Month: August 2018

Creators and marketers may love Instagram, but they’ve been hesitant to build on Instagram’s 2-month-old longer-form streaming feature, IGTV. However, there’s been early experimentation and a growing marketing tech stack as each side tries to understand what actually works on Instagram’s vertical video platform.

IGTV’s growth has been slow, but that seems to be part of Instagram’s strategy. When Instagram released IGTV on June 20, just days before the annual online video conference VidCon, it opened the platform to any Instagram user. That’s a stark contrast to Snapchat’s curated list of partners for Discover and even Facebook’s launch of Watch. That strategy has led to a strange array of content from horizontal videos originally on YouTube and plenty of comedy sketches, but it’s yet to produce any big hits.

Viner-turned-YouTuber Nash Grier has been experimenting on IGTV and has shared some the select few impressive originals. He started producing for IGTV on June 22, two days after its launch, and now posts a new IGTV video almost every Sunday. While he has 9.9 million followers on Instagram, an IGTV video he posted on Aug. 26 has only brought in about 15,000 views over a day. Yet that isn’t deterring him. 

“I had already been drawn to the vertical look and feel from using my phone every day. I love that this platform glorifies that. Aside from everything being catered towards 16:9 everything I post on IGTV is very visual moreso than my YouTube and the videos themselves are much shorter. YouTube and IGTV are still very different worlds in terms of audience, content and opportunity,” Grier emailed from Dubai, where he’s currently filming.

Grier hasn’t done any sponsored videos on IGTV yet, but he continues to do some influencer marketing as traditional Instagram posts.

Some brands are beginning to promote within IGTV. Postmates, for example, had singer Nick Jonas make surprise deliveries and shared it as a two-minute IGTV video on Aug. 24. That post got about 164,000 views over the past three days compared to Jonas’s 16.6 million followers on Instagram.

Made a couple surprise @Postmates deliveries in LA including one to my friend @IISuperwomanII Posted the video over on my IGTV and if you’re in LA or NYC check the app for a list of my favorite spots you can get food from #RIGHTNOW https://t.co/oy4T4oEL39 pic.twitter.com/ZGnN7ltuuI

— Nick Jonas (@nickjonas) August 24, 2018

Other brands have been less willing to devote that much time to IGTV. For one, the platform doesn’t have an ad share model, unlike YouTube. Despite being featured on Instagram’s video monitors showcasing IGTV at VidCon and appearing IRL at Instagram’s VidCon booth, celebrity pomeranian JiffPom launched a new show on YouTube last week and has done very little on IGTV.

“Right now, our focus has been and will continue for a little while rolling programming out on YouTube. Each platform has specific needs and requirements for the audience. We want to be sure that with new programming we have one really right,” said Kevin Grosch, CEO of Made In Network who works with JiffPom.

Even with the lack of quality IGTV content, Activate, an influencer marketing company formerly called Bloglovin’, released support for IGTV within its platform this week. Now, creators and brands can see views, likes, comments and the average percentage of viewers for each video. That matches the in-app insights Instagram already provides, aside from the audience-retention graph, but as a larger platform, Activate analyzes IGTV alongside statistics for Instagram Stories, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

“We’re in a bit of a testing stage for IGTV. For brands, there’s a lot of questions of what is the return? What’s the platform activation strategy? But given the conversations I’ve had there’s definite interest and willingness to create on IGTV so they can build up the case study if it’s effective for them,” said Lauren McGrath, Activate’s vp of studio and strategy.

Kamiu Lee, CEO of Activate, and McGrath said YouTube is still king of online video because it’s been around for much longer, but that influencers they work with say they see Instagram as a king in regards to different content formats.

“IGTV is a content format that can extend and amplify and add further engagement from an existing campaign. Longer-form video is still based around YouTube, and IGTV is becoming a more important spoke to that wheel,” McGrath said.

Still, Grosch said before he invests in the platform for accounts like JiffPom he wants to see more of a community built around IGTV.

“Outside of comedy sketches, which work all the time, everywhere, you’re having people still trying different things and then learning and replication of formats. I’m excited to see what gets the first hit. It’s in the hands of the creators,” Grosch said.

Of course, that introduces a chicken-or-the-egg problem. Grier said he wants more of his peers to create vertical videos, whether it’s for Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook or Musical.ly (now TikTok).

“The fate of IGTV relies on the attention, awareness of Instagram and its creators. A few more additions here and there could really elevate it as a platform,” Grier said.

