Month: June 2018

Snapchat is looking to get publishers more invested into the platform with a key new hire of a publishing veteran.

Former Flipboard and Time Inc. executive Sarah Gallagher is coming on board to lead a new group the company has formed to work more closely with the more than 90 media companies producing stories and shows for Snapchat’s Discover section. Gallagher will start with the company next week and report to Snap’s director of business development for content David Brinker. Brinker had negotiated deals with Gallagher while he was at News Corp. and she served as Flipboard’s head of publisher partnerships, a role she took in 2014 after spending several years working in sales and marketing at Time Inc.

As head of strategic partner management, Gallagher will oversee Snap’s strategic partner management team, a 12-person unit within Snap’s larger content organization that will serve as the primary contacts for publishers. In an attempt to clear up publishers’ confusion and frustration over who within Snap’s content organization to ask about any given issue, the partner managers will field publishers’ questions and feedback for all aspects of their work with Snap and be responsible for connecting the publishers with other members of Snap’s content team that may specialize in certain areas, such as editorial or sales.

Snap’s partner managers have been pulled from other parts of the company’s content organization and are being assigned to publishers based on their existing relationships with publishers as well as their location and their expertise in certain areas of importance to individual publishers. The number of publishers that each partner manager works with varies based on the publisher’s size, Brinker said.

Snap decided to create the strategic partner management team after it hosted a publisher summit in New York in April. The publishers in attendance told Snap that they each wanted “one person that they knew was their person instead of trying to have subject-matter experts in each one of our fields managing different parts of the relationship,” said Brinker.

Gallagher and her team have their work cut out for them. Publishers have been struggling to make heads or tails of the redesign that Snapchat rolled out in February. The redesign handed the Discover tab over to an algorithm to decide how to rank publishers’ stories. That has led to publishers’ stories being put in front of people who don’t subscribe to them in the app, but it has also resulted in the stories sometimes appearing lower in subscribers’ feeds. Several publishers have said that the redesign’s viewership fluctuations have made it hard for publishers to how many people will likely see their story on any given day, which complicates the number of ad impressions that they can guarantee to advertisers.

The constant state of flux following the redesign has been reflected in Snapchat’s shifting importance for publishers like Food Network. The app remains “a piece of the pie,” said Deb Puchalla, svp of digital brands for Food Network and Cooking Channel, said at last month’s Digiday Video Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona. However the size of Snapchat’s slice can switch with the size of the publisher’s audience. Following the redesign, Food Network saw its Discover channel’s viewership drop by about 20 percent, though “some of that has come back a bit,” Puchalla said.

Publishers shouldn’t expect Snapchat’s changes to abate anytime soon. The app only recently rolled out a redesign of the February redesign. However the company’s hope is that its new strategic partnerships team will help publishers to navigate these changes. To that end, the partner manager will be judged by the growth in audience, engagement and revenue of the publishers they support.

“By having having that dedicated point of contact, publishers will be able to get a better sense of how these changes impact them and the role that they can play in addressing the changes as they come,” said Brinker.

The post Snap hires Flipboard, Time alum Sarah Gallagher to lead new publisher support team appeared first on Digiday.

The New York Times Reader Center’s role and responsibilities changed considerably during its first year of operation. Unsurprisingly, those changes were driven by reader feedback.

When the 22-person Reader Center first launched in May 2017, it was an eight-person group with no presence on the Times’ website, no connection to the publisher’s commenting system and no clear role in driving subscriptions.

Today, in addition to touching all of those things, the Reader Center publishes dozens of stories every month, which either supplement or respond to stories written by Times reporters, or are created just from questions it asks of readers.

By responding to reader questions, concerns and comments, the Reader Center plays a part in the Times’ all-important subscription business. But the Times isn’t yet segmenting out the Reader Center participants or figuring out where they fit in a marketing conversion funnel.

“We think we can learn more about ourselves and use it as an opportunity to educate readers,” said Hanna Ingber, the Reader Center’s editor.

