Month: August 2018

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Vijoy Gopalakrishnan, senior vice president and principal at the IRI Media Center of Excellence. While advertisers should always measure the sales lift of the products they advertise, sometimes they may… Continue reading »

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As publishers get more serious about generating commerce revenue, they’re looking beyond simply adding affiliate links to their pages. Many have taken steps to create their own online store through which to sell products, but increasingly publishers are selling their own products via third-parties too.

A survey of 53 publishers at the Digiday Hot Topic: Commerce for Publishers found that 41 percent of publishers now sell products via a third party, such as Amazon or other retailers.

The post Digiday Research: Publishers turn to retailers to sell their products appeared first on Digiday.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. David And Google-iath US Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) sent a letter to the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission Thursday calling for an investigation into whether Google’s dominance in search and digital advertising is suppressing competition in the market, The Hill reports. Hatch’s concerns… Continue reading »

The post New Call for FTC To Investigate Google’s Ad Dominance; Chain Offers Free Coffee For Data appeared first on AdExchanger.

After bringing on more businesses to sell on its Marketplace section in categories like home rentals, auto and home services, Facebook is making a push to widen the pool.

A Facebook spokesperson told Digiday it will soon work with Shopify, allowing the 600,000 merchants on its platform, with companies such as Rebecca Minkoff, Kylie Cosmetics and Nestle to sell their products on Marketplace. Shopify will be the latest e-commerce provider that Facebook has tied up with recently to get more retailers onto Marketplace. Facebook has also began taking applications from retailers that want to sell on Marketplace, according to a Facebook spokesperson.

Facebook introduced ads to Marketplace in June. Ad buyers said they’ve been cool on the offering and that they see Facebook’s latest moves aimed at drumming up interest from them.

“Right now, Marketplace seems more like a Craigslist than an Amazon or e-commerce platform,” said Mark Sytsma, associate director of paid social at Huge, which hasn’t run any ads on Marketplace.

Another buyer said his agency has not run any ads in Marketplace because it is not yet at the scale of Amazon. Getting more inventory from big-name brands could improve Marketplace’s perception, growing its audience and in turn improving the ad inventory and targeting ability for media buyers.

A Facebook spokesperson told Digiday it is interested in adding retailers of all sizes and will not take any percentage of revenue made on Marketplace, which means the platform is banking on advertising to monetize the platform.

Within weeks of Facebook introducing ads in Marketplace in June, Facebook partnered with SaaS e-commerce provider BigCommerce to let its merchants, which include Ben & Jerry’s, Sony and Toyota, sell on Marketplace. Jimmy Duvall, BigCommerce’s chief product officer said that initial merchant interest has been “overwhelmingly positive.”

Also in June, Facebook introduced a web page promoting upcoming integrations with e-commerce providers ChannelAdvisor and ShipStation, and began taking applications from retailers to sell on Marketplace through its Help Page. Retailers say they are starting to see prompts to the application within their Facebook business profiles. One retailer said the application popped up when he was in Ads Manager.

The application tells retailers that to sell on Marketplace, they must have a Facebook Shop in place on their Facebook Business page since all Marketplace listings are linked to a shop. A brand or reseller must also sell new goods, accept returns within 30 days and ship orders within three days that are received by customers within seven days.

The form also asks retailers which e-commerce platform provider they work with and lists other providers Facebook is working with around Marketplace, including IBM, Oracle Commerce Cloud and WooCommerce, which all manage e-commerce components like inventory, shipping and marketing for retailers. At the end of the application, Facebook states that since the program is in its early stages, it cannot provide an explanation on how long it will take to review applications.

A Facebook spokesperson said the primary way retailers are partnering with Marketplace is through e-commerce providers and not the application form.

