Accenture must be vigilant and question the firm’s conflicts, according to agencies, auditors and pitch managers. No company can credibly and independently advise on media planning and strategy as well as offer to run in-house trading models, argue Accenture’s critics. The backlash against the consulting firm is somewhat ironic considering the conflicts of interest that plague agencies, auditors and pitch management. The hypocrisy may be fear-induced, as one ad tech executive, who spoke to Digiday on condition of anonymity, revealed. “The main feedback we have heard from folks who work at agencies, not our own clients, is that they view it as a threat mainly because Accenture will come across well to clients in terms of their highly structured approach to engagement and also to presenting results when it comes to research,” this executive said. “This may or may not prove instrumental to how they fare with programmatic buying, but it is certainly a concern for some agencies off the back of the announcement.”

It’s not all noise, however. Some of those concerns are valid. The mix of Accenture’s media audit business combined with its access to media buying means they could end up setting the price for media eventually. If Accenture executives know what their clients are buying and where the demand is in buying, then they could potentially manipulate the media prices to maximize their margins while delivering low-cost media options to their clients compared to media agencies. This could be very dangerous for media publishers.

Given this conflicted position, Christian Polman, chief strategy officer at media measurement firm Ebiquity, said the business is advising advertisers, agencies and other vendors to check the confidentiality of their media data when working with Accenture. To eliminate its conflicts of interest, Accenture needs to “devolve or close down” its media auditing, advisory and compliance business, said Polman. It’s in the best interest of clients — “and fairer to their suppliers” — if all media advisers are truly independent of the media supply chain, said Polman.

At this point, however, the consulting firm has made no indication it is going to do this. In fact, it seems as though the consulting firm intends to carry on as an auditor and buyer of media — for now. Accenture’s programmatic buying arm is housed within Accenture Interactive, a separate part of the business from where the media audits are conducted, said Scott Tieman, global lead of programmatic services at Accenture Interactive. There are also confidential data and nondisclosure protections, firewalls and policies in place that Tieman said adhere to “recognized industry standards” that are “always in place to ensure that information is maintained with the strictest levels of confidence.”

Furthermore, there’s anecdotal evidence to suggest the consulting firms don’t see conflicts of interest in the same way as agencies do.

“I have had a number of clients tell us they have either rejected the proposal or refused permission to access the agency financial arrangements for these consultants,” said one media consultant. “Agencies are particularly sensitive to this, as they see the management consultants becoming direct competitors. Many advertisers do not like their media agencies working on conflicting accounts. But consulting firms make working across categories a virtue.”

Convenience and expertise normally override any concerns advertisers may have with any conflicts. Advertisers are more concerned with the conflicts of interest with their competitors, said Darren Woolley, founder and global CEO at marketing consultant TrinityP3. But in regard to media auditing, Woolley said advertisers have “ignored these conflicts for years when media agencies have set up media-buying performance deals where the agency sets the performance metric, measures the performance and validated the performance.”

“If I were [an agency] CEO, I’d be gathering my team around me to try and build something as fast as possible,”said Tom Denford, chief strategy officer at media management consultant ID Comms. “The winning combination is likely to be one that combines the ability to deliver offline media and non-auction media with an Accenture-like guarantee of greater transparency.”

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NPR is taking a product approach to its events as it looks to grow audiences and sponsorship revenue.

The public broadcaster has been putting on live events for at least 20 years like tapings of its popular shows and podcasts like “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!”, “Code Switch” and “How I Built This.” In the past couple of years, NPR has added more elements as it’s started thinking of its editorial properties as franchises. All in all, NPR produced about 30 events last year and anticipates growing that number to 38 this year.

Case in point is NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts that started four years ago as videos and this year includes a 14-stop tour and Tiny Desk Talks, master class-type events for aspiring musicians.