At the outset, the Reader Center was not meant to have a very external-facing role. Instead, Ingber said, she thought the Reader Center’s mandate was to inject a “new way of thinking” into different parts of the organization by sharing insights it gleaned from readers. But before long, readers began asking where the Reader Center’s content was on the Times’ site, and the team decided it would have to show its work more publicly.

Today, it publishes many different kinds of content on a special section of the Times’ site: stories written using reader responses to questions the Reader Center poses, such as a piece about the conditions in public schools or a Q&A with Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi and Times international editor Michael Slackman discussing the ethics of reporting in a war zone; or stories that own up to mistakes made, like one apologizing for an article about bubble tea that some readers thought was too exoticizing.

The Reader Center regularly solicits information from readers, using callouts from its site — on June 5, it was asking for input from anybody who has been in Miss America or other beauty pageants — but it also gathers feedback and input from other sources. The group analyzes and responds to comments that visitors leave on Times stories, and it gathers comments that readers share on social platforms, including Twitter. The Reader Center also tends a private Facebook group, which has gathered over 500 members since its launch at the start of 2018, where people sound off on the Times’ work.

The Times folded its community team into the Reader Center, so the publisher can keep all the external feedback it gets in a single place, as well as share it more efficiently with reporters and other stakeholders. The Reader Center will help flag interesting comments that readers leave on stories for the reporters who wrote them, highlight interesting letters it gets and analyze information en masse.

“Everything we do is connected to the journalism,” Ingber said.

While the Reader Center plays a central role in collecting feedback, Ingber said its job is not to replace the public editor, a position the Times eliminated the same week the Reader Center launched.

Like most everything else the Times does, the Reader Center plays a role in helping the publisher grow its subscriber base, too, mostly in a support capacity: The Times’ subscribers are big fans of the commenting system.

The paper hasn’t yet determined where the Reader Center fits into any kind of marketing funnel. It does not segment out people who reply to its calls to action, or anything along those lines. “Our business goals are to have a deep relationship with our readers,” Ingber said. “But we’re not measuring, ‘Did this person answer a call and become a subscriber?’”

The post One year in, The New York Times reader-insights group has 22 people appeared first on Digiday.

Social video publishers in the U.K. are getting more serious about non-advertising revenue.

Take, for instance, Facebook food video channel Twisted. Last November, Jungle Creations, the parent company of Twisted, launched Twisted London, a food-delivery service hosted on its own Facebook page that delivers meals within a two-mile radius in London. Twisted London’s Facebook page hosts recipe videos of meals, which users can watch and then order for themselves. Twisted London is on track to bring in £1 million ($1.3 million) this year, said Jungle Creations CEO Jamie Bolding, during the Digiday Video Summit Europe in Amsterdam.

Last year, Jungle Creations also sold a Twisted cookbook, which sold 30,000 copies in what Bolding called a “trial run.” With the next cookbook, he expects to sell 200,000 copies. And it’s not just with Twisted: Jungle Creations sold 7,800 desktop punching bags based on a viral video created for its VT brand (formerly Viral Thread), Bolding said.

Commerce and other forms of consumer-related revenue are a big area of focus for Jungle Creations, as the company looks to become less reliant on advertising — and specifically, branded content, Bolding said.

A lot of this also has to do with Facebook, where branded and sponsored videos are still the biggest moneymaker for most publishers (especially in Europe, where Facebook’s mid-roll ads are still testing with a smaller number of publishers, and where Facebook Watch hasn’t launched yet.) And with Facebook choking off video reach in the news feed — Jungle Creations’ monthly video views on Facebook dropped from 3.7 billion views across all of its properties in February to 2.2 billion views in April, according to Tubular Labs — other forms of revenue become even more important.

“How do we turn more of our video views into an actual business? The value exchange is very different in the traditional model with pre-roll and display, where you have your audience, you create valuable content, then you place ads around that content, which can fund more content,” said Bolding. “In the branded content model, you have to make enough of a margin to make sure you can make more unbranded editorial content.”

