Month: June 2018

Into, the year-old publishing arm of LGBTQ dating app Grindr, is offering itself as a distribution outlet for LGBTQ creators whose videos may be penalized by platforms that have a history of mistaking content featuring LGBTQ slang for hate speech.

Into has opened a production studio in Los Angeles’ West Hollywood neighborhood that LGBTQ creators as well as advertisers and other media companies can use to produce videos. The studio lets Into support LGBTQ creators and provides a potentially more cost-efficient supply of videos for its own properties. Creators will not be charged to use the studio but will need to agree to let Into publish their videos on its site. The idea is for Into to sell ads against those videos to make back the money it puts into the studio. Into also plans to use the studio to produce videos for advertisers, which would pay the publisher for the production and distribution.

When Into launched in August 2017, the publication opted to commission videos from outside creators instead of producing them internally, and it had an editor charged with securing that content. However, those independent creators often didn’t have anywhere to shoot their videos. So Into converted one of its two office spaces within the Pacific Design Center — a 1.6 million-square-foot facility that leases space to design firms, architects and other companies — into a production studio.

Into’s production studio removes that barrier by offering for free the space and equipment for creators, similar to how YouTube does through its various YouTube Spaces around the world. Creators are asked to email their video pitches to Into’s editors, who then assess the ideas and book the shoot. Into compensates creators depending on the project, said Zach Stafford, Grindr’s chief content officer and Into’s editor-in-chief.

In return for giving creators space, equipment and money to create their videos, Into distributes those videos on its site and social accounts such as Facebook and YouTube as well as on Grindr, which claims 3.8 million daily users, according to Stafford. Creators can distribute the videos through their own channels on YouTube, Facebook and elsewhere as well. Typically, creators are asked to cede ownership of their videos to Into.

“Generally, most content we create would be made with our ownership of the [intellectual property] because it’s living on our site, but we would be open to negotiating that,” said Stafford.

Creators may be wary of surrendering the rights to their content, in the same way that media companies are uneasy about giving Netflix and Facebook the rights to their IP. However, the videos that creators provide to Into may ultimately receive more views than they would on their own on platforms. Into has worked with Facebook and YouTube to get its content unflagged and would do the same for the creators it works with, Stafford said.

“It’s been an issue in the past few years where LGBT content gets flagged on YouTube and Facebook for being inappropriate — and understandably so,” Stafford said. “A lot of these algorithms haven’t understood the fact that like ‘queer’ isn’t always a negative thing, or to call someone ‘gay’ isn’t always negative. It’s really contextual.”

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As companies continue to move more resources in-house, agencies are scrambling to keep business. One strategy: fear.

In the latest installment of our Confessions series, where we exchange anonymity for honesty, we spoke with a senior executive at a global advertiser that’s taking strategy and media in-house, who said agencies use scare tactics like claiming the marketer’s rates will increase if it abandons the agency. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

How did you decide that you need to move in-house?
Agencies are managing services I don’t need anymore. There’s consolidation. There once was a time when you had to work with five different ad exchanges, but that’s not the case anymore. The majority of our budget is spent against Google, Facebook and Amazon, and if we ask those platforms to come up with a targeting plan, they’ll do it. I don’t have to pay my agency to do that if Facebook will do it for me.

You have also uncovered mistakes your agency has made.
We’ve found everything from campaigns being paused to people moving off our business with nobody being told. Recently, we were trying to do a campaign on Facebook with a test market, and it got targeted to a broader audience. So who approved that? The answer is nobody. The agency just decided that these were the target audiences we should go after. There was a big discrepancy on how our programmatic was being run as well, and we were spending more than we had to.

Do you believe they’re erring on purpose?
I don’t think they’re doing this stuff in an underhand or sneaky way. My team often debates whether they’re just not smart or they’re doing this maliciously. And unfortunately, I think they’re just not smart.

With these discrepancies, how is your agency working to keep your business?
There’s definitely scare tactics they use. They’ll say, “Look at how many hours we spend. You’re never going to be able to do this yourself,” and “We have 50 people working on your account –you’re not going to hire 50 people.” Another is around data. They’ll start explaining to me all the ways our data has to be normalized and cleansed and structured. I look at my team, who are experts, and they were like, “I don’t know how to prove that they’re wrong.”

What about their rates? Do they push these knowing you are turning away?
Yes, the holding companies say they can get better rates with say, YouTube, than you can because they spend more in totality than we do and that we can’t do it without them.