Facebook has had a plan in place to bring on more product from businesses, not just Facebook users, since August 2017. Since then, it has opened up the platform to auto dealers such as Cars.com and Edmunds, home rental companies through partnerships with Apartment List, Zumper and Rental Beast and home services with companies Handy, HomeAdvisor and Porch. Facebook has also been picking certain retailers to see what kind of things people are most interested in buying on Marketplace, Facebook said. At its F8 Conference in May, Facebook said Marketplace is used in 70 counties and used by 800 million people every month, with one in three people in the U.S. using it monthly.

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The post Ad buyers are still cool on Marketplace, but Facebook’s recent moves could change that appeared first on Digiday.

Discovery should have as good an idea as any media company as to how Instagram’s IGTV is panning out for publishers. Eleven of Discovery’s properties have uploaded videos to IGTV since the Facebook-owned app debuted its YouTube-meets-Snapchat platform for longer vertical videos on June 20. And Discovery’s Food Network has published 70 videos to IGTV in that span, averaging roughly one video a day and 35,000 views and 12 comments per video. Yet it will be several more months until Discovery Inc. has gathered enough information to assess IGTV’s standing among YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat and regular Instagram videos.

“Until you have about six months of data, it’s hard to get anything of meaning to surface internally and externally,” said Vikki Neil, gm of Discovery’s Lifestyle Digital Studios.

For Discovery and three other publishers interviewed for this article, two months after its launch IGTV remains something of an enigma: a platform to experiment with but not to devote much in the way of dedicated resources to, at least not until there’s a clear way to reap some revenue in return. That means taking videos already distributed on other platforms and repurposing them for IGTV. The work involved is typically cropping a horizontal video uploaded to YouTube or Facebook, a callback to how media companies waded into Snapchat a few years ago. Media companies are also taking the vertical videos they post to Snapchat and distributing them on IGTV.

This content recycling lowers the cost of experimentation, especially for a property like Food Network that is able to pull from a video library that spans TV, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.

“There’s a practicality to how we participate in these platforms,” said Neil.

While Food Network has been especially active on IGTV, other Discovery properties have been much less so. Discovery Channel has been dormant since uploading eight videos on June 20, and HGTV has not uploaded a new video to IGTV since July 30. But in the same way that it’s too early to go all-in on IGTV, it’s too early to pull all the way out.

“HGTV is actually developing some content specifically that we think will play well for IGTV. That’s rolling out, I believe, in the next few days. For Discovery and some of other brands, we’re waiting to see how some of this lifestyle stuff works,” said Neil.

National Geographic would seem to have more motivation than most media companies to go hard on IGTV. To date its IGTV videos have averaged 1.6 million views and 1,250 comments. But it has only uploaded two videos to IGTV since the platform launched. One of those videos was a 47-minute-long episode of its show “One Strange Rock” that aired on TV on May 28 and was published in full to IGTV on June 20, taking advantage of IGTV’s 60-minute maximum video length. The other video, published to IGTV on Aug. 16, was a three-minute excerpt of a 22-minute documentary that Nat Geo published in full on its own site on Aug. 14 and uploaded to YouTube on Aug. 15.

“I think it is still too early,” said Nat Geo’s director of Instagram Josh Raab. “We are defining what IGTV is and the role it plays for us, but Instagram is also still developing the role [IGTV] plays on Instagram overall.”

That Nat Geo’s videos varied so widely in length but have each accrued more than a million views could indicate that IGTV viewers are open to both long- and short-form programming. However, once again, it’s likely too early to come to that conclusion.

“It’s still something that needs to be tested quite a bit more, but I would say that the optimal lengths are most likely to be more akin to YouTube and to Facebook than to Instagram Stories [on the short end] or traditional TV shows [on the long end],” said Raab.

“With IGTV, there are so many question marks right now,” said Khalil Jetha, vp of emerging brand audiences at Great Big Story. To get some answers, the CNN-owned video company has been primarily repurposing existing videos on IGTV as a way to A/B test the platform. Five of Great Big Story’s seven IGTV videos had been previously published to YouTube as part of its “Uncharted” series, and another had been originally uploaded to YouTube in March 2016. On YouTube, those six videos have averaged 226,000 views per video; on IGTV, they have averaged about 2,400 views.

