Month: June 2018

To boost online sales, Campbell Soup Co. is making all 3,000 recipes on its Campbell’s Kitchen website shoppable.

Here’s how it works: When people select the “Get Ingredients” tab at the bottom of a recipe and enter their ZIP code, they’ll get a list of retailers that deliver to their area, such as AmazonFresh, Instacart and Peapod. The shopper is redirected to the delivery service’s site, where a list of all the ingredients they need for a given recipe pops up. When the customer places an order, Campbell gets an undisclosed cut of all the product sales, Campbell’s brand or not.

Matt Pritchard, vp of digital marketing at the Campbell Soup Co., said the service eliminates the need to hunt for ingredients outside of the website. “Consumers shop very differently now,” he said. “They expect things to be there in an instant.”

Campbell’s Kitchen, as the company’s largest online property, gets 20 million visits a year,  Pritchard said. If the service takes off, it’ll be rolled out outside the U.S., to the Campbell’s Kitchen app and perhaps its Alexa skill.

Campbell’s sales in segments like soup and fresh foods have declined. The company reported a net loss of $475 million in the third quarter of 2018, shares hit a five-year low and CEO Denise Morrison stepped down. Pritchard joined Campbell in June 2017 with a goal of bringing in $300 million in e-commerce sales over the next five years. Right now, e-commerce only makes up a little more than 1 percent of the company’s overall sales, said Pritchard. Shoppable recipes mark the latest example of the company’s push into delivery. In February, Campbell started selling meal kits with Chef’d, after investing $10 million in the company.

Several marketers expressed doubt about the shoppable recipes approach, saying people won’t automatically purchase all ingredients from just viewing a recipe.

“While people will pay for convenience, as evidenced by all the meal-prep delivery services, restaurant delivery and even grocery delivery services like Instacart, but this one from Campbell’s may be a bit too niche,” said an agency exec.

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The England Football Association created a daily YouTube show called the “Lions’ Den” centered around its men’s team at the World Cup.

With carmaker Vauxhall ending its multiyear sponsorship of the country’s football teams after the 2018 FIFA World Cup, the Football Association is looking to the show as a way to replace that sponsorship revenue — assuming it can draw enough fans to a show that won’t have access to matches or highlight footage.

The show is broadcast from the World Cup inside the national team’s base camp in Repino, Russia. The 30-minute show is hosted by TV presenter Craig Mitch, who interviews players, management staff and fans. Fans are encouraged to send questions to Mitch during the broadcast and vote in live polls. Members of the FA’s supporters club can speak to players via FaceTime live on the show.

Twelve episodes in, the show is averaging 500,000 views, most of them lasting seven minutes and 30 seconds, said Damien Cullen, the FA’s senior video manager. Considering the show airs at a different time each day, making it hard for viewers to know when to tune in, those view figures are an encouraging start.

As much as the show is a commercial opportunity, it’s also a marketing one, and once England’s participation in the World Cup ends, it’ll be assessed based on how many people watched it, and for how long, and if it changes attitudes about the national team by providing intimate access to the team, which is harder to measure, said Cullen. Cullen also will weigh whether the show, which is split between video producers Tony Watson and Alexander Brown at the England team hotel and four crew members in the U.K., could be turned into commercial rights.

Creating new assets that advertisers will pay for is one of the hardest challenges for any rights holder. There’s value in giving fans exclusive access to some of football’s biggest stars like Harry Kane, but the question is how many people will watch it, said Neil Hopkins, global head of strategy at M&C Saatchi Sport and Entertainment.

“At the moment, the FA are getting half a million views because it’s a World Cup, and people are genuinely interested in what’s going on behind the scenes in the Lions’ Den,” he said. “The challenge is that, unlike football clubs, a national team won’t have an ongoing narrative beyond the five or six qualifying matches they play a year outside of the big tournaments, which will make it hard to put a value on content like a daily show.”

Mindful of how restrictive those spikes in interests could be, Cullen is already thinking about extending the same live show format to the FA’s other teams such as the England women’s team, if they qualify for next year’s World Cup in France.

Livestreams won’t be a huge moneymaker for an organization like the FA as the value in sports rights is still in live coverage and highlights, said Hopkins. It is, however, part of what Cullen sees as a strategy that unites marketing, public relations and commercial interests. Sports sponsorships have mainly been a way for a brand to get its logo in front of a large audience or get VIP company access.

