Month: August 2018

Shopping via text message may not seem like the most common behavior. Yet nearly a year after launching a pay-by-text service called Must Have It, PopSugar said it expects to have 20,000 subscribers by the end of the year.

Must Have It is a free service that users can sign up to through PopSugar’s website. They get texts about twice a week, each featuring a picture and brief description of an item. Users simply reply “yes” to order, and the item is delivered within five business days.

Must Have It has sold everything from backpacks to protein bars to housewares, often discounted or just impulse buys. More than 90 percent of the products are from companies that PopSugar has relationships with, with occasional input from the editorial staff. PopSugar wouldn’t say how many subscribers the service has now, but said it has attracted enough subscribers that advertisers are interested in selling their products through it.

Must Have It is run by a five-person team based in San Francisco that also runs the publisher’s subscription box service, PopSugar Must Have. The team first used its subscription box subscribers to grow the text message program, and 41 percent of Must Have It’s subscribers get the box, too. Lately, PopSugar has used its site and newsletters and asked participating brands to promote it, though no major ad campaign is planned.

“We think there’s so many more people that we can reach via organic means,” said Chris George, PopSugar’s evp of product marketing and sales strategy.

About five months ago, PopSugar began selling or distributing advertisers’ products through texts. A program with the protein bar brand RxBars sold out within 30 minutes. A free beauty sample it distributed for Kat Von D also moved briskly. George said along with product sales, he also sees using the channel to distribute samples as their tried and true avenue, print magazines, lose circulation.

To control the customer experience, PopSugar handles fulfillment. Unsold inventory goes back to the retailer or brand.

To expand into more product categories, Must Have It needs to evolve. The publisher has been reluctant to work with fashion brands, for example, because the current version of Must Have It doesn’t make it easy for customers to select sizes. George said an update that would make it possible to select sizing was in the works.

It’s unearthed a few other best practices. Fridays, for example, tend to convert the best. “I don’t know if it’s payday, or people being in a more jovial mood, but day of the week does play a factor,” George said.

The post What PopSugar learned from selling products through text messages appeared first on Digiday.

Digital video is taking dollars away from traditional TV — but not necessarily from traditional TV companies. In the latest in our Confessions series, where we grant anonymity for honesty, an agency exec who buys ads across TV and digital talked about how digital dollars are being spent, whether advertisers care about YouTube’s brand-safety crisis and more. This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Where do things stand with this year’s NewFronts and TV upfronts negotiating cycle?
On the more traditional upfront side, we saw bigger digital spend with traditional partners like NBC, ABC, CBS and even the cable networks. I don’t think there’s an overall shift of pure-play digital to the broadcast digital players. It’s still TV money.

So the digital money being spent with traditional TV companies is just TV money moving around but staying with the same companies?
The majority of it is TV money moving to digital. If last year I spent $100 on TV, this year I’m going to spend $100 but $95 of it is going to run on TV and $5 of it is going to run on digital. And now they’ve got the technology and the traffic systems to measure and deliver that message seamlessly across screens. That’s what’s really fueling the digital growth on the traditional side.

Is that digital growth on the traditional side hurting the digital companies?
It’s separate. I wouldn’t say it’s a scenario where, as an example, we’re moving Google Preferred money or YouTube money to NBC. The pure-play guys still have an opportunity to grow their budgets.

You said three digital companies are moving up into the TV upfronts negotiation window — Google/YouTube, Hulu and Roku — what’s behind that?
It’s the quality of the inventory. It’s scalable inventory, unique audiences, quality content, and it’s viewable. For lack of a better term, it feels like TV.

Did YouTube’s brand-safety problem impact its NewFronts deals this year?
I don’t necessarily think that led to money going away. It probably added an extra layer to the conversation. You’re on edge, as opposed to last year [when] it felt like, “It’s Google. No problem. We’ve got no issues.” Now you’re probably digging one layer deeper.

What about other upfronts and NewFronts presenters that seized on brand safety as a major selling point this year — did that move the needle in doing deals?
It was at the top of a lot of presentations. The bar for brand safety has been raised significantly across all the major publishers and partners, so I don’t see it differentiating.