That’s tough on Facebook, where most of the views don’t go monetized, Bolding later said. This is why the company is looking into other areas, including restaurant deliveries and pop-up shops, events, merchandising, and paywalls — anything seems to be on the table, really.

Other U.K. social video publishers also spoke about the importance of building out non-advertising revenue streams. Kyra TV, which has grown an audience on YouTube off of three successful long-form shows, said it’s also exploring everything from licensing programming to content buyers and distributors to pop-up shops, live events and even products ranging from clothing to makeup.

“It’s easy to be unfocused at times,” said Kyra TV founder Devran Karaca from the Digiday Video Summit Europe stage. “We initially focused on growing ad revenue and integrating brands into our shows.”

But now, Kyra TV is exploring how to fully take advantage of the show brands it has created. “PAQ,” which airs weekly on YouTube, has an average watch time of 14 minutes per episode on 20-minute episodes, Karaca said. That provided a lot more opportunities for sponsorships and brand integrations, but it also demonstrates a loyalty among the audience — Kyra TV’s three shows have an average 70 percent retention rate on YouTube, Karaca said — which the publisher can use to drive viewers toward other products and services.

“We’ve dabbled in experiences in the past. We created a pop-up event on Instagram and have 500 kids queuing outside,” said Karaca. “If you create an obsessive fan base, they become easy to sell to. We’ve been helping brands sell to them. We should be selling our own products to them.”

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Nearly 200 publishers attended the Digiday Video Summit Europe in Amsterdam this week to find answers to some of the burning questions affecting publishers’ video businesses. Among the issues that frequently arose: the balance between scale and engagement; monetizing audiences on and off platforms; and, of course, the ripple effects of the General Data Protection Regulation.

During working groups and publisher-only town hall sessions, which operated under the Chatham House Rule, delegates debated their core concerns. Here are some of the takeaways.

The price of growing audiences on platforms
“You have no control over your own destiny. You need a balanced portfolio. If you rely on a distributed platform strategy, you need a variety of platforms to make it work.”

“On social, you gain the audience, but lose the engagement.”

“Do you prioritize creating content for where the money will come from? It becomes easy to create something specifically for Facebook.”

“It depends on what type of publisher you are, but Facebook’s video initiatives are not working.”

“For traditional publishers, YouTube is a different model. It gives you the flexibility to embed and maintain audiences in your own environment. Facebook and Snapchat, you have to play in that environment.”

“Most video content is still largely built for TV and then repurposed to digital platforms.”

“It’s difficult for traditional companies steeped in ways of working to diversify and hone in on how consumption is on a platform. That takes focus. If you do it from the beginning, that’s all you do. You have the change the mindset.”

“We are putting more videos on our site that are social-friendly that can be repurposed for Facebook. Instead of making six Facebook-only producers, we’ve shifted focus to our site, but it’s still Facebook-friendly video.”

“The key is to pivot to where the platforms want to go. It becomes a cost-benefit situation. It’s a balance, aligning and supporting what’s important to then put you in favor and helps.”

Issues with scale
“We don’t have enough scale to bring in [advertiser] demand, which is why we have to work with demand platforms to show advertisers that we can produce a certain amount of video and demonstrate the kind of scale that they want.”

“Is it possible to scale without social platforms? I’m not sure there really is.”

“Scale is a problem, at least being in a smaller market like we are. It’s more work than value. Syndication is an answer, but it’s not a great answer.”

“We have tried syndication with a few companies, and it’s never really worked. We would supply them our feed, and the conversation would just drop off. Then, we’ll come back two months later and realize we’ve made $14 — that’s an exaggeration, but you get what I mean. So, we turned [the syndication partnerships] off.”

“The problem for a lot of publishers is it’s a vicious circle: Brands want scale; you generate 3 billion views a month; the algorithm change means that drops by 30 percent, but brands don’t want to hear that, so then you start buying the views; then, you’re paying rent to the platforms.