The post Influencer marketing is slowly coming to IGTV despite lack of big hits appeared first on Digiday.

Celebrity-led media companies may be easily lampooned as vanity projects, but for Kevin Durant’s Thirty Five Media, it’s an opportunity to diversify the NBA star’s existing business with sponsors and set him up for a future outside of the spotlight.

To that end, Durant has parlayed his endorsement deals with companies like Nike, Alaska Airlines and American Family Insurance into branded content deals for his media company. For example, on Aug. 21, Thirty Five Media premiered an episodic series on Durant’s YouTube channel that features American Family Insurance as the show’s presenting sponsor, as opposed to Durant pitching on the insurance company’s behalf.  These deals are not only about accelerating Thirty Five Media’s business with advertisers, but extending the reigning NBA Finals MVP’s endorsement deals and the scope of those deals.

“Moving forward, I think more of the brands will be just working with us as a media partner and less as just a part of Kevin’s sponsorship deal,” said Durant’s business partner Rich Kleiman.

Thirty Five Media is part of a larger organization that includes Durant’s investment arm, The Durant Company, and his philanthropic arm, the Kevin Durant Charity Foundation. Seven people, including Durant and Kleiman, work across the three divisions, said Kleiman. Thirty Five Media isn’t interested in producing content for hire like an agency would. “It would have to have a real tie-in to what we’re trying to do,” said Kleiman.

Early into Durant’s NBA career, he struck more traditional endorsement deals, which involved him starring in commercials, mentioning a company or its products on his social accounts and appearing at company events. But that’s all changed as Durant enters his 12th season in the league. Now, Durant isn’t looking to just make Thirty Five Media a part of his endorsement deals; he’s making it a primary one.

When it’s time to renew an existing deal, Durant and Kleiman are looking to strike agreements with terms that include Thirty Five Media producing content for the sponsor. “I think we would say to a company we were renewing with, ‘We need to make this deal with Thirty Five Media first,’” said Kleiman. In cases when an existing endorsement is not yet up for renewal, Durant and Kleiman sign a separate content production deal with the sponsor that has its own budget.

Thirty Five Media isn’t the only celebrity-led media company to capitalize on an association with the famous in order to bank branded content deals. Kevin Hart’s Laugh Out Loud recently parlayed the comedian’s yearlong sponsorship deal with Mountain Dew Kickstart to incorporate the beverage company into its episodic series “Cold as Balls.” And Derek Jeter’s The Players’ Tribune has used its relationship with athletes to secure them as talent for the branded content the company produces for advertisers.

The inclusion of celebrities’ media companies in their endorsement deals brings more opportunities to the table for individual advertisers, but it can also bring more advertisers to the table. If a deal is primarily with the media company, then the celebrity doesn’t need to be as involved as in a traditional deal. LeBron James has served as a template of this endorsement-by-association arrangement. His media company, Uninterrupted, has produced original shows sponsored by Uber and JPMorgan Chase, with some episodes that may involve but do not star the Laker legend-in-waiting.  Thirty Five Media sees an opportunity to do something similar through Durant. “That opens up a lot more opportunity because we have a whole company that can work with them in creating content and distributing it. And Kevin can still work with them without having to give them his actual time, which is so precious to all these athletes,” said Kleiman.

Thirty Five Media isn’t only about expanding the way that Durant works with companies today. It’s also about setting him up for working with companies after his NBA career has ended. Case in point: “Dream to Achieve,” the episodic series sponsored by American Family Insurance. In addition to extending Durant’s endorsement deal with the insurance company, it’s also a vehicle to promote other companies with which Durant has a relationship. The show’s first episode featured the CEO of Forward, a health-care startup in which Durant is an investor.

“The way in which Kevin interacted with a brand in the past is not the way he would do it now. Now it’s about finding companies he can work with for the next 15 to 20 years,” said Kleiman.

The post How NBA star Kevin Durant is turning athlete endorsements into media deals appeared first on Digiday.

Before platforms, portals such as AOL, MSN and Yahoo played a significant role in the growth of early digital video. In addition to producing a ton of programming of their own, portals were significant distributors of publishers’ content, often through syndication deals where the portal would distribute a publisher’s videos across its massive audience base with both companies sharing in the ad revenue.

It was decent — and free — money for publishers, with top publishers being able to make millions per year by sending their video clips to AOL, Yahoo and MSN.

