Month: June 2018

Visa is the latest advertiser to rethink how it works with its agencies.

Visa is briefing both the firm’s creative agency, AMVBBDO, and media agency, Starcom Worldwide, to meet business objectives, not traditional campaign goals for the financial firm’s World Cup sponsorships. Visa’s marketers are asking for those sponsorship campaigns to deliver against global business priorities instead of awareness alone as it did earlier this year with previous events like the Super Bowl or Winter Olympics. Reach and engagement will still be barometers of success for the financial firm’s marketing, but Visa will pay closer attention to how those efforts move the dial in terms of growing its share of the mobile commerce market or encouraging people to use their Visa cards instead of cash abroad, for example.

“We’re trying to get smart about the upfront briefing process to ensure that the insights used are really crisp and the objectives in place are really clear,” said Lynne Biggar, chief marketing and communications officer at Visa. She added that the effort is an ongoing exercise with the agencies designed to incentivize them to create more assets that can be targeted more specifically. There’s a greater focus on targeting display ads to people who are traveling to cities like London and Las Vegas this summer and then optimizing those buys to the most receptive audiences.

More than 20 versions of the ad’s video have been created for TV, display, social, print and out of home in 45 markets and 24 different languages. Swedish footballer Zlatan Ibrahimović, one of the sport’s biggest personalities, stars in all the ads and will front the campaign alongside five other influencers, depending on what market the ad appears in.

It’s the latest example of the lengths global advertisers are going to get their agencies to perform better. Procter & Gamble went so far as to create a new agency group made up of ones from rival shops in a bid to foster better creative, while others have reverted to running workshops to keep a closer eye on how their agencies work with one another. Part of the reason why Visa’s attempt is interesting is because it’s testing the model on a sponsorship campaign, which aren’t usually required to do more than generate awareness for sponsors.

Visa wouldn’t say whether this approach will extend to fee structure. But similar moves from advertisers like Direct Line Group, Barclays and L’Oréal have predated the arrival of payment models that are — at least in part — driven by the need to pay agencies based on their performance, not as a proportion of ad spend, for example. Biggar did, however, explain that changes to the way Visa works with its agencies are partly motivated by her experiences with performance models when she worked on the publisher side at Time Inc.

“My background is much more on the performance marketing [side] than it is on the big brand [activations], said Biggar. “It meant that my experiences with marketing were about being able to quantify outcomes and being very promotionally minded. That’s very important to me and our team, and it’s what we should be doing. … We’re working with some of the most iconic partners [in advertising], and we should hold ourselves to the accounts that we drive from those investments that the company has made.”

The post Visa ties down its agencies to deliver on business goals for World Cup efforts appeared first on Digiday.

Like other digital platforms, YouTube has been attracting more TV-like series from content creators to its platform. In the U.K., YouTube’s early foray into commissioning ad-funded shows, “Training Days,” has aired since the beginning of May and is making the case that longer-form football content drives views.

The unscripted series follows comedian Jack Whitehall as he meets football players and managers with the aim of taking them out of their comfort zones. The series, produced by Fulwell 73, consists of six weekly episodes of between 20 and 30 minutes, concluding with an hourlong special before the FIFA World Cup kicks off June 14. Supplementing the episodes are 14 shorter-form episodes of 2 1/2 to 10 minutes, timed around the football calendar. The whole series airs on Whitehall’s YouTube page.

Since the end of January, Whitehall’s page has been managed by his social media team and digital content studio Little Dot Studios. At the beginning of this year, the page had around 5,000 subscribers and has since grown to nearly 500,000, while daily views are often several hundred thousand, according to Social Blade statistics. The page had 320,000 subscribers at the beginning of May, and that number has increased since the show started airing, thanks to it featuring well-known personalities.

“The reality on YouTube is it takes a lot of time, effort, energy and content to build any scale for a channel. It doesn’t just happen overnight,” said Wayne Davison, managing director at Little Dot Studios.

Over the last six months, Davison’s team has populated Whitehall’s YouTube page with longer-form content from the comedian’s back catalog twice a week, like clips from TV talk shows and sitcoms he’s starred in such as “Fresh Meat” and “Bad Education.” The page’s audience has also grown due to cross-posting videos with other YouTube creators, like this video with “The Sidemen,” which has amassed nearly 4 million views. Little Dot Studios also optimizes headlines, metatags and thumbnail images to give videos the best chance of being featured on YouTube’s homepage and right-side suggested video rail, a key consideration to stand out from the mass of content.

“That’s the real key to building channels,” said Davison. “As soon as suggested videos are awash with your channel’s content, then you are feeding the audience back into your own channel, instead of them being sent to someone else’s content.”

YouTube is a popular place for football content, and the upcoming tournament has fueled that fire. Longer content and regularity drives longer watch time, a metric that YouTube said in recent years will have a favorable impact on the algorithm. According to Tubular Labs, the majority of football content uploaded in the last 90 days is around five minutes long and has had 7 billion video views, while football content that’s 20 minutes long has had 3.2 billion video views. However, engagement — likes shares and comments — is nearly twice as high on videos that are 20 minutes than those that are five minutes.

Maintaining the pace for longer-form content is key. “Each platform has different parameters. You tailor the content for whoever it’s for,” said Gabe Turner, company director at Fulwell 73, which also produced James Corden’s YouTube hit “Carpool Karaoke.”

“Our natural inclination [for ‘Training Days’] was to go more slowly. We quickly realized that’s not the right route,” he said. “Creating content for YouTube needs more energy, more stunts, more scene changes. The pace of the cut is quicker; we’re not spending a lot of time on one person, but many people in different locations. It’s a process.”