Given how nascent IGTV is, Jetha is unperturbed by the videos’ lower viewership on IGTV compared to YouTube. “When we publish stuff to IGTV, we’re not expecting to get the same watch time as YouTube. IGTV and Instagram overall are still developing as a platform. YouTube has been around for [more than] 10 years,” he said.

Yet YouTube appears to be what IGTV will be largely measured against, if only because so many of the videos that publishers are posting to IGTV are vertically cropped versions of what they have uploaded to YouTube.

GQ waited until July 17 to post its first video on IGTV. On that day, it uploaded a vertically cropped version of the Kylie Jenner-Travis Scott interview it had uploaded to YouTube on the same day to promote its August 2018 cover story on the celebrity couple. On YouTube, that video has received 28.8 million views and more than 72,000 comments; on IGTV it has received more than 136,000 views and 130 comments. In total, GQ has uploaded five videos to IGTV to date. Those videos have averaged more than 46,000 views and 34 comments, and more than half of viewers watch more than half of those videos, according to a GQ spokesperson.

While GQ has seen the most success with its Jenner-Scott video, it is one of the rare publishers that has produced videos specifically for IGTV. In July, the magazine recorded three interviews with celebrities during Comic-Con that it teased through Instagram Stories clips that people could swipe up on to watch the full videos on GQ’s IGTV channel. Those three videos have averaged more than 16,800 views and seven comments. But GQ still has some more experimenting to do before it can identify what content works specifically on IGTV.

“We’re still trying to figure out what some straight-up, made-for-IGTV content looks like because we’ve not gotten enough feedback,” said Jon Wilde, executive digital director at GQ.

Revenue will also help GQ and other media companies to assess how much to prioritize IGTV. For now, Instagram does not provide media companies with any ways to make money from their IGTV videos. And while publishers can sell advertisers on sponsored videos distributed on IGTV, they are not yet. In part, that’s because the viewership on IGTV is not considered large enough for publishers to pitch it to advertisers. Additionally, Instagram has not extended its branded-content tagging tool to IGTV for publishers to easily disclose when a video has been paid for by an advertiser. GQ is waiting until that tool is made available on IGTV before it begins uploading sponsored content, said Wilde.

“It’s early days for IGTV, and as we were with Stories and Feed, we want to be thoughtful in our approach to monetization and branded content. We’re exploring ways to help creators in these areas but have no further plans to share right now,” said an Instagram spokesperson in an emailed statement.

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The post ‘So many question marks’: Publishers aren’t ready to commit resources to Instagram’s IGTV appeared first on Digiday.

The NFL’s top media exec expects the tech giants to become major players for live sports rights when the league’s existing big broadcasting deals expire in 2022.

Brian Rolapp, the league’s chief business and media officer, said that year will be the “inflection point” for any dramatic changes to the NFL’s lineup of broadcasting partners. Before any of that happens, Rolapp said the tech giants will need to demonstrate they can handle tens of millions of simultaneous viewers before the league makes an exclusive-rights deal with them.

“Our entire model is based on reaching as many people for as long as we can,” Rolapp said, speaking during a media event hosted by the NFL in New York on Thursday. “Traditionally, the best way to do that has been broadcast TV.”

Rolapp acknowledged that the number of people regularly spending time on Amazon, Facebook and YouTube is “staggering,” which will complicate how the league approaches its distribution strategy. It’s also important that these platforms can manage a high-quality stream for the number of live viewers that NFL games still get on TV, Rolapp said.

“We can get 25 million people; I have not seen a live event on the internet that can serve 25 million concurrent users at a high quality,” said Rolapp. “It’s one of these things that will need to be resolved, because money is not the issue for these guys.”