NPR also is turning its “How I Built This” interview show into a day-long summit taking place Oct. 16 at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The summit, NPR’s first, will include on-stage interviews by the 2-year-old show’s host Guy Raz of the founders of Airbnb, Lyft and others; sessions for budding entrepreneurs; and networking. American Express, a longtime sponsor of the show and NPR, is the presenting sponsor. Most of NPR’s live events cost $10 to $45 to attend; the “How I Built This” summit tickets go for $699. NPR expects 500 to 600 to attend.

“The NPR content is at the center of this wheel and each spoke is connecting content with the outside world,” said Jessica Goldstein, who as director of NPR’s events and strategic initiatives oversees a six-person team focused on events. ”We’re thinking about everything we do connecting at the end of the day with content, and events is helping with that.”

Before green-lighting an event, Goldstein puts them through a checklist to make sure they meet such criteria as connecting with the audience, involving member stations that can help promote the event and having the expenses covered.

“In the past, I think it was easy to spend a lot and not break even because people get so excited about putting bells and whistles on things,” she said.

Breaking even is the goal, given it’s costly to put on events, with venue and talent and production staff costs. Sponsorship sales, driven by NPR’s sponsorship arm National Public Media, help offset the cost of the events (some of which are contingent on getting a sponsor) and in turn fund NPR’s editorial content. National Public Media said revenue from event-centered sponsorships is small but growing, having increased fourfold from 2015 to 2017.

Events also are a way to expand NPR’s audience. Goldstein’s team has a person dedicated to creating events that specifically appeal to millennials and Gen Z, and the events bring in a younger and more ethnically and culturally diverse audience than the average NPR listener.

Other podcast producers are getting into live festivals: Slate Live is doing its first day-long podcast festival, with The Texas Tribune; and Gimlet Media is throwing its first festival, a two-day event in June. One challenge producers face is how to keep the relationship going with attendees after the event is over, especially if attendees are new to the brand.

“With events, it’s hard to measure success because it’s more of a feeling than a number,” said Faith Smith, executive producer of Slate Live. “I could see publishers and advertisers wanting to know more about these people.”

NPR has a “How I Built This” Facebook group where fans of the show communicate and surveys event-goers, but still has work to do when it comes to measuring the halo effect of events. “How to keep talking to people afterwards is tricky to measure,” Goldstein said.

Photo by Beck Harlan via NPR

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Every year, Cannes attendees find a new type of attendee to complain about. First, it was the clients, then the media companies, then the ad tech contingent, followed by the media agencies. This year is shaping up to be the year of the consultants.

Consulting companies are set to make a big splash in Cannes this year when the festival kicks off on June 18. While they certainly made their presence felt last year, it’s a move that’s starkly at odds with how traditional agencies seem to be approaching Cannes — fewer parties, fewer blowouts and much more introspection, if they’re there at all.

IBM iX has a cabana on the Croisette double the size of its space last year, with talks both there and in the Palais. Accenture Interactive is planning its biggest year yet. The company has 10 senior executives on the ground and is taking over the M/Y Accama yacht in the Cannes harbor for a series of meetings and parties. It has jury members in almost every category and has also entered work. It’s also on the Cannes stage, with six sessions in the Palais.

(One of those is a conversation between Anatoly Roytman, managing director at the company and Publicis Groupe’s global chief creative Nick Law, one of the few officially sanctioned Publicis reps on the ground in the Cannes.)

Roytman said the company will double its investment in Cannes this year. In the past year, Accenture has completed acquisitions of multiple agencies, including Meredith Xcelerated Marketing, SinnerSchrader, Clearhead and The Monkeys. Roytman said the focus this year in Cannes is to have creatives meet each other and their clients.

“We had no discussions on whether we should even be there,” said Roytman.

The industry is undergoing a major transition, and one symbol of that is the rising presence of consulting companies in Cannes, even as agencies pull back. Agency holding company Publicis publicly announced last year it would sit out of Cannes as it focused resources elsewhere, including building its artificial intelligence platform Marcel. Overall, traditional agencies are reporting lowered revenue as margins continue to be squeezed.