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Elisabeth Murdoch’s digital media company Vertical Networks is best known for producing video shows for Snapchat and Facebook. However, the plan was never to just produce for social platforms, but to create content that can exist in other forms of media, including TV, books and apps.

In late August, Vertical Networks will air a show called “Phone Swap” on local Fox stations as part of a syndication test. On the half-hour show, two people go on a blind date, but are allowed to peruse each other’s private information on their phones before deciding if they want to go on a second date.

“Phone Swap” didn’t begin on TV; it started as a short-form Snapchat video show, where it has been averaging 10 million viewers per episode across two seasons. It’s one of two or three TV shows that Vertical Networks aims to get on the air this year, including “Ghost Hunt” and “I Have a Secret,” based off of programming that the company has already made for Snapchat or Facebook.

The idea is that social platforms can be fruitful testing grounds for new programming, which can then be expanded globally through TV distribution, books, apps and other forms of media, said Tom Wright, CEO of Vertical Networks.

“[Elisabeth Murdoch], in a previous life, was responsible for huge global shows like ‘MasterChef,’” said Wright. “Our mandate from the get-go has been to go out and create new ‘MasterChefs’ — huge global pieces of IP that have an incredible ability to travel.”

Snapchat has been a testing ground for Vertical Networks to try out new programming formats and concepts. In addition to shows such as “Phone Swap” and “Ghost Hunt,” the company operates three Snapchat Discover channels: Brother, Mindsy and Solve. Vertical Networks will often use the channels to test out new show formats and concepts before developing them as stand-alone short-form video series. (Snap is a minority owner in Vertical Networks.)

With TV, instead of pitching networks on the idea of “Phone Swap” or showing an episode of the Snapchat version of the show, Vertical Networks already had a 22-minute episode of “Phone Swap” ready from the beginning, Wright said. That’s what potential content buyers were seeing when the show was being shopped around.

“On a platform like Snapchat, you just have to get to the good stuff. There’s very little time for setup and backstory,” Wright said. “But when we put that show on linear, we suddenly have a different language that we need to speak in. We can do the backstory, we can spend more time with the characters, and we can give the show some room to breathe. Conceit is still the same, but it’s a different language.”

Beyond TV, Vertical Networks is writing a book based on its Brother channel, described by Wright as an advice book written as if it came from an older brother. Vertical Networks is also developing some mobile apps, which Wright wouldn’t detail.

With 50 employees, Vertical Networks is profitable, Wright said. About 60 percent of the company’s revenues today are from advertising, with the rest coming from ancillary revenue streams including producing and licensing. The company’s goal is to flip the percentages next year, Wright said.

“Ad-funded media is a challenging model, in general, whether you’re a production company or a digital publisher — the days of hollow eyeballs, quick scale and monetization by accident are gone,” said Wright. “If you can build a direct relationship with your audience with IP that they really care about, then it’s easy to see models emerge for monetization and distribution that helps in building a healthy company.”

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Facing competition from Amazon and even platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, retailers are getting hungrier for content that will get customers to open their wallets. And increasingly, they are turning to commerce-focused publishers for help creating it.

Over the past year, retailers including Amazon, Nordstrom, and Target-owned Dermstore have tapped commerce-focused publishers for articles to feature directly on their own sites. Publishers interviewed for this article said they have deals in the works to distribute their articles on other retailers’ sites, which they wouldn’t name, and that the pace of retailers’ requests for content has picked up in the past six months or so.

Publishers might produce the articles as part of wide-ranging deals with the retailer that can include ad buys, branded content production or direct deals on affiliate commerce, where the retailer pays a commission rate for sales driven by the publisher’s website. The articles can also be white label content that the publisher creates for the retailer. The work can be created by publishers’ editorial staffs or contract writers.

In one example of such an exchange, a staff writer at New York magazine’s e-commerce play, the Strategist, compiled a list of skin care products that was incorporated into a post on Dermstore’s blog.

The trend’s not limited to retailers: PopSugar, for example, has a multiyear agreement to produce content for a site owned by what it called a beauty brand, which it declined to name.

Publishers say retailers are trying to influence people earlier in the buying process by improving the retailers’ search results and site experience. The six publishers interviewed for this story wouldn’t comment on the record so as to avoid violating confidentiality terms of agreements with retailers or to avoid damaging relationships with key business partners. Dermstore did not respond to a request for comment, and Nordstrom declined to comment.