Turner said the supplementary episodes were suggested by Luke Hyams, YouTube’s head of originals for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. YouTube is looking for series that are ad-funded, like “Training Days,” where YouTube manages the ads, and for its subscriptions service, YouTube Premium, formerly YouTube Red. Potential scale, topicality and intended audience will affect how the shows are monetized. For instance, Broadcast Now reported in early May that the target demographic for YouTube Premium is between 18 and 34, while the ad-funded audience is broader.

Other unscripted originals YouTube has commissioned include Sundog Pictures’ “If I Could Tell You Just One Thing,” featuring actress Priyanka Chopra, and Antenna Pictures’ stunt series “The Sidemen Show” for YouTube’s subscription service. As part of its subscriptions service slate, YouTube has also commissioned sci-fi series “Origin,” from Left Bank Pictures, which produced popular Netflix Original series “The Crown.”

The post How UK YouTube original series ‘Training Days’ built a following appeared first on Digiday.

The pivot to paid has many variations. German publisher Spiegel, which publishes weekly news magazine Der Spiegel, is taking an approach that’s somewhere between a paywall and a metered system. Spiegel+ instead makes approximately 100 articles available to subscribers and scatters them throughout the site. The goal: to drive subscriptions based on reader interest in individual stories, rather than risk losing readers by asking them to subscribe too fast.

Spiegel has 20 million monthly online visitors, according to German online measurement standard Arbeitsgemeinschaft Online Forschung. The publisher makes the majority of its revenue — 99.9 percent of it, in fact — from online and print advertising, according to Spiegel Online CEO Jesper Doub. But the publisher recognizes it must diversify its revenue streams to guarantee long-term sustainability. Around 30 people from across Spiegel have been assigned to creating the new reader-revenue product model.

“For the last 23 years, the ad business has been great, but if we want to take it to the next level, we must come up with the next model,” said Doub. “Our ad business is still huge, so we’re not under pressure yet and not expecting it [reader revenue] to be anything near a 50-50 split over the next few years, but we aim for two-digit percentage growth.”

Over the last two years, Spiegel made certain stories available on a pay-per-article basis. A reader could pay 39 euro cents (46 U.S. cents), for example, to read a specific article, and once they reached €5 ($5.85), they would be asked to subscribe. That model didn’t scale, but the publisher continued using it until recently to test what kinds of stories people were willing to pay for.

Spiegel+ subscribers pay €19.99 ($23.38) a month for a digital-only subscription and €24.99 ($29.23) a month for a print and digital subscription. Spiegel Online attracts a decent number of younger readers, but to encourage the habit of paying for content, it has also introduced a Spiegel+ package for people up to 30 years old. Those readers can pay €11.99 ($14.02) for a digital-only subscription and €16.99 ($19.87) for print and digital. A trial month is offered for free for digital-only subscriptions.

A digital-only subscriber will receive access to all content produced exclusively for Spiegel+, which includes a combination of approximately 50 text articles and videos, in addition to the 45 to 50 articles published weekly in Der Spiegel. Previously, the magazine articles were available digitally only via a PDF, which people would download to read an online version of the magazine.

Spiegel has around 400 journalists in its print and digital newsroom. Rather than choose a specific editorial team to create subscription content, all its journalists will be invited to pitch stories for it. Two people coordinate the project management of Spiegel+ and monitor its subscription conversions. Spiegel is also looking to fill a new role that focuses on distributing paid content articles on third-party platforms like Facebook.

The content that converts tends to be longer pieces of up to several thousand words. Spiegel+ will focus on these long formats, which have evergreen topics and so aren’t tied to daily news cycles, and can’t be found elsewhere, particularly in areas like politics, economics and lifestyle.

The top five highest-selling pay-per-view articles in the last two years had a mix of investigated topics: how an American tourist visiting a Berlin nightclub died, a man’s hunt for his lost treasure, whether intimacy or distance improves sexual intimacy for couples, a time-based weight-loss diet, and the Islamic world’s economic development. All of these are now available to Spiegel+ members, too.

“We have seen several publishers at local newspapers play around with metered models, and most of them ended up having 99.9 percent of visitors ending usage when they hit the paywall,” said Stefan Plöchinger, Spiegel’s head of product development. “It [the metered model] drained the traffic — they didn’t get people to jump over the hurdle to get beyond the meter. Also, the metered model seems old now: People are talking about [techniques like] dynamic pay gates. We don’t want it [paid-for content] to be too in your face. It’s important that it feels integrated into the homepage. You then sell the story, not the model, and you don’t disturb readers.”

Other formats created by big-name local journalists that generated high views on other free products, like weekly email update Spiegel Daily, have been exported to Spiegel+ formats. Harald Schmidt, German TV presenter and comedian, does a weekly video column discussing politics and other issues; Swiss journalist and presenter Jörg Kachelmann will do his popular video-based weather report for subscribers only. Radio host and poet Sophie Passmann has also been commissioned to write a weekly column for subscribers.

The post How German publisher Spiegel is experimenting beyond the metered paywall to drive reader revenue appeared first on Digiday.

Changemakers is part of the summer issue of Digiday Magazine, available exclusively to Digiday+ members. Subscribe here and use code CHANGEMAKERS for a 15 percent discount.

One thing that never gets old in media and marketing is the desire to rethink the status quo, challenge conventional wisdom and raise the bar. That impulse is evident in our second Changemakers list, where we spotlight people who are busy creating the future of media and marketing. A few themes dominated this list, including the battle against tech giants’ dominance of online advertising, solving the mystery shrouding where ad dollars are spent and putting a spotlight on bad workplace culture. Meet 50 people we are honoring for their contributions, every day, in making change a reality.

Click below to see this year’s class of Changemakers.

The post Introducing 2018’s Digiday Changemakers, honoring those modernizing media and marketing appeared first on Digiday.

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