In the meantime, the NFL continues to experiment with sports packages with tech giants. Earlier this year, the league renewed a deal with Amazon to simulcast 11 “Thursday Night Football” games on Amazon Prime and Twitch. Amazon is reportedly paying the NFL $130 million over the next two years for these rights.

Live sports streaming still hasn’t caught up with TV. Amazon’s 11 “Thursday Night Football” games last year (which, like this coming year, did not include free broadcasts on Twitch) reportedly averaged 310,000 viewers per 30 seconds over the course of the season. The high point was a December Saints-Falcons game, which peaked with 2 million concurrent viewers. That same Saints-Falcon game drew an average of 14.6 million viewers per minute on TV, according to Nielsen data.

During the event, NFL executives acknowledged the reality that the league is not immune to downward trends in linear TV viewership. “I’m not going to sit here and say that we’re not concerned by some of the things that happened last year,” the NFL’s COO Maryann Turcke said.

Execs pointed to the NFL’s expanded distribution plan this year to supplement declining TV ratings. With Verizon, the NFL is making games available for free on smartphones and tablets — across all wireless carriers — through the NFL and Yahoo Sports mobile apps. These games won’t require a cable subscription and will be simulcasts of the TV broadcasts in local markets. On the NFL mobile app, the local game will autoplay as soon as users open the app, said David Jurenka, svp of digital media and business operations for the NFL.

“I don’t think there’s a fear [in the league office] about declining TV viewership, but there’s a healthy paranoia,” Rolapp said. The new mobile streaming plan is about reaching more people: “We’re supplementing our reach in TV with more people over here. That’s a big shift.”

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The post The NFL says tech platforms have yet to prove they can compete with broadcast TV appeared first on Digiday.

Amazon wants to leave marketers without doubt that its ads are better than those of its rivals at driving sales on its sites.

The retailer is testing its Amazon Attribution tool, which lets advertisers compare whether ads on its sites are more effective than those on its rivals. Only those advertisers that sell on Amazon, rather than through it, are being invited to the free trial. Competition for search rankings on Amazon is getting harder as more advertisers compete, forcing some to look elsewhere for traffic.

Page views, purchase rate and sales are among the conversion metrics advertisers can pick to pinpoint the influence of their display, search or video ads outside of Amazon.

“This move will encourage brands to drive more ads to Amazon because they’ll have attribution parity,” said Connor Folley, former Amazon executive and founder of search ad platform Downstream. “Brands will see how much better their Amazon product detail pages convert compared to their own site. From an ROI perspective they’ll be hard pressed to justify driving traffic elsewhere as a result.”

Like Google and Facebook, Amazon is effectively trying to take credit for the success of ads outside its own platform, whether they’re on a rival or publisher site.

Google has an advantage over Amazon in that most advertisers are likely using some form of Google attribution to measure not only their Google campaigns but also their their Amazon campaigns. Now, Amazon can have advertisers use its own attribution to measure Amazon ads and Google ads. Not only does Amazon get to take credit for the ads it can prove push traffic back to its site, but they also get a peek inside millions more Google searches.

“Owning your own attribution lets you grade your own homework,” said Ben Tregoe, svp of revenue at ad tech company Nanigan. “The reason each platform is intent on having their own attribution system is that they know the other platforms cannot be trusted to properly credit ads outside their own platform. Google is always going to say it’s ads were more effective in driving the conversion just as Facebook and Amazon will.”

As intrigued as many advertisers are by ads on Amazon, they only spent $2.2 billion on its ads in the latest quarter, whereas they spent $28.9 billion over the same period. To loosen the purse strings, Amazon ran a series of attribution tests earlier in the year.

One advertiser that’s happy with the performance of Amazon’s ads is Pernod Ricard. The world’s second largest alcohol manufacturer will spend more on ads that drive sales back to its pages on the site as it looks to expand a fledgling ecommerce business.