For consultancies, there is no “reset” needed, according to Deloitte Digital CMO Alicia Hatch. She has 70 people attending, and the focus is on multiple CMO roundtables the company will do with the Association of National Advertisers, bringing senior execs together to discuss content creation and the rise of in-house agencies. “We’re completely focused on the future,” Hatch said. “Cannes is going to going change as part of the change in the industry. That’s OK with us. It’s less about ‘Do we sit out?’ and more about where we focus.”

Deloitte, which has two spaces, one in the Majestic hotel and one in the Carlton, will also sponsor this year’s Young Lions School, its second time doing so, and the Cannes speakers’ lounge.

On the other hand, there is marked quiet on the agency end. Omnicom Media Group, for example, has a whittled down presence, doing away with its Oasis cabana and sending half as many people, according to sources.

“We decided to retire the platform after 2017 to pre-empt wear-out,” said CEO John Osborn. “This year, we’re focusing on curating customized experiences that align more closely with individual client interests and priorities. It’s a strategy that requires less manpower on the ground, while continuing to deliver value to our clients.”

Ogilvy will have a smaller presence, with fewer people, and the focus is less on parties and more about meetings and conversations. “We’re showing up differently,” said an Ogilvy rep. Some of the mainstay parties aren’t happening, such as J. Walter Thompson’s Friday soiree on C Plage.

An agency executive who was on the ground last year said some of the quiet is attributable to Publicis: When the news broke that the holding company would sit out, there was a palpable sigh of relief: “Someone had the made the first move and gave others permission to pull back.”

“I definitely think that the past Cannes, when all the headlines were about pullbacks, did force the industry to say, ‘What’s really important about this, and what are we trying to get out of it?’” said 360i President Abbey Klaassen, whose Cannes team is small and in line with the approach the agency has taken previously. “Agencies send a message to internal teams based on what they choose to invest in. Cannes is expensive. And if you’re having giant fancy parties and paying big celebs to show up, that’s money you can’t use in other things, investments in tech, or technology or training development.”

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VidCon, the digital video industry’s version of Comic-Con, is making its case to become a must-attend event for the digital media and advertising industries, on par with the Cannes Lions and CES.

Instead of spending the third week of June in the south of France with fellow senior executives at brands, agencies and media companies, Noah Mallin will be in Anaheim, California, at VidCon. “And I’m not sorry about that at all,” said the head of experience, content and sponsorships at GroupM’s Wavemaker.

This year will mark the ninth VidCon, an annual conference that originated as a way for fans to meet their favorite YouTube stars and has grown into a place for digital video networks, platforms, brands and agencies to gather as well. But it will be the first that Mallin will attend because he feels spending a few days in and around the Anaheim Convention Center will be a more meaningful use of his time than sipping rosé on someone’s yacht.

“With VidCon, you can really roll up your sleeves, learn something, meet people who you’re not going to meet someplace else and have an experience that’s going to directly translate into the work that you do with your clients,” Mallin said. “That’s pretty meaningful.”

The agency executive isn’t the only one that has made VidCon more of a priority this year. LinkedIn, which debuted its video platform last year, will participate in its first video creator summit at VidCon this year, according to VidCon CEO Jim Louderback. Additionally, Snapchat and Amazon’s Twitch have become official sponsors of VidCon, alongside the event’s main sponsor, YouTube, as well as Facebook and Twitter. An estimated 30,000 people attend VidCon over its three days, not including a pre-party for industry execs and a concert, Louderback said.

For the first time, Facebook will host a booth for fans that will promote the social network’s Watch video hub, and feature appearances by creators like Laura Clery and Doug the Pug, according to a company spokesperson.

“Every creator that is going to be presenting onstage will have access to the Twitter green room and be in our space as opposed to trying to get people before or after [they talk] to go to a hotel or somewhere off campus,” said Dennis Todisco, global head of creator community at Twitter-owned influencer marketing firm Niche.

Having many of the major video platforms formally involved with VidCon may be particularly important this year as a show of the event’s independence following its sale to Viacom in February.