But as the portals’ media businesses have faded — AOL, Yahoo and MSN owner Microsoft have all had high-profile retreats from original digital video — their impact on video syndication is beginning to recede as well. In their place: Newcomers like Facebook Watch, Twitter and Snap, all of which are warming up to publishers as places where they can syndicate video in addition to funding or partnering on original programming.

Publishers see these new platforms as new sources of video syndication revenue, even if — right now — YouTube stands the tallest.

Slowing growth among the big portals
Publishers have historically made digital video syndication money through ad revenue sharing agreements. These deals typically focus on short-form video. (Digital publishers would use these agreements to distribute their web series or daily videos; TV programmers use these partnerships to syndicate out various clips from their TV shows.) Instead of a licensing fee, publishers would collect a negotiated percentage of ad revenue made from the distribution of their videos across various sites and apps that are owned by or partnered with the portals.

Digital publishing sources said video syndication revenue from portals, including Oath (the combined AOL and Yahoo) and MSN, has gone flat or dipped in recent years.

An exec at an entertainment and lifestyle publisher said his company made less than $1 million in 2017 from the syndication deals it had signed with Oath and MSN.

An exec at a top distributed media publisher said syndication revenue from portals including Oath and MSN went from roughly $1 million to a quarter of that last year. That number is expected to stay flat for 2018, he said.

“None of the [portals] have been consistent,” this exec said. “There have been moments where MSN is high and Oath is low and vice versa, but I assume that’s because those guys closed a bigger programmatic deal and you see a pop as those deals get fulfilled, and then it goes dormant again.”

Video syndication revenue from portals has always been treated as an incremental part of a publisher’s revenue mix. Two digital publishing execs said syndication revenue has never accounted for more than 1 to 2 percent of their companies’ total revenue over the past three years. But it has been free money, which is increasingly coming from newer sources.

Facebook, Snap and Twitter are rising
Facebook, Snap and Twitter have all prioritized video that’s exclusive to them as a way to get more people to spend on their platforms. While Twitter has been open to non-exclusive video clips from publishers in its Amplify program, Facebook and Snap have recently started to warm up to syndication.

As Facebook tries to boost intentional viewing and time spent on Facebook Watch, the company has opened the video-viewing section to more types of content, including one-off videos and shows that publishers have distributed elsewhere. This includes allowing BuzzFeed to distribute new episodes of shows such as “Worth It,” which go out to YouTube and other platforms at the same time, as well as cutting deals with broadcasters such as CBS to include late-night TV clips inside Watch. Similarly, Snap has also opened up its Discover section to include non-exclusive video shows, though this still requires some investment from publishers to recut content into the vertical video format.

“Facebook will still tell us to pitch them a big, shiny $250,000-per-episode show, but they’re also asking about non-exclusive stuff we can bring to Watch,” said the entertainment and lifestyle publishing exec. “They’re now OK with [shows] being non-exclusive.”

With Facebook’s mid-roll ad breaks program showing some signs of life — but still requiring a ton of views for the revenue to be anywhere near meaningful — some publishers see Facebook Watch as a new syndication opportunity that could potentially take market share away from the portals. An exec at a big U.S. media company said it expects to collect more than $100,000 in Facebook mid-roll revenue per month from syndicating just a portion of its TV clips on Watch.

Others argue that Facebook still needs to improve its ad product before prioritizing Watch as a syndication platform. “[Facebook revenue] is not significant, so it’s not like we’re suddenly going to launch a ton of pages for our shows in [the fourth quarter],” said the entertainment and lifestyle publishing exec.

Twitter, too, is growing in this area: the entertainment and lifestyle publishing exec said it now makes as much money from its syndicated clips on Twitter every month as it does from Oath.

YouTube is still the one to beat
YouTube is still the giant.

Publishing sources were more hesitant to provide specific YouTube revenue numbers, but all signaled that YouTube is unrivaled in terms of how much ad revenue it delivers compared to other platforms and portals. As a directional example, for a Digiday story last month, one video publisher estimated that they made $264 from every million video views on Facebook during the most recent quarter; for YouTube, that number spikes to $2,200 for every million video views.

“It’s pretty simple: YouTube is a video-first platform, and it’s more mature in its ability to generate revenue,” said the distributed media exec. “On top of that, we can sell [ads] directly on YouTube, and we are selling directly.”