“How much scale do you need to convince brands to still work with you while monetizing in other ways?”

“Everyone wants to branded content, but is it scalable? Are you going to get the money back from branded content that you spend on making it? I hope the answer is we can. You have to have multiple revenue streams.”

GDPR ripple effects
“Our rates dropped by about 20 percent. That’s demand drying up. We’re hoping that will bounce back once we start gathering consent, but Google is late to the party, so there’s nothing we can do there.”

“Rates went down by between 30 and 40 percent. We’re looking into the data now, but it’s still so early to understand why.”

“We dropped by 100 percent. Our legal team are very concerned about child-friendly advertising, so we turned off all ads. We’re trying to find a better solution.”

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The ESPN phone — at a reported $150 million — was enough of a disaster for no less an authority as Steve Jobs to reportedly call it “the dumbest fucking idea I have ever heard.”

But ESPN executives think Jobs has it wrong. Sure, the phone was a commercial bomb — ESPN scrapped it within a year — but the ill-fated project got the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader willing to make bold digital bets and also provided it with the plumbing to deliver content quickly in mobile. (Google recently ranked ESPN first among media and technology companies with fastest mobile websites.)

The post ESPN vs. the narrative: Inside the fight for the future of TV’s last unicorn appeared first on Digiday.

PayPal wants to be the one-stop financial shop for underserved customers.

The company rolled out a Mastercard debit card in April issued by the Bancorp bank, with no monthly fee or minimum balance on which customers can load funds onto at stores or online. Previous prepaid cards the company rolled out had monthly fees. It’s a first step in a suite of services it’s developing for underserved customers.

“Our goal is to look at the people who are outside of the financial system and give them a full platform to manage and move their money, and that we call democratizing financial services,” CEO Dan Schulman said at the company’s investor day conference in late May. “We think we have a tremendous competitive advantage to bring those citizens into the digital economy to afford them of the opportunities all of us have as we move into the digital world.”

For industry watchers, it’s a land grab for PayPal for the underserved.

Read the full story on tearsheet.co

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On a recent Sunday, Sarah Harden was eating pizza with her kids while exchanging emails with actress Reese Witherspoon. “Can I call you? I’ve got a surprise,” Harden wrote to Witherspoon. Once on the phone, she broke the news to the Oscar winner: AT&T had agreed to fund a summer camp for Witherspoon’s media company, Hello Sunshine, to teach filmmaking to 20 teen girls. Harden remembers an emotional Witherspoon telling her, “This is exactly the sort of thing I’ve been wanting to do.”

Hello Sunshine, a company that specializes in empowering and relatable stories for and by women, was just the sort of company Harden had wanted to run, too.

The post Her Story: Hello Sunshine CEO Sarah Harden has Reese Witherspoon’s media company seizing its moment appeared first on Digiday.

Heineken USA today announced the appointment of its first female CEO. Maggie Timoney will succeed Ronald den Elzen, who will be relocating to the brand’s Netherlands headquarters. Timoney’s appointment adds a major crack to the beer industry’s glass ceiling–she will be the first woman to serve as chief executive of a major American beer supplier….

Ken Auletta’s new book, “Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else),” examines an ad industry in the midst of profound change. He followed pillars of the ad industry, including former WPP CEO Martin Sorrell, former GroupM Chairman Irwin Gottlieb, Facebook’s Carolyn Everson, CBS’ Les Moonves and MediaLink’s Michael Kassan. The group… Continue reading »

The post ‘Advertising Is The ATM For Media’: ‘Frenemies’ Author Ken Auletta On Profound Change In Ad Land appeared first on AdExchanger.

After more than five years in the position, Gerard Baker is out as editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, the company announced Tuesday. He will be replaced by Matt Murray, currently WSJ’s executive editor. Baker will become the Journal’s editor-at-large, where he’ll write a column in the paper’s weekend section and…