Do any of these scare tactics work on you?
Mostly the rates. We’re really going to have to figure out whether the money we save will make up the rates we’re missing out on. If it goes wrong, we’re screwed.

Do you ultimately feel like it will be worth it?
Yes, I believe we could save between $2 million to $3 million, and if I got a full team for programmatic and search, I think we would do better, but at the very least … the very least, would do just as well as the agency is doing today, and I would have full transparency and be stronger digitally.

The post Confessions of a marketer: Agencies are using scare tactics to stop the in-house trend appeared first on Digiday.

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X marks the spot for fashion. Collaborations are everywhere. Tommy x Gigi. Adidas x Alexander Wang. Supreme x Louis Vuitton.

Amid the high-low, designer-influencer, streetwear-luxury hybrid designs flooding fashion, no one is a more prolific collaborator than 37-year-old designer Virgil Abloh. In the past seven years, Abloh has risen the industry ranks, from Fendi intern to Kanye West’s creative director to brand founder to artistic director for Louis Vuitton’s menswear label. Along the way, he’s molded luxury fashion to fit his own image, designing streetwear-inspired status symbols for a crowd that would be more likely to scoff at than spend on Chanel.

On the way up, collabs have littered Abloh’s journey.

Through his label Off-White, he has collaborated with the likes of Vans, Sunglass Hut, Levi’s, Ssense, Kith, Converse, Nike, Moncler, Air Jordan, Jimmy Choo, MatchesFashion, Ikea, Warby Parker, Rimowa, Champion, Dr. Martens, Timberland, Heron Preston, Byredo, Hiroshi Fujiwara, Umbro and more. There’s seemingly no brand too big or too small or too unrelated for Abloh to infuse with Off-White’s take on fashion, which has taken the streetwear world by storm despite being strikingly mundane and seemingly ironic, like a $2,000 pair of boots that have “FOR WALKING” boldly printed up the side.

The reception of these collaborations, and the degree to which they fervently sell out, depends on the audience he sells them to. His Nike collaborations are notoriously impossible to get, selling out as they drop. Pieces like denim jackets from the sold-out Levi’s collab sell on eBay for several hundreds of dollars more than their original price tags. Head-scratching partnerships, and the pace at which Abloh announces them, don’t appear to faze his cult following of rabid streetwear fans: At Stadium Goods, a pair of $190 sneakers from Off-White’s collaboration with Air Jordan is selling for $2,750, while shoes from the Abloh’s less-hyped Converse collab sell on Grailed for $1,250.

“He’s one of a very small handful of creatives that have influence beyond their core craft or business that appears to be untouchable,” says Andrew Raisman, the CEO of sneaker and streetwear app Copdate. “He’s the Kanye West of fashion if you take the actual Kanye West out of fashion. Off-White is just streetwear that’s marketed as luxury product, but there’s an aesthetic behind it that’s for the young kids’ streetwear, and that’s not what high fashion classically would be. It opens up doors.”

With the announcement of each new Off-White collaboration, it seems like Abloh is testing his followers to see how long they’ll stick around before writing him off for selling out. There’s no guarantee in fashion that what’s cool now will remain cool for much longer, and some of Abloh’s collaborators have been head-scratchers: When anyone can buy an Off-White rug at Ikea, the critical exclusivity component vanishes. But when he dots the market with Off-White offspring made in partnership with suburban retailers and mall brands, the Abloh touch allows them to be sold as a subversion of the collaboration, rather than a saturation.

“With someone like Virgil, it’s not about what the product is anymore. It’s not defined as luxury or streetwear or anything. It’s in a field of its own — definition doesn’t matter,” says Arby Li, the editor-in-chief of streetwear publication Hypebeast. “That doesn’t mean it’s limitless, but he’s been incredibly smart about it. He’s opened up the process so that even if you can’t get every piece, you can still be a part of it.”

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At this year’s Cannes Lions, fashion and beauty brands are getting their due time in the spotlight as the industries continue to represent a combined force of creativity, digital evolution, and cultural shift.

Speakers from brands including L’Oréal, Tommy Hilfiger, Rebecca Minkoff, Glossier, Covergirl, Diesel, Levi’s and more will be hosting and participating in discussions around modern branding, innovation in marketing and how technology influences creativity in their fields during this year’s festival.