An exec at another big U.S. media company said YouTube ad revenue has grown by 30 percent year over year for the company, which operates multiple TV networks and studios. “YouTube [revenue] is material, and it’s not small,” this exec said. This exec also added that YouTube and short-form video in general has “rated in any material way at the senior level” only in the past 12 to 18 months — and that the old syndication portals never drove enough revenue for it to matter for senior execs. “I don’t remember a time in the past five years where I would talk anyone through the MSN video revenue opportunity.”

Portals such as Oath and MSN might be fine ceding ground to YouTube — they have fundamentally different video businesses — but Facebook, Twitter and other platforms certainly want to cut into the stranglehold YouTube has on digital video. Even with the growth that Twitter has been demonstrating and whatever promising signs publishers can glean from recent Facebook Watch ad trends, there is still a ton of distance between them and YouTube, publishing sources said.

“YouTube is just years ahead,” said the entertainment and lifestyle publishing exec. “Everyone else is fighting for No. 2 and trying to get what they can get.”

The post Once powerful, portals fade as video-syndication revenue sources appeared first on Digiday.

The rush of advertisers trying to do more marketing themselves is as much a threat to agencies and ad platforms as it is an opportunity.

Some advertisers are going back to media agencies and ad tech vendors after struggling to run those services themselves. The reasons vary but tend to hinge on the difficulty in recruiting qualified personnel, which can be turned off from working for a single company and not having exposure to various marketing facets that will help their careers.

When online marketplace Notonthehighstreet.com decided to buy its own search and social ads earlier this year, it realized very quickly it wouldn’t be able to do so without help from ad platform Goa Marketing.

“Resource is a key challenge for in-house teams, and we are building an internal team that will combine over 10 years of experience, said Notonthehighstreet.com’s head of performance marketing, Luke Boudour. “Unlike an agency that can re-deploy resource at short notice, in-house teams do not have that luxury. Having an external partner does help mitigate against this as it does a lot of the heavy lifting in day-to-day data analysis, which gives us the time to spend making actual changes to influence performance.” He adds that, while time will need to be spent developing internal tools and training staff, it’s just a part of the transition.

Flight-booking app Hopper faced similar challenges when it tried to build its own Facebook buying tool to avoid paying any service fees as well as tweak some of the tools to its own specific needs, said the app’s head of user acquisition, Simon Lejeune.

Building the tool was easy, he said, maintaining it wasn’t, to the point where the cost of doing so wasn’t worth the return. The longer the process went on the more Lejeune and his team realized that buying Facebook ads internally wasn’t saving them as much as they first thought. In the end, Hopper decided to focus on creating its own buying tools on platforms that didn’t have their own, so it built software to buy ads on Snapchat, Twitter and Pinterest. Even then it needed help from advertising automation platform Smartly.io to make it happen.

“It’s about pricing correctly the value that a service brings to your company and compare it to the fee that is asked,” said Lejeune. “What is changing in the marketing space is that the value that companies find in external services is moving from human expertise to automation software.”

Advertisers still worry over how agencies profit from their investments. Brands like Mazda, Heineken and Adidas have sought third-party help to get that clarity, as a result. But agencies, in turn, say they can now be trusted to show marketers what happens to their money — so long as they aren’t incentivized to just keep prices down.

It’s opened up new opportunities for agencies like Mediacom, The&Partnership, Engine Group and Jellyfish, which are increasingly working as either an adviser or recruiter for senior marketers looking to take more creative production and media planning in-house. It’s getting harder for agencies to make money out of biddable trading due to the transparency issues. Consequently, agencies are chasing margins in different ways.

“Brands still want a high-end strategic offer when they work with agencies, but they want to be able to pull that expertise as and when they need it rather than paying $50,000 a year for a retainer with a traditional agency,” said Johnny Hornby, founder of WPP-backed The & Partnership, which manages in-house teams for Toyota and News U.K. “That’s a problem for the larger holding companies rather than the smaller agencies because they have to put all the costs of running different agencies into the bills of clients.”

The agency has built internal teams for Toyota and News U.K. that flex in headcount and expertise depending on what’s needed, whether it’s campaign management, strategic thinking or data insights. Other agencies charge clients a management fee rather than a commission to manage relationships that the advertiser has brokered directly with Google and Facebook. Agencies want to get paid for consultancy rather than execution now.