“They’re all trying to move further up the purchase funnel,” said one executive at a commerce-focused publisher that’s created content for retailers’ sites. “Amazon just owns the bottom of it.”

“This is definitely becoming more and more of an ask with brand partners,” said an executive at a third publisher. “As brands are considering whether they want to invest in their own content team, they’re weighing whether it makes more sense to license publisher content. Content created by an editor at a publisher will always feel more authentic.”

These requests are part of a broader trend of retailers working closely with commerce publishers, which has taken the form of publishers using sales conversion data to advise retailers on offers or doing experiential marketing. In some cases, retailers sell publishers’ products.

But content-focused deals risk eating into commerce-focused publishers’ own business. They have become valuable at driving sales because they rank high in search results, or they’ve become trusted sources of product information and recommendation. If consumers start going to retailers for that information, it could start eating into the influence publishers spent many years building. Publishers wrestled with that tension last year when Amazon began offering them the chance to embed their content directly inside its sites.

“It’s not a business I’m anxious to get into,” said an executive at a fourth commerce publisher that’s previously done some white label work.

Still, as retailers continue to get squeezed, not just by Amazon but direct-to-consumer brands and platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, they will need to work harder to keep people shopping with them, which spells opportunity for publishers.

“If you’re not going to compete on price or convenience, you need to compete on a differentiated experience,” said Chris Palmer, director of industry solutions at the e-commerce agency Smith. “If you can be inspired and convert all in one channel, it has huge implications.”

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As marketers take on more of their own advertising needs, they’re often doing so by hiring people away from ad agencies.

In the latest installment of our Confessions series, where we exchange anonymity for honesty, we spoke with a senior executive at an ad agency about the frustration of losing talent to marketers, especially when those marketers are their own clients. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

Have you had clients hire away your employees?
We’ve had some employees go to a national brand we do creative for. I’ve even been offered a job at a client, but I don’t want to move. When you hear about [poaching] happening, you immediately get on the phone and say, “Hey, please don’t steal our people! We’re trying to deliver the best work for you that we can.”

Does that ever work?
Yes, they respect that open communication. It’s awkward, but that’s the account team’s job — to protect our relationships with clients.

Why are people moving to the client side?
They’re fed up with how things are changing in the industry right now. Clients are asking for things to be done faster with less money, and everyone has to pitch for everything they’re doing. So if you’re a creative who’s tired of the rat race, you might end up finding yourself at a national brand or Apple or Facebook, so you don’t have to sing for your supper every time you walk into a room with a client. In-house, the hours are a little less demanding and the benefits are really good, and creatives know the brand well because they live it every day, so it’s less stressful.

What would deter employees from going in-house with a client?
Clients don’t paint the best pictures of themselves in the process of working with us. Sometimes the client-agency relationship feels antagonistic. You can get dragged through the mud and see not the prettiest side of people. I’ve seen people fed up with client feedback. So some creatives might not be so excited to start working for a client that just tore down the last three concepts they were working on.

Are there any roles you’re especially fearful of losing?
Really good writers are hard to find. There’s a lack of talent out there because of in-house studios. Nothing against art direction or design, but being able to articulate a narrative about a brand in a few short words or long form is a real skill that’s hard to find, even without companies moving in-house.

Do you think this in-house trend is forever?
It seems to go in waves. Some brands have started doing it, but have gone back to agencies. The same is true with talent. I have creative directors who’ve left here to freelance or permalance on the client side and are now back at agencies. It may be nice for a minute, but there’s reason for wanting new challenges. Still, creatives seem to roll through places pretty quickly, and that’s pretty tough on agencies because it dips into the overall talent pool again and again.

What can agencies do to retain people as more companies move in-house?
Make the day to day really meaningful and fulfilling. Let them flex their creativity in internal projects that have more freedom than accounts, and remove some of the administrative responsibilities that can be time and energy drains so they can really focus on the work.

The post ‘Please don’t steal our people’: Confessions of an agency exec on clients poaching agency talent appeared first on Digiday.

With production costs rising, broadcasters like Sky and BBC are increasingly co-producing and co-financing shows with Netflix and Amazon. But the short-term finance perks come with the loss of international rights to broadcasters and risk of siphoning off their audiences to the streaming platforms.

