Month: July 2018

After years of focusing on performance marketing to grow subscriptions, Crunchyroll is shifting its approach.

This week, production began on the second season of “Anime Crimes Division,” a branded content series that the streaming anime subscription service is distributing on RocketJump’s YouTube channel. The first three-episode season piled up over 4.5 million views.

Each end-credit sequence of “Anime Crimes Division” offered a 30-day free trial of Crunchyroll, but for the streaming service, the key stat was engagement. It was happy with what it saw — more than half the viewers watched all the way to the end, and 13 percent of the show’s viewers commented on or liked the episodes, compared to the 1-2 percent that typically do so with a RocketJump video — to pay for a second season. The second season will run six episodes instead of three.

In this way, Crunchyroll has shifted its marketing approach with an eye toward retaining its 40 million-plus registered users. Crunchyroll also expanded into commerce and events in 2017 to diversify its revenue and super-serve its community.

“We have migrated more toward top-of-funnel initiatives,” said Jennifer Corbett, head of audience development at Crunchyroll. “It maybe is a luxury of the brand reputation that we do have and the loyal audience we’ve built.”

Crunchyroll has worked before with YouTube creators on branded content, including the British YouTubers Dan and Phil, the Fine Bros and the Game Grumps. But those projects were one-offs and aimed at on acquiring new subscribers. “Anime Crimes Division” is the largest influencer marketing investment Crunchyroll has ever made. In branded content or influencer marketing terms, it’s big, said Brendan Gahan, CEO of digital agency Epic Signal.

When Corbett arrived at Crunchyroll’s parent company Ellation two years ago, the company was focused almost entirely on performance-driven marketing; Crunchyroll didn’t even have a full-time social media manager. Today, 300-person Crunchyroll has a 17-person audience development team that pays attention to subscribers and the rest of the anime-loving community.

The audience development team has lately been creating content that’s designed just for social platforms, such as a weekly live show on Twitch and Anime News Recap, a three-minute anime news show on Facebook Watch. In addition to “Anime Crimes Division,” Crunchyroll is exploring documentaries and other live-action collaborations with influencers, Corbett said.

“When we first started putting content out there, it just exploded,” Corbett said. “We can’t make enough content in-house.”

The post To retain subscribers, Crunchyroll looks past performance marketing appeared first on Digiday.

The consumer privacy law that California’s governor signed into law on June 28 is considered the strongest, most aggressive privacy protection measure in the U.S., according to legal experts.

The new California law, which takes effect on Jan. 1, 2020, will require that companies tell state residents what information the company is collecting and how it’s used. It also gives people options to ask the company to delete or stop selling that information. The law does not prevent companies from collecting people’s information or give people an option to ask a company to stop collecting their information, differentiating it from GDPR.

“The sweeping nature of this bill is really unprecedented in the privacy area, and its impacts are still far from known,” said Dan Jaffe, group evp for government relations at the Association of National Advertisers.

The law contains “broad sweeping definitions of personal information,” said Ron Camhi, managing partner at law firm Michelman & Robinson’s Los Angeles office and chair of its advertising and digital media industry group. That personal information includes standard categories like people’s names, email addresses and Social Security numbers. But it also covers unique personal identifiers: IP addresses; geolocation data; shopping, browsing and search histories; and consumer profiles that are based on inferences from personal information.

The inclusion of unique identifiers — which ad tech firms use to anonymously track people around the web — means that any ad tech firm storing tracking cookies on people’s devices will need to give people an option to ask the company to delete the information collected through those cookies and will also need to ensure that those cookies and any corresponding information aren’t exposed in a data breach, which would make the company subject to a class-action lawsuit.

On the other hand, the law includes a loophole for any personal information that is “de-identified or in the aggregate consumer information,” according to the law. If the personal information can’t be associated with a particular consumer, then it would be de-identified, said Camhi. But it’s not clear whether the types of identifiers that run the online advertising ecosystem are or are not subject to the law, said Mayer.

The law suggests that online tracking cookies and mobile advertising IDs, which are used to collect information about individual devices, may fall under its jurisdiction. However, digital advertising companies may argue that they meet the law’s exemption standard because they aggregate those identifiers into larger, anonymized audience pools.