“Our first rule of thumb when we bought VidCon — and we preached it religiously — is to do no harm,” said Kelly Day, president of Viacom Digital Studios. Viacom-owned Nickelodeon has been a VidCon staple for years and MTV will also sponsor a booth, but both companies paid for those booths, like VidCon’s other sponsors. When asked if Viacom received a friends-and-family discount on the booth fees, Day said, “not as much as you would think.”

But VidCon will change following Viacom’s acquisition. Day and Louderback are already looking at how they can expand VidCon’s three programming tracks — “industry” for business types, “creator” for the video makers and “community” for the fans — to have vertical-specific tracks for beauty vloggers or creators that produce animal videos or do-it-yourself craft videos. Viacom is also interested in how it can expand VidCon into its own media entity beyond the events business, said Day. As an example of what she has in mind, Day cited a show that VidCon and MTV are producing that will follow a creator attending VidCon for the first time this year.

VidCon has changed as it has grown. Whereas originally, top creators walked the halls among their fans, as a safety precaution in recent years, their presence has been limited to onstage appearances and autograph signings while being otherwise sequestered to the upper floors of nearby hotels with entryways guarded by security officers. That isolation eliminates the “YouTube IRL” feel of VidCon.

Reach Agency has brought clients such as DiGiorno and Hallmark to VidCon for the past five years, using it to cycle through meetings with creators that a brand has previously worked with or is planning to work with. “Clients are spread throughout the country. Having the opportunity to identify people who we want to work with and meet these people in person has been incredibly valuable,” said Gabe Gordon, the agency’s managing partner. “As brands are exploring longer-term relationships [with creators] and the levels of investment are getting higher, there’s a lot of value in terms of relationship management to have a client sit down with the talent.”

Katrina Frank is on the other side of those meetings as vp of brand integrations at digital video network Kin Community and similarly uses VidCon to set in motion deals between Kin’s creators and brands. While she said that VidCon isn’t where the deals actually get done, she has “definitely done deals coming out of VidCon.”

The deal-making at VidCon may increase thanks to the Viacom acquisition ginning up interest among those who have never been and may now opt to attend. Both Mallin and Gordon said the acquisition signals the event’s importance to marketers, and Frank said the same as it relates to media companies. In addition to Viacom’s TV networks, NBC continues to sponsor booths at VidCon, and Frank expects the event to further reflect the ongoing convergence between traditional and digital entertainment. And for Day’s part, the Viacom exec “certainly wouldn’t be opposed to” streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon establishing official presences at VidCon.

“I don’t think it would reflect what’s really happening in the online video industry if we didn’t have everybody there and represented,” said Day.

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As soon as people had wrapped their minds around the concept of Spotify, media observers started asking when the model would be applied to news.

Interest in the idea has waxed and waned for publishers, and it got another boost this spring when Apple acquired Texture, the joint venture formed by Condé Nast, Time Inc., Hearst, News Corp, Meredith and Rogers Media in 2012. Apple hadn’t disclosed its plans for Texture — which is also called “Netflix for magazines” and “Hulu for magazines” — as of press time, though publishers have speculated that it will be integrated into Apple News.

But roadblocks stand in the way of a product that lets news junkies pay one price to access multiple titles. First, most people remain uninterested in paying for news. And those that are interested might take a dim view of an all-you-can-eat product that only offers some of what they want.

Second, many publishers, particularly those that are just getting serious about pursuing consumer revenue, are loath to let an intermediary come between them and a paying audience. Others are still figuring out which segments of their audience will pay, and how much, for their product.

“The current state of audience segmentation among publishers is shockingly primitive,” says Frank Luby, a consultant who helps media companies price their products. “That needs to improve for something like this to gain any traction.”

Texture may be the largest example of a product like this, but others have tried their hands at it. Before Jason Kilar launched Vessel, he was in talks with American publishers about a Spotify-for-news type of product. Inkl, an Australian startup that offers pay-as-you-go and unlimited access models starting at $15 per month, is available everywhere from Poland to the Philippines. Then, there’s Readly, a Swedish startup that offers unlimited access to 2,500 magazines for $9.99 per month. It raised more than $15 million in a Series B funding round last year, led by U.K. venture capital firms. Each of these products is at least four years old.