How have Hulu’s and YouTube’s pitches around their live TV services gone over? Is there substantial money going toward them?
I would say minimal. If you wanted to buy YouTube TV, you could buy it as a part of Google Preferred but with very broad and loose terms around what the meant. They didn’t sell it as a direct product. Same with Hulu. I think you’ll see that more test and learn post-upfronts, given that the scale on both of them isn’t tremendously large and that they really should be set up as more of an addressable, one-to-one targeting opportunity. I think they’ll have a bigger impact in next year’s market.

The post ‘It’s still TV money’: Confessions of a TV and digital ad buyer appeared first on Digiday.

Meme accounts have been flooding Instagram feeds, each offering their own brand of witty, relatable posts. And with the bloom fading for influencers, meme accounts offer attractive partnerships for brands and publishers.

Social media agency Cult LDN is running a campaign with several meme accounts for its client, streaming service Hayu, around the new season of “Keeping Up with Kardashians.” The brand has advertised on two Kardashian-focused meme accounts on Instagram: Bound2West and ScouseBarbieX, with 500,000 and 160,000 followers, respectively.

“Meme accounts get such a good return on investment compared to influencers, who no longer get the same results,” said Lauren Smeets, talent strategist at Cult LDN. “It’s hard for a brand to create the kind of wit that comes naturally to the content creators behind these meme accounts. They are relatable, so they get amazing engagement.”

The economics can be favorable for advertisers. Meme accounts with small follower counts often have high engagement rates. And they don’t know their value yet, so they’re cheaper, at least for now. “For 1 million followers, you could be paying $15,000 to a human influencer, and for 1 million followers on a meme account you’d be paying about $1,000,” said Tim Armoo, CEO of influencer platform Fabytes.

Meme accounts are good for driving brand awareness because their engagement is often more stable than that of influencers, said Muhsen Syed, CEO of influencer benchmarking firm CampaignDeus. Engagement rate, calculated as likes plus comments divided by the number of followers, is 3.5 percent for meme accounts in fashion, which is equal to mainstream influencers in the same vertical, according to the firm.

Meme accounts represent five to 10 percent of the influencers the firm tracks, which only looks at the U.K. Tracking growth for meme accounts is tricky because many are private and grow followings by cross posting with other accounts, said Syed. Some like FuckJerry and The Fat Jew have grown into full fledged media companies and agencies. But it’s the smaller, targeted accounts like Uni Bubble, Beige Cardigans, Boys Who Can Cook and So Very British that are getting a new look.

“They are moving into a new form of native advertising,” said Zanna Wharfe, senior strategist at social agency We Are Social, which is actively considering using meme accounts with brands. “This is a specific type of content you’re producing with them with a specific look and feel and humor, rather than using the influence of the individual. It’s a new distribution platform.”

There are pros and cons for advertisers. Many of the accounts aren’t tied to a specific person, which can give them flexibility in working with brands. Franchises and merchandise also make viable revenue lines. But accounts with an irreverent tone can turn off risk-averse clients.

As influencer marketing has come under the spotlight for murky frameworks and buying followers, so will meme accounts, which, as they are new, have scant experience working with brands, making them less demanding than influencers, said Smeets. And as these smaller meme accounts grow up, they risk commoditization.

“Everything starts from somewhere that makes them authentic,” said Smeets. “As they grow, it becomes harder to relate, more saturated and less organic.”

The post ‘Better ROI than influencers’: Meme accounts attract growing interest on Instagram appeared first on Digiday.

As Amazon, Alibaba and other e-commerce platforms grow their reach among online shoppers, large retailers are testing how technology can help build a more digitally-connected experience for customers — whether they’re in the store or at home. For Walmart’s Store No. 8, its startup incubator that was launched last year, conversational commerce and VR are two areas of focus.

Katie Finnegan, principal of Store No. 8, said it’s not just about reacting to Amazon, but zeroing in on which technologies will enhance the customer experience of the future. Through Store No. 8, Walmart is looking to the needs of mobile-first consumers who use internet-connected devices in their homes.