“All of this is still in flux. But arguably, anonymized information doesn’t allow you to create that [consumer] profile, so that you can’t draw it to [an individual person]. With a cookie situation that’s tied to a device that’s tied to a person, that may not necessarily be the case,” said Donna Wilson, managing partner-elect at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips and chair of the law and consulting firm’s privacy and data security practice.

What’s more clear is that digital advertising companies shouldn’t take comfort that their practices would be exempt from the law. Even if a company claims that it has disassociated the information with an individual person, it will need to ensure that the disassociation cannot be undone and that the data is reconnected to the individual, said Camhi and Wilson.

A week after California’s governor signed the bill into law, many in the advertising industry are still scratching their heads over the possible loophole and defaulting to assuming that there is no loophole because “almost any kind of data connected to some other data is capable of being associated with somebody,” said Jaffe.

Ad tech firm Exponential Interactive buys data from third-party companies to use for ad targeting purposes. “But when we buy it, it is totally aggregated,” said Tim Sleath, the company’s vp of product management and data protection officer. However Exponential Interactive uses cookie IDs to be able to match the aggregated third-party data to its own audience pools in order to target people with ads without accessing the underlying data, such as people’s names or email addresses. That cookie-based matching process likely subjects the ad tech firm to needing to comply with the law, even if it were to somehow remove the cookie-based identifiers from the process.

“If you have a behavioral profile for someone, even if you strip the IP address and cookie ID, that behavioral profile, which I would classify as deidentified, remains personal information under this [law],” said Sleath.

Facebook and Google have already rolled out features required by the law, such privacy settings that categorize the information that the companies collect from people and tools for people to request that information be deleted. The companies claim that they don’t sell people’s information so they don’t need to give people a way to request that the companies stop selling their data. That would help to explain why Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said the company supports the California privacy law that has been passed, though the company donated money to the organization opposing a similar ballot initiative.

“For the major online platforms, I think this law will have very little impact,” said Jonathan Mayer, assistant professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University and former chief technologist of the Federal Communications Commission.

There remains roughly 18 months until the law takes effect, and since the law was passed by the state legislature instead of by California voters, the details of the law can change before it is enacted. But before the industry can try to get California lawmakers to clarify, if not change, the specifics of the law, it will need to assess the impact of this initial version and identify what changes to request.

“The ANA has more than 2,000 members. We’ve gone out to our members asking how this will impact them. Clearly, we’ve not had time to get that input yet, and people are still trying to figure that out,” said Jaffe.

The post Why California’s new consumer privacy law won’t be GDPR 2.0 appeared first on Digiday.

Since it launched in December, News Corp’s ad platform News IQ has gotten a workout from advertisers looking to prove that the ads News IQ hosts led to business outcomes.

News IQ has already used “dozens” of measurement vendors and methodologies, said Scott Hendrickson, svp of sales for NewsIQ, adding that the pace of change in the ways advertisers measure advertising’s efficacy is “blistering.”

“We’ve come a long way from CTR [click-through rate],” Hendrickson said.

Advertisers are increasingly looking for evidence that their campaigns lead to concrete business outcomes like store visits, sales or TV tune-ins, and publishers are trying to provide that evidence. But doing so is complicated and expensive.

Vendor dilemmas
A cottage industry of measurement and attribution companies has sprung up that publishers have to work with. Having all those vendors to choose from makes it hard for publishers to fit onto agencies’ media plans, as agencies want to work with big blocks of publishers that all measure campaigns the same way so the agencies can more easily track the outcomes for clients.

Hendrickson said News Corp designed News IQ to accommodate any advertiser or vendor measurement system. But he also wants to learn which measurement methods work best, which ultimately should help the company deliver better results for clients.

“We’re going to have our own opinions on which attribution solutions are better than others,” Hendrickson said.

Some publishers have deals with measurement vendors. Popsugar has a deal with Placed, which uses geo-targeting to measure how many store visits are driven by ad campaigns. Condé Nast and Hearst are among several publishers that use Nielsen Catalina to measure if their ad campaigns drive sales of consumer packaged goods.

But if an advertiser wants things measured with a different system or using a different methodology, the advertiser usually gets its way. “I’ve not seen the tail wag the dog,” said Oscar Garza, evp of media activation at Essence.

Staffing costs
Proving attribution also nibbles into publisher margins in the form of measurement measurement costs that can run into the five figures per campaign; and the need for teams of people to measure and analysis the ads, which for big publishers can mean dozens of staffers.