But the concept has rarely been a top priority for publishers, which until recently were too busy chasing scale to focus on growing digital consumer revenue. “I cannot tell you how little Time Inc. gave a shit about Texture,” says one former Time Inc. executive that worked directly with Texture.

Beyond indifference, all of these companies face structural challenges that Spotify itself never had to face. Even though there are thousands of record labels, the recording industry is effectively an oligopoly, with three major labels — Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony — controlling the vast majority of the market, and a business consortium, Merlin, effectively representing the rest.

The digital media industry, by contrast, is significantly more fragmented and competitive, with few market leaders capable of pulling the rest of their peers in the same direction.

“[In music], once you get Universal, it tends to go that the others will come along,” says Zach Fuller, a media analyst at Midia Research, a firm that covers both the music and media industries. “[In media], even if you got a Condé Nast to sign up, for example, I don’t think it’s a given that every other publisher would immediately offer you access to their content.”

In addition, many of these publishers are already pursuing consumer revenue on their own. Record labels, as well as film and TV production companies, have always been dependent on third parties for distribution and promotion, and they can attract an audience on their own. Many already have sophisticated systems in place to turn readers into customers.

The existing Spotify-like services for news understand they have to take a back seat to publishers’ subscription efforts. And each has made attempts to appeal to publishers. Readly, for example, sends publishers the name and mailing address of any user that reads content from consecutive issues of a publisher’s magazine.

Inkl, recognizing that many publishers’ products are targeted at a specific geographic region, lets publishers use geofencing to restrict availability of content. It also lets publishers limit access of their content to mobile phones, knowing that readers who hit a publisher paywall on desktop repeatedly are more likely to become subscribers.

“I say to publishers, ‘I guarantee I won’t deliver as much value as your own subscriptions. No one will,’” says Gautam Mishra, Inkl’s founder and CEO. “But I guarantee I will be the second or third.”

The best prospect for a Spotify for news is likely to look more like Scroll, a startup that will deliver an ad-free version of publishers’ sites, than it is to look like Netflix. Just like with the original version of Spotify, people may not be ready to pay for content, but many will pay to get rid of ads. “If there’s a middle model between entirely free and entirely paid, that’s a model that could fit very well,” says Michael Silberman, svp of strategy at Piano.

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Advertisers may be known for jumping on just about every major holiday, but Ramadan has traditionally been an exception–likely because, as a month dedicated to fasting and self-denial, it represents the exact opposite of most marketing messages. But here’s an interesting exception: Coca-Cola created a spot about a young Muslim woman who, in addition to…

BuzzFeed is rethinking how it does business both at home and abroad, and layoffs have ensued.

On Thursday, Le Monde reported that BuzzFeed was shutting down its France operation, laying off all 14 staffers at the American publisher’s offshoot, which launched in 2013. In a memo sent to employees, BuzzFeed’s vp of international, Scott Lamb, described the layoffs as a “first step” toward reconsidering its presence in France, writing that it had “started a consultation process” with staffers there. “We have questions about whether we can build a sustainable business in France,” Lamb’s memo read.

Meanwhile, a separate memo written by chief revenue officer Lee Brown and published in Recode revealed that the publisher will be making changes to how the business side operates in the coming weeks. The company posted 45 job openings it said will position it to “operate more efficiently” and ease the workload of some “overextended” teams.

Nearly five years after BuzzFeed embarked on an international expansion plan, charging into nearly half a dozen countries in less than two years, the publisher is going to put more emphasis on entering new markets through partnerships, while adopting a different strategy for the markets where it’s already carved out a presence.  At home, it is tacking away from the sponsored content that formed the bedrock of its business, in favor of more programmatic advertising.

“Moving forward, our strategy will be more dynamic, more tailored to specific market conditions, and more informed by the local business environment,” Lamb’s memo continued. “Our global network will be the glue that ties our international businesses together, but we’ll also be more open to new approaches and partnerships that expand our current model.”