“Our strategy is really about playing offense, it’s about doubling down on our competencies and where we see a differentiated experience,” she said.

Legacy retailers are increasingly investing in startups — sometimes through in-house innovation labs like Lowe’s, and partnerships with tech accelerators as Target is doing with TechStars Retail.  Walmart uses in-house labs (Walmart Labs) to address near-term customer experience needs (a six to twelve-month timeframe), but Store No. 8 looks at longer-term trends that will bear fruit in at least three years. While Walmart keeps Store No. 8 separate (it’s an LLC of its own), portfolio companies are wholly owned by Walmart. So, instead of investing in these companies as a venture capitalist would, performance is measured by what it calls “operational and strategic returns” — in other words, how these tools may be useful for a future customer experience — rather than profitability.

Walmart is testing personalization of the customer experience through automation and visualization, tools that help free up in-store associates to handle more value-added tasks. Jetblack, a service currently in beta, lets customers engage in text conversations with the retailer to determine the kinds of purchases that fit their product preferences and delivery timing requirements — a form of curation that doesn’t require human intervention. Finnegan said the natural path for the technology’s evolution is to move towards a voice-based interface. For Spatialand, which has yet to release a product, the concept is around helping customers visualize how they will interact with a product, which will go much further than trying it in the store.

“Think about getting into a kayak and virtually getting out on the river,” she said. While VR technology can first be rolled out in the store, Finnegan said it could be scaled out to customers’ homes with time.

Store No.8 is one component of a bigger innovation strategy to prepare for a future customer experience that will be increasingly digital and mobile. Walmart, like other retailers, is investing in various technologies — both through Store No. 8, Walmart Labs, its in-house innovation lab, and through acquisitions like Jet.com. and Flipkart, it’s placing multiple bets on a range of technologies. Casting a wide net in tech investments is important for retailers as they determine their recipe for differentiating from competitors.

“We can debate on the merits of specific technologies [retailers] are investing in like AR or VR — time will tell,” said Forrester principal analyst Sucharita Kodali. “The truth is that most technologies don’t really change the world.” By investing in a portfolio of companies, retailers are hedging their bets on which ones will stick, she said.

For Walmart, the bigger themes are around how machine learning and artificial intelligence will remove friction points from the customer journey — an area where Walmart, like many other large retailers, has room to grow, said Andrew Murphy, managing partner of Loup Ventures, a Minneapolis-based venture capital firm that invests in retail technology startups. He said many current venture investments in retail technology are focused on computer vision (using cameras and other technology to facilitate Amazon Go-type walk-in, walk-out payments) and voice. Despite retailers’ moves supporting innovation, culture and shareholder pressure may prompt some of them to shy away from taking too many risks as they experiment with new technologies, a constraint Amazon doesn’t have, he added.

“[Retailers] risk not experimenting enough because they’re being too careful being overly protectionistic,” he said. “Investors don’t expect profitability from [Amazon’s experimentation] — they can spend like crazy to experiment with things like Amazon Go.”

The post Inside Store No. 8, Walmart’s incubator that is testing VR and conversational commerce appeared first on Digiday.

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Lots of readers have decided that Facebook is hopelessly compromised and vowed to stop using it. This, comes, of course, on top of other reports that Facebook’s growth is slowing (while it still makes
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To commemorate its IPO today, speaker company Sonos recreated the Nasdaq bell that opens each trading day. By the time the closing bell rang, Sonos closed up more than 32 percent. The long-anticipated IPO comes as Sonos upgrades its speaker lineup to compete with the likes of Google, Amazon and Apple. Sonos hopes its legacy…

In a ploy to keep subscribers happy, traditional cable companies are continuing to partner with large streaming companies. In keeping with that, Comcast announced today that it agreed to launch Amazon Prime Video on Xfinity X1. “Amazon Prime Video’s growing list of originals, movies, shows, documentaries and kids’ programming will be an excellent complement to…