Some publishers also are building their own insights teams to track campaigns’ effects. Hearst launched a 20-person data studio earlier this year to measure the outcomes of advertisers’ campaigns and particularly how the target audiences advertisers responded.

Todd Haskell, CRO of Hearst, said the data studio might try to find additional audience segments that might be likely to take the action that an advertiser’s looking for.

That kind of information doesn’t necessarily cover the publishers’ costs or change how an agency analyzes its campaigns, said Kandace Barker, vp of media at DigitasLBi. But the insights do help a publisher stand out, she said.

“There are times when the publisher might just come to us and say they’re willing to provide that measurement as an added value,” Barker said. “Though there’s a certain level of looking at it as a publisher grading their own homework.”

“Publishers are in a really tough position, normally, to demonstrate their value,” Garza said. “Publishers have to deal with every kind of client and agency combination, which can lead to different measurement methodologies, different attribution models, and in a lot of cases, not even measuring the right thing. They don’t get to influence what they’re being measured on, and in a lot of case they don’t get feedback on what they’re being measured on.”

A survey conducted in June 2017 by the Data and Marketing Association and Winterberry Group found that nearly two thirds of U.S. marketers were putting a higher priority on attribution for the coming year. Publishers that want to tap into big ad budgets will need the ability to measure if their audience took a specific action after viewing an ad.

Some publishers are used to proving they can deliver results for advertisers. Meredith has offered a sales guarantee to big-spending advertisers since 2011, and this past spring, it extended the guarantee to video sales. Podcasting is supported largely by direct-response advertising, which is measured on its ability to drive outcomes such as sales or app downloads.

“There is, increasingly, a demand for ROI for these big deals,” said Todd Krizelman, CEO of Mediaradar. “More folks are going to be forced to participate to retain bigger ad programs. It’s going to become a cost of doing business.”

The post ‘We’ve come a long way from CTR’: As attribution blooms, publisher headaches follow appeared first on Digiday.

At the end of June, News UK title The Times and the Sunday Times reached 500,000 subscribers, with digital-only subscriptions overtaking print for the first time, up 20 percent from the previous year to 255,000.

The Times has grown its registered-access user pool — where readers share their email address to access two articles a week — to 3.75 million since it was introduced in 2017. To move this cohort to full subscribers and keep audience acquisition up and churn down, the focus is in understanding how these readers react differently to subscription offers through messaging and distribution and offering them relevant content at the right time.

“We were confident that by getting people sampling our content we’d identify new subscribers,” said Chris Duncan, managing director of The Times and The Sunday Times. “This milestone is part of our broader growth plans, it’s only just the beginning.”

The Times has introduced relevant articles based on reading history into half of the content served in its daily email, The Best of The Times, which registered-access users are automatically subscribed to when they sign up. Over the next year, it plans to make personalization more automated.

As such, The Times’ cost for acquiring new customers is lower than it has been in five years, according to Duncan, although he wouldn’t share absolute figures.

The Times’ “digital butler” is also learning when is the right time registered-access users want to receive messages and then sending out personalized emails, born out of predictive data models that judged when the highest probability of subscribing. It will extend this to push notifications, text messages and social channels over time.

“If you’re seeing messaging from us because you read about Brexit, do we make that general messaging or relevant messaging, and can we then get you to sign up to [political daily newsletter] Red Box?” said Duncan. “We’re constantly learning what our conversion targets could be, it’s something we’re constantly looking to improve and it’s gradually ticking up.”

Churn rate has reduced by 10 percentage points, mostly this is thanks to serving relevant content to lapsed registered-access users and subscribers through Facebook when it notices changes in reader frequency of visits, interactions with articles, recency of visits to the site and the number of articles read.

In May, The Times made it a lot easier for people to move from registered-access users to full subscribers by reducing the number of subscription bundles on offer from 15 to three and reducing the number of pages in its store from 200 to 10, according to Duncan. Immediately bounce rate went down, and having fewer lower-cost bundles encouraged readers to take a more expensive seven-day subscription without having an impact on the acquisition rate, according to Duncan.

“What’s worked really well for The Times in the last 12 months is that it’s taken a holistic approach,” said Greg Harwood, director at strategy and marketing consultant Simon-Kucher & Partners. “It’s improved the user experience and the aesthetics of the site, which drives conversion, and — in parallel — it’s changed the commercial strategy, the pricing and the introductory offers.”