Though BuzzFeed’s foundation of quizzes and listicles might have seemed like a very American thing, it had already been widely copied in some of the markets it tried to enter. In France, for example, BuzzFeed had to fight for buyers’ attention with sites like Demotivateur, which at the time was trafficking in the same kinds of quizzes and entertainment-heavy content that BuzzFeed had. Demotivateur also has a Facebook audience more than three times larger than BuzzFeed France’s, according to CrowdTangle data.

And while BuzzFeed’s foreign offshoots managed to grow their brands on social media, they had trouble achieving the fast growth that defined its presence in the United States. At its 2014 launch, BuzzFeed Deutschland’s founding editor said she’d like to amass 1 million social followers before the site began covering politics or other serious news. Today, BuzzFeed Deutschland’s Facebook page still has fewer than 500,000 likes, and its current total is up just 20 percent from where it was 12 months ago, according to CrowdTangle data.

(It did wind up moving into hard news despite missing that 1 million follower target, even bolstering that side of its newsroom ahead of Germany’s national elections last year.)

The success and impact of the news teams’ reporting across BuzzFeed’s international bureaus remains a point of pride inside the company. Editor in chief Ben Smith became fond of sharing stories published by BuzzFeed France starting during last year’s election; news stories from foreign bureaus were frequently translated and shared internally. Two months ago, BuzzFeed UK won Website of the Year at the Society of Editors Press Awards.

But as most publishers know, impact reporting doesn’t always translate into business success. In BuzzFeed’s European bureaus, its teams had to deal with an unusual arrangement: No local sales teams. Despite years of clamoring for a local sales team from France, according to Le Monde’s report, the ad sales for BuzzFeed’s French, German, Spanish and British operations were all handled by a central team in London.

While the strategy of selling media across European markets is not unheard-of, it is not common, in part because there are enough local market idiosyncrasies that specialized sales teams are normally required.

“Sometimes [American publishers] have the mistake of lumping Europe as one place,” said Dale Lovell, the chief digital officer of the native advertising vendor Adyoulike. “If you really want to be successful you have to have feet on the street in these spots. At the very least you need native speakers working the patch from London making weekly trips. Otherwise you are only picking up ‘international’ ad plans for Europe planned out of London.”

BuzzFeed has editions in 10 different markets outside the U.S., including China, Japan, India, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, UK, Spain and Germany. The company claims more than half its audience lives outside the United States. While BuzzFeed didn’t enter any new markets in 2017, it announced a content licensing partnership with Chinese media company Bytedance in January.

The style and structure of those operations differs. BuzzFeed Japan, for example, is run as a joint venture with Yahoo Japan, while in countries such as Brazil, there’s a greater degree of autonomy. BuzzFeed Canada, for the past two years, has operated as a kind of extension of BuzzFeed News, posting content on its own social media sites infrequently — it hasn’t posted a story to Facebook or Twitter in over a week — while staffers focus principally on BuzzFeed News. Content written by BuzzFeed News staffers across all its English-language offices is frequently syndicated or shared across its accounts.

But in the past year, Germany and Spain have become empowered to do more selling on their own. Germany, for example, recently sold a bunch of sponsored quizzes to Sky Deutschland.

Yet without superior social distribution and in an increasingly crowded branded content marketplace, the path forward on BuzzFeed’s old map seems less clearly marked. “If you’re looking for someone to make something in the BuzzFeed style, there are 20 other people that can do that quite easily,” Lovell said.

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It’s ironic that in “Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else),” Ken Auletta tries to document how advertising has changed – and before his book even hit the shelves, the
landscape had shifted again, enough to render the remarks made by Martin Sorrell (whom Auletta leans on heavily) out-of-date.

Mobile-focused ticketing platform SeatGeek became the first company to sell tickets directly via Snapchat when it offered seats to a Major League Soccer match directly via the messaging application last month. Snapchat began testing native ecommerce capabilities in February, and SeatGeek offered tickets to Los Angeles Football Club’s May 26 match versus D.C. United via…