The co-production model — where the streaming platforms typically get rest-of-the-world rights in exchange for partial funding — is on the rise, according to research from Ampere Analysis, which found that in U.K., Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands, 56 percent of upcoming European Netflix and Amazon Original shows are co-produced with broadcasters. The same study found that just 11 percent of upcoming linear shows identified by Ampere Analysis are co-productions.

“On the face of it, you have more people paying more money, but it’s like mortgaging your future,” said Jake Cassels, managing director at The Connected Set, a production company that pitches to Netflix and Amazon as well as broadcasters. “Producers don’t want broadcasters to be eroded. We want a healthy environment rather than a monopoly system.”

Upcoming co-produced shows include Amazon’s British sci-fi series “Good Omens” with ITV and Netflix’s Spanish-language series “Brigada Costa del Sol” with Mediaset España and Warner Bros. Previous co-productions include “Requiem” by BBC and Netflix, “Britannia” by Sky and Amazon, and “Kiss Me First” by Channel 4 and Netflix.

The high cost of making dramas has led broadcasters to pursue these co-production arrangements. Producing a high-end drama in the U.K. typically costs around £2 million ($2.65 million) an hour, said Richard Broughton, research director at Ampere Analysis. For a commercial broadcaster, “the ad revenue would barely cover that.”

The question is whether broadcasters are getting a good deal from these arrangements. “We’re hearing that broadcasters are bearing the brunt of the costs, around three-quarters of it,” Broughton said. “The question is whether that’s fair and equitable.” Knowing how well content performs internationally would help broadcasters in negotiating such deals with the platforms.

Aside from the cost, local content feeds the streaming platforms, risking cannibalizing the broadcasters’ audiences. British dark comedy “End of the F***ing World,” a co-production by Channel 4 and Netflix, was released on the linear channel and its catch-up service in October, and it arrived on Netflix in January. The show “seemed to generate far more buzz for Netflix than for its originating broadcaster, due to a muddled distribution strategy and the relative sophistication of the Netflix platform,” wrote Chris Curtis, editor at Broadcast Now. According to Netflix, the show outperformed its internal forecasts.

Co-production models can also thwart broadcasters’ international business prospects. According to Ampere Analysis, international distribution of finished shows represents 12 percent of ITV Studios’ revenue. If a co-production deal gives Netflix streaming rights outside of the broadcaster’s home territory, the broadcaster risks losing out on future revenue by licensing a sought-after show to distributors in other territories.

Netflix’s co-produced original shows have grown to 12 percent in 2018 from 8 percent in 2015, according to Ampere Analysis. At Amazon, co-productions have grown to 8 percent from 4 percent in the same time frame. At the same time, the platforms are increasing their content creation outside the U.S. as they gain subscribers and understanding of those markets.

“I imagine broadcasters will be more cautious with these types of deals,” said Cassels. “They’re increasingly concerned with the penetration of Netflix particularly.”

In Scandinavia, that caution is already playing out. Linear broadcast viewing there has suffered more than in the U.K., said Broughton, as services like Netflix have taken hold, helped by high levels of English speakers and people’s access to advanced broadband. As such, broadcasters have been more reluctant to make co-production deals with Netflix and Amazon.

Other funding partnerships are emerging. Atrium TV, a Pan-European drama co-financing club, lets broadcasters get exclusive access for their markets to new shows produced at a low cost. There’s only one broadcaster member per territory (BT in the U.K., Telefonica in Spain and Deutsche Telekom in Germany), so they don’t compete with each other, said Ben Keen, chairman of TV drama consultancy mediaXchange.

And U.K. broadcasters are uniting to compete with streaming platforms, announcing an investment of £125 million ($166 million) from BBC, ITV and Channel 4 to develop a streaming service to compete with Netflix and Amazon.

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President Trump, already embroiled in a trade battle with China, plans to ratchet commercial tensions higher by barring many Chinese firms from investing in U.S. technology and by blocking more technology exports to Beijing.

You want to choose your streaming service carefully because whichever you pick will take over your music.

Online dating apps try to woo female users in one of the world’s largest untapped markets; ‘not for average-looking guys’

Amid the lowest unemployment in years, fast-food restaurants are turning to machines—not to get rid of workers, but because they can’t find enough. Flippy the burger chef doesn’t complain about the drudgery of grill work and never leaves the kitchen.