“Amazon is a platform for both sales and advertising for Pernod Ricard,” Laurent Pillet, md of the company’s U.K. business told Digiday. “Over the last year we’ve dramatically increased the amount of media we buy on Amazon. On top of the media we buy, we’re also looking to sell more on Amazon. In 2017, our sales on Amazon grew by 100 percent and we’re now the second largest spirits provider for the site, with a market share of 10 percent. That’s far more than we have in traditional markets.”

An Amazon spokesperson said it would not reveal any further information about the pixel that wasn’t already featured on a blog post it ran earlier this month.

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The post Amazon is testing an attribution pixel, a key step in rivaling the duopoly appeared first on Digiday.

It was only a matter of time before publishers’ commerce operations started to get a little more programmatic.

Over the past year or so, a number of publishers, including Purch, MSN, BuzzFeed, Wirecutter and Allure have been experimenting with making the links in their commerce content biddable, adding a layer of automation to a normally human-powered process.

The appeal, in the abstract, is obvious: Competition among retailers should increase the amount of revenue they get from their content, and theoretically lower their reliance on Amazon, which in some cases accounts for 80 percent of commerce publishers’ affiliate revenues.

But adding a programmatic element to commerce is a high-risk, high-reward concept, and many publishers remain skeptical of the practice, seeing a technology that potentially degrades the user experience, or keeps publishers from forging more direct relationships with retailers.

But retailers, who are fighting to claw market share away from Amazon, are more willing than ever to spend money on performance marketing; and commerce publishers, who now find themselves managing thousands of links across ever-growing libraries of posts, are giving the concept a fresh look.

Those who have added the auctions are keeping it at arm’s length, but they see an efficient way to monetize the long tail of their commerce businesses.

“We kind of put this in a programmatic bucket, and programmatic is a small piece of the pie,” said Christophe Frenet, vp of product at Purch. “But we’re also at a size where this [technology] can be win-win.”

As an idea, biddable affiliate commerce links are not new; VigLink, which helps publishers including The Daily Beast and MSN with their affiliate commerce, first rolled the concept out in 2014. Even further back, vendors including Vibrant Media have been creating ads by turning keywords in publisher content into biddable links for over a decade.

But it also didn’t get much traction among publishers at first. The products often couldn’t accurately match the products in the retailers’ bids to the products mentioned in the publishers’ links: A link in a story about a pair of Nike running shoes, for example, might instead link to a pair of Nike basketball shoes, or a pair of running shoes made by Asics.

While contextual ad targeting can be close enough for display advertising or branded content, even the slightest mismatch is a disaster for commerce content.

“I haven’t seen anything better than 60 percent [match rate], which is horrendous,” said Lynda Mann, the senior director of commerce at Digital Trends. “The problem is there is no true UPC [universal product code]. Every single merchant is using whatever they want [to identify and catalog their products].”

Many publishers were also unsure if the highest bidder would deliver a quality experience to customers who left their sites. “There are so many knockoffs and sites with bad customer service,” said a director at one large digital publisher focused on commerce. “A lot of the work we do is making sure the retailer and the product we feature are legit.”

To shore that up, some vendors now work directly with the retailers to ensure that they have a transparent look at the products being sold and what’s available, or use artificial intelligence and natural language processing to identify products more accurately in the body of posts. Others have gotten more proactive. Narrativ scrapes its retail partners’ sites three times a day to monitor what’s in stock.

Retailers have upped their commission offers, partly to eat away at Amazon’s market share and partly because they have discovered that publishers’ content is a crucial source of referral traffic.

“Content referral is already a larger source than social or display for Nordstrom or Best Buy,” said Shirley Chen, Narrativ’s founder and CEO. “The comparison of social to content, in terms of scale, is already really favorable.”

That’s improved the earnings per click on publishers’ commerce posts enough to bring more publishers along. Oliver Roup, the CEO of VigLink, said 70 of the top 100 top-earning publishers in his network now make either their buy buttons biddable, or automatically create shopping links inside content.