With this influx, there will be more fashion and beauty brands represented at Cannes Lions than ever before: 13 will be featured during the event this year, up from five last year, according to Jose Papa, Cannes Lions’ managing director. Media publications covering these industries are joining the action, too: editors from British Vogue, Allure and Cosmopolitan are also getting time on the Cannes stage.

“Creativity manifests in many forms outside of advertising campaigns, so we need to recognize everything that’s happening under that wider umbrella,” said Papa. “When we talk about fashion and beauty, they are at the heart of everything that’s happening in the digital transformation of creativity, around brand building and the experience economy. We wanted to include both startups and traditional brands that are going through a transition.”

The topics of digital transition, modern branding, technology as it influences creativity, and brands’ roles in modern culture will be addressed by fashion and beauty brand leaders throughout the festival’s programming. Tommy Hilfiger’s chief brand officer Avery Baker will discuss how to be a “fearless” brand, while Glossier president Henry Davis will map out the path ahead for future brands with WGSN. Rebecca Minkoff will share how to build a modern brand. L’Oréal will be represented across several sessions: Esohe Omoruyi, svp of open innovation and digital services, will host the session “Technology is at the Heart of Beauty,” while Antoine Borde, the global digital transformation and e-commerce acceleration director will present on how the brand began selling online. L’Oréal’s latest acquisition, AR technology company Modiface, will also be represented.

“Beauty is an industry that’s very much been open to technology — not just testing ideas, but embracing them and using them at scale,” said Parham Aarabi, the CEO of ModiFace. “Beauty, technology and creativity have been at an intersection that for a long time was almost unspoken — it was happening quietly in the background. But what’s happened in the past year would have been unthinkable before: You’re seeing companies like Samsung and Pinterest adopt technology that was actually built by the industry.”

Aarabi will be speaking alongside Omoruyi on the “Technology is at the Heart of Beauty” panel to explain the role augmented reality plays in the industry. Papa said that the Cannes Lions organization lets speakers and presenters guide the direction of their sessions. Almost all of the brands represented at Cannes pitch their own speakers and topics — he said that as fashion and beauty, two creative industries, have become more intertwined with digital technology, they naturally took on a more substantial role during the festival.

“We want our festival to naturally evolve to reflect the current work that brands and agencies are doing, and you can’t separate technology from that,” said Papa. “These are two creative industries that have been forever changed by digital transformation, including how people interact, consume and engage with products. It’s growing in these industries, and we want to represent that.”

Footwear designer Tamara Mellon, who founded Jimmy Choo and later launched a namesake brand, was invited to represent both the past and present versions of her businesses during the session “F*ck-Ups. The Mother of Reinvention.” Mellon was asked by the session’s host, the agency Untitled Worldwide, to reflect on selling Jimmy Choo, starting a new wholesale brand, filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and then rebuilding it from scratch as a direct-to-consumer brand.

“We’re going to talk about fashion’s new business models, the new customer, and how we’re marketing to them,” said Mellon, who hasn’t spoken at the festival before. “How fashion is using technology now is really interesting. It’s not how traditional brands were built, and it’s not how I built Jimmy Choo. What we do now, everything is influenced by technology. But unlike other industries, you have to build a tech company that’s also a consumer company that doesn’t sacrifice an ounce of creativity. That’s a unique position.”

Female fashion and beauty brand executives are also uniquely positioned to speak to how their industries influence modern culture. As Cannes Lions takes steps to feature a more gender-balanced and less insular agenda, the fashion and beauty brands are moving to the forefront. Covergirl svp Ukonwa Ojo, for instance, is featured on two such panels: “Creative Women Can Change the World” and “Can We Redefine Feminity with Creativity?”, which will also feature Covergirl ambassador and actress Issa Rae along with Allure editor-in-chief Michelle Lee.

“This year it seems they’re looking for more culturally relevant personalities. It’s about broadening the scope of participants overall,” said Ana Andjelic, the chief brand officer at Rebecca Minkoff. “Fashion and beauty, as well as Hollywood, have an inordinate amount of influence on how women see themselves in society, and so it’s important to represent them. A female CMO of an automotive brand may not have the same outward and culture-facing influence around what being a modern woman means. So it’s not just about technology and digital developments, but more socially important issues that will spur new conversation.”

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Facebook turned in more than 450 pages of homework to U.S. lawmakers, defending itself against claims that it is a monopoly and sidestepping questions about the effectiveness of an app that can effectively spy on competitors.

The post Onboarding AI: Guide for marketers appeared first on Digiday.

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