“What we’re seeing in the market are far fewer media pitches than there were at this time in 2017 and a lot more noise around in-housing,” said Gawain Owen, strategy director at Jellyfish. “We’re seeing more brands have an internal expert who understands how digital is traded and executed but isn’t too deep into the weeds. They are the conduit between the brand managers and digital practitioners — but they don’t all need to be in-house especially when running seasonal campaigns.”

As brands look to take more control of their marketing, they are becoming less interested in the traditional expertise of media agencies, but they still need service. They are looking to automate more of their marketing, often from a single platform, but need businesses that can give them data, analytics and measurement to help ensure they don’t plateau in performance.

From a cost perspective, it’s often better to be able to “tap in and out of specialized and evolving skills” rather than constantly invest in them as an internal fixed headcount, said Lucinda Peniston-Baines, managing partner at marketing management consultants The Observatory International. She said, “The advertisers that have tried to build a more permanent in-house model, a year on and they’re still struggling to house the right capabilities. And for the few that have made progress, I suspect some are leaning on a tech stack they don’t own or software they don’t manage.”

The post Some companies backtrack on taking marketing in-house appeared first on Digiday.

Civil Media Company is a startup that aims to support a network of high-quality news outlets through the sale of cryptocurrency. Now, it’s trying to apply the blockchain that underpins digital currency to protect that journalism.

Today the company is announcing a two-part deal with The Associated Press. The AP will license its content to the newsrooms in the Civil network (there are 14, and they include startups like ZigZag and Block Club Chicago), as it does with other news outlets. The other part involves the AP and Civil working together on a build a blockchain based-technology that will let Civil newsrooms track the flow of their content and enforce licensing rights.

The arrangement gives Civil access to the AP’s experience in licensing, business practices and product design. The AP gets access to potential new customers through Civil’s network and a chance to learn and adopt the emerging blockchain technology. It also will get Civil tokens, which Civil will issue (the token sale is set to start Sept. 18). The tokens are part of the way Civil is trying to form a self-governing system to promote ethical, high-quality journalism.

Civil is a for-profit company that is funded with $5 million from Consensys, which helps companies build on the Ethereum blockchain. It’s brought on a who’s who in media, including Vivian Schiller, who is CEO of the Civil Foundation, a nonprofit that will promote Civil’s core values; and advisors such as Columbia University’s Emily Bell and former Gizmodo Media Group CEO Raju Narisetti.) Token holders can use to help fund Civil newsrooms and keep low-quality newsrooms out of the network. Ex-Washington Post exec Jarrod Dicker is taking a similar, tech-based approach to publishing’s sustainability problem with blockchain startup Poet.

Matthew Iles, Civil’s founder and CEO, said the goal of the blockchain technology is twofold: to make it easier for publishers and creators to license their content and make it easier for them to track down their content when it’s used without permission. Iles, a vet of ESPN, said big media companies tell him that 50 percent to 70 percent of the content they publish is being republished without any credit or compensation. And even though many have robust legal teams, it’s hard to track down the offenders.

“People who are creating content aren’t in control of it in any way,” he said. “What this all boils up to is content creators to to be able to get credit for work wherever it’s published and more efficiently track the chain of value and ensure people are getting name credit and compensation.”

Jim Kennedy, svp of strategy and enterprise development at The Associated Press, said finding new customers for the AP’s journalism was its primary interest in Civil, but protecting intellectual property was important, too.

“Right now, we send something out on the internet, and we can’t really track it in all the ways it’s consumed,” he said. “When you’re licensing content to a legacy media company, you can pretty well track it. But on the internet, it’s never been easy. When we do contracts with people, we establish their rights to use it, and they’re generally followed. But when it’s published, it’s freely available for people to scrape and cut and paste. It used to be, we just worried about people using it for free. Now there’s this whole element of people using it for fake news and misinformation. This presents an opportunity to have a real track record of who’s allowed to publish content and how it’s being used.”

The idea is to release a product in three months, Iles said. Pricing hasn’t been determined but there will likely be a free version available to Civil newsrooms, he said.

The post The Associated Press signs on with journalism blockchain startup Civil appeared first on Digiday.

Now that Elon Musk has squashed efforts to take Tesla private, the spotlight will turn back to its operational challenges, namely whether it can maintain its grueling Model 3 production pace and generate cash to stave off fundraising.

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Toyota is set to invest about $500 million in Uber as part of an agreement by the two companies to work jointly on driverless-vehicle development.