More of those publishers — 59 of the 70 — are using the technology for link creation, compared to 36 that use it for link optimization. Purch, which recently sold its consumer-facing business to Future plc, used VigLink to monetize content in its message boards on some of its sites, an area it knew suffered from broken links. The vast majority of its buy links, which it considers premium inventory, remain direct-sold.

“We have different tiers of inventory,” Frenet said. “We don’t use [VigLink] everywhere, but there are lots of placements where their technology is useful.”

Yet some publishers see competition among retailers as an opportunity to better serve their consumers. “Being the number one tech brand in the market it’s really hard to scale across our vast inventory,” said Mark Larkin, evp and gm of the CNET group at CBS Interactive. “These technologies make it easy for us to provide consumers with options.”

Over time, the vendors are hoping that this market looks more like the market for Google AdWords, where an advertiser should expect to pay up to 30 percent of their item’s purchase price for a click; an affiliate transaction costs an advertiser closer to 5 percent.

They will have to hope it gets there even with publishers focused mostly on direct deals with advertisers. “The downfall to all [these services] is you’re not having a direct conversation with the merchant,” Mann said. “That’s just where the money is.”

The post How programmatic auctions are creeping into publishers’ commerce links appeared first on Digiday.

Timehop had three months of runway in the bank when it decided its current advertising solution wasn’t going to cut it. The app — a way to reminisce on photos and posts across social media — had raised $14.1 million since its launch in 2010. If it was going to ever return that money to investors, the company had to do something else.

“Millions of people use it every day. We can’t just shut it down. At that point, we had so many ideas of what else to do. Maybe we fail and it still ends but we should not end it here?” said Matt Raoul, CEO of Timehop.

As Twitter knows well, you can just shut apps down. But Raoul, Timehop’s design lead who was promoted to CEO after his predecessor left for Snapchat, decided against a quick demise. Instead, the plan was to boost its programmatic advertising. The 15-person team ended up building its own ad server. A year and a half later, the app’s CPM has grown from $2 to $28. Timehop is currently profitable with 50 percent margins this quarter.

Timehop’s leadership team, seated in a conference room within a Soho office featuring framed photos of the app’s mascot Abe the dinosaur, described a journey of exhausting ad tech solutions from January to October 2017. During that time, Timehop hired David Leviev, who worked in ad tech prior, as director of programmatic and partnerships. They moved from using a bunch of SDKs to trying a third-party ad server, which initially gave them a nine-fold increase in revenue.

“We didn’t really understand our own inventory because all we had was the viewability of these two demand partners. We were kinda content with that $2 [CPM] because we thought we were valued at that,” Leviev said.

But after their third-party ad server was down for a weekend, Leviev began to consider moving it all in-house. He declined to name the company’s previous partners.

“Typically reporting is down, and you wait 24 hours. We sent them an email, another email. Three days worth of revenue down the toilet. We got no reassurance we were a priority so we understood the need to have control and viewability in-house,” Leviev said.

In November, Timehop instructed some of its product engineers to begin building an ad server that focused on its own inventory, mobile-only. Leviev said they also wanted to maximize CPM and fill rate, not just choose one or the other. Currently, the system integrates with about 15 SSPs and DSP, the exact number depending on the day.

On Aug. 28, Timehop’s server was filing 74 percent of its inventory at $14 CPMs. Compared to a year ago, the company’s revenue is up 1,000 percent. About 85 percent of that revenue is programmatic, rest direct sales. The startup’s making close to $1 million per month, said Rick Webb, Timehop’s chief operating officer, who served as a revenue consultant the year prior to his full-time involvement.

Timehop is still perfecting the process. This week, they implemented Moat’s SDK for viewability and verification measurement.

“Our biggest regret is not doing sooner. If you have the resources the best solution is to get rid of the SSP. There’s no low-balling of a $2 CPM, no skimming off the top. Publishers if they have the control themselves can determine how much they’re truly valued,” Leviev said.