In order to keep its longer-term subscribers loyal, the publisher is more flexible with The Times+, its events and rewards program for subscribers. The Times offered event tickets with actor Michael Caine discussing his documentary before opening it out to all subscribers. According to Duncan, the event was mostly filled with publisher’s most valuable customers, and there was only 1 percent difference in subscription churn rate between those who attended the event and those longer-term subscribers who were invited yet didn’t attend. “It’s hard to reward tenure in news organizations,” he sadi, “that helped us to understand the value of our loyal users.”

The post The road to growth: How The Times (UK) reaches 500k subscribers milestone appeared first on Digiday.

Alibaba’s first smart store is open, and Guess is acting as its retail guinea pig.

The new Guess store in Hong Kong is outfitted with Alibaba’s FashionAI technology, which combines in-store shopping with inventory and personalized data sourced from Alibaba’s Taobao and Tmall e-commerce marketplaces. Every customer who walks into the store checks in with their Taobao mobile IDs, used to track items that are tried on, saved for later, or purchased, and personalize product recommendations online based on that behavior. Each item in the store is equipped with RFID tags so that smart mirrors and smart fitting rooms can identify and respond to individual customer interactions with any piece of clothing. Taobao mobile virtual kiosks display items in sizes and colors that aren’t available in stores. Check-out is done by scanning the mobile app.

The store is part of Alibaba’s ongoing “New Retail” initiative, which aims to restructure traditional retail by digitizing the in-store experience with endless aisles, mobile check-in, smart mirrors, customization kiosks and stores that double as distribution centers. So far, the company has invested nearly $8 billion in the project.

For Guess, Inc., the FashionAI store is part of the company’s ongoing partnership with Alibaba to expand the brand’s presence in Asia. The region is the company’s fastest-growing market: For the first quarter of its financial 2019, revenue in Asia increased by 32 percent, while e-commerce sales increased by 22 percent. While Guess doesn’t break out revenue by region, overall, revenue for the quarter increased 15 percent to $521 million. The brand continues to keep building on that opportunity by tightening ties to Alibaba, and participating in new technology initiatives thrown its way. This has led to more investment in physical stores: Guess has opened eight directly operated stores in the region in the last quarter alone, which will accommodate the new FashionAI technology. According to José Blanco, the CEO of the Greater China market at Guess, the first store came together in only five months.

“This is a unique opportunity for us to collaborate with Alibaba in this experiment in experiential physical retail that we believe will provide us consumer insight that will enhance our e-commerce business, both with them on Tmall and in our physical stores,” said Victor Herrero, Guess’s CEO, on an earnings call with investors in June. “We are trying to apply a lot of new technology into the retail shop and I think the partnership with [Alibaba] is strong. China has a lot of potential for us in the future and I think we should continue trying to benefit from that.”

Alibaba and peers like JD.com are reaping the benefits of an all-eyes-on-China era of luxury fashion, where the local industry is outpacing the global market, and expected to reach $587 billion by 2020, up from $493 billion in 2016. By offering marketing consultations, distribution logistics services, and a separate “Luxury Pavilion” shopping destination geared toward high-spending customers, Alibaba is taking the anti-Amazon approach of positioning itself as a brand ally, acting as a gateway to the Chinese market.

Like Amazon, Alibaba’s interest in fashion has been steadfast. FashionAI has been in development over the past seven years, according to Alibaba group vp Zhang Zhuoran, and extends beyond the Guess partnership. The system’s algorithms have processed millions of clothing items and accessories in that time across fashion brands selling on Taobao and Tmall, building up the ability to recognize clothing and accessory features (like cut, color, size and fit) and track and predict trend lifecycles. The goal is to move beyond single-product, “if you like this, try this” recommendations to more complex build-an-outfit recommendations, which can appear both online and in FashionAI stores. According to Alibaba, more than 500,000 outfits have been put together by the algorithm, using machine learning and computer vision.

The algorithms aren’t brand-specific: For instance, if someone shopping at the Guess store saves an item they tried on, but doesn’t try on any of the Guess products available in store that are recommended in the smart fitting room, their Taobao mobile app will build outfit recommendations sourced from thousands of other Taobao and Tmall brands. While Alibaba is fostering strong individual brand partnerships, the technology it’s building is still focused on amassing data to personalize its sprawling marketplace for customers.

“This is a major step. This is would be the equivalent of consumers having their own personal stylists,” said Zhuoran in a statement.

The post Alibaba rethinks retail with a new Guess store in Hong Kong appeared first on Digiday.

When Toys ‘R’ Us closed up its last U.S. store at the end of June, it set off a retail free-for-all to fill the gap, with both behemoth and smaller retailers in related categories looking to benefit.

Amazon is taking a page from Toys ‘R’ Us’ own playbook and will reportedly mail out a holiday catalog to millions of U.S. homes and hand them out at Whole Foods locations, according to Bloomberg News. Target also aims to ramp up its toy strategy. Joshua Thomas, a Target spokesman, told the Star Tribune last Thursday that the company plans to expand the toy aisles in 500 Target stores for the holiday season, start stocking new toy categories, such as electric ride-ons and playhouses, and make improvements to its online toy section.

“The general merchandisers — Walmart, Target and Amazon — are all going to look to divvy up as much of Toys ‘R’ Us share of the market as they can,” said Scott Web, president of marketing consultancy Avionos. Toys ‘R’ Us left open a potential $11 billion hole in the $20.7 billion toy industry, a market that grew by one percent in 2017, according to The NPD Group.

Meanwhile, in the same week Toys ‘R’ Us closed its last store, Party City made headlines for announcing its plan to start selling toys in its nearly 300 Halloween pop-up shops starting in November. The toys will take up nearly 4,000 feet of shelf space in each 12,000 ft. pop-up and will continue to sell through the holidays and into the beginning of January, according to Party City evp and chief financial officer Dan Sullivan. He said Toys ‘R’ Us’ liquidation helped propel the company, which had previously only stocked a small toy offering in about half of Party City’s 800 U.S. store, to expand into its largest push into toys yet, including a larger online assortment of toys coming in the fall.

“Typically, we’ve kept the assortment tight and focused more on games, crafts, more party events,” said Sullivan, “but with Toys R Us’ retreat from brick and mortar, there’s the opportunity to expand.”

For Party City, expanding its toy business brings with it another opportunity: more premium stores. Now, since the company’s pop-ups will be open into January, landlords are more willing to make deals with the company, allowing Party City to secure “very attractive storefronts including many former Toys R Us and Babies R Us stores,” said Sullivan.

Webb said to expect other toy retailers to push into experiential efforts like Party City is doing with pop-ups. Toys, he said, are one of the most experiential products in the retail space, customers tend to build emotional connections with them and, because of that, retailers should take advantage of that. “It’s a shame that Toys ‘R’ Us never created a play area where kids could try the toys,” said Webb, who pointed to Lego and American Girl concept stores as successful retail environments because they embrace the play aspect of the toys.

“For some retailers, it would be smart – given the conditions right now – to take advantage of the gap Toys R’ Us has left by helping customers bridge their buying habits from that company to their own,” said Brendan Witcher, vp and principal analyst at market research company Forrester. “It can act as a way for retailers to be more relevant to a broader section of the market.” He said to expect peripheral toy retailers like Build-a-Bear and Game Stop, that already have knowledge of the space, to deliver more toy messaging this holiday season.

The post The fall of Toys ‘R’ Us leads to retailer rush to fill the void appeared first on Digiday.

Crafting an appropriate apology is something of an art form in the brand marketing world–one that companies like Facebook, Starbucks, Uber and Wells Fargo have tried to perfect over the last year. An effective brand apology typically comes in two parts: The initial “we’re sorry” statement, and the operational changes that follow. Taking responsibility quickly…

Female sports fans have long known that even if the community still acts like a boys’ club, women are some of the most passionate sports junkies out there. And the numbers prove it: Sports brands need to start paying attention to women if they don’t want to lose crucial engagement. New data from social intelligence…

For creatives of today and tomorrow, it’s time to face our own personal disruption, which is being caused by the accelerating change around us. Whether you’re at an agency, consultancy, client or somewhere else, the creative department and its role in transforming brands has fundamentally changed. Just as marketing and advertising have evolved in the…

Google released its self-service pay-per-click advertising platform AdWords in 2000, revolutionizing the digital advertising industry. One side effect: a cottage industry of specialized agencies to help brands navigate the new format. That same year, Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos cited a brutal 2000 in which shares were down more than 80 percent from 1999. Nevertheless,…