As for the future growth of the company the team said they hope to use this new financing to hire more employees, in particular, a marketing team, which they currently don’t have. Part of its future marketing initiatives will include reminding people that while Facebook and Snapchat may have a memory feature, Timehop provides it all within one app.

Timehop’s user base is about 80 percent in the U.S., 80 percent women and 80 percent millennial. In July, the app was hacked, affecting the personal data of more than 21 million of Timehop’s users. The team declined to provide exact user numbers but said it has “millions” of daily active users. Timehop did lose between 10 to 15 percent of those after a redesign at the end of 2016, but it’s also adding users each week.

“We lost some users in the redesign, but we still have the core user base that we want to improve things for, that has stuck with us through thick and thin,” Raoul said.

The post Memory app Timehop built an ad server to go from near-death to profitable appeared first on Digiday.

Emerging designers, particularly those who have built up social media followings, are now seen as keys that can unlock a new customer for the retailers that carry them. Online retailers like Net-a-Porter, MatchesFashion, Moda Operandi and the e-commerce sites of luxury department stores are competing on newness, exclusivity and an ability to discover the next big names in fashion, to give customers a reason to shop there and to keep coming back.

On Thursday, Net-a-Porter launched a new program called “The Vanguard,” offering a rotating pool of designers access to a guided mentorship program led by Net-a-Porter executives and team members. It entails business strategy and marketing support, social media production, PR and technology resources. In exchange, the designers will sell their collections exclusively through Net-a-Porter. The first four designers to participate in The Vanguard are Les Reveries, Ruh, Gu_de and Martinez. All the brands are international, which speaks to Net-a-Porter’s ongoing mission to attract a global customer, and some speak to emerging customer trends: Ruh, for instance, is a sustainable clothing brand for modest apparel targeting Muslim consumers, while Gu_de is a locally made, Korean-based handbag brand.

“The Net-a-Porter buying team selects brands based on design and directional brand perspective. We pursue brands that we believe have the potential to grow into meaningful businesses,” said Lisa Aiken, Net-a-Porter’s retail fashion director. “With social media, we’re seeing new brands make a larger impact in fashion within a shorter period of time.”

“You have to take care of luxury customers, especially online,” said Ken Morris, principal analyst at Boston Retail Partners. “They want to feel like they’re being catered to, like they’re unique, like they’re in on something other people aren’t. Exclusive collections from up-and-coming designers is a differentiator.”

Other sites have launched similar initiatives to highlight young talent. Neiman Marcus launched “The Luxe Lab” in 2017, a shop-in-shop online and in a handful of physical stores that spotlighted designers Neiman Marcus’s buying team thought were innovative and outside the norm, like Simone Rocha and Nour Hammour. Some, but not all, of the pieces in the collection were exclusives. MatchesFashion has an “Innovator Lab,” which carries one-of-a-kind pieces from emerging designers that work with non-traditional fabrics and means of design. The retailer also has an internal data program set up that sends real-time sales feedback to its brands, which head of menswear Damien Paul said is a particularly strong benefit for small designers looking to build up their businesses.

“We wouldn’t get anywhere without being transparent with our brands. The new brand we’re making a $30,000 buy with this year may be the brand we’re making a $1 million buy with next year,” said Paul. “So we have to be aware what the feedback we give them is worth in the long term, because it’s also worth it for us.”

Thanks to e-commerce and social media, the bar is lower for new designers to enter the market. That also means it’s become far more competitive, and the cost of acquiring customers to direct channels online has continued to climb. While designer brands may attract cult-like followers on social media, they’re competing in the new brand space against flashier, tech-infused direct-to-consumer startups that oftentimes sell their business model right alongside product, making them more attractive to investors, which in turn pad them with cash to scale faster.

“There’s so much noise that, as a young brand, the most important thing you can do is be wise with your budget and your finances,” said designer Audra Noyes. “Building relationships with the right buyers, partners and influencers is how to scale, not flash-in-the-pan marketing. That applies to wholesale and fashion week, and everything that I do.”

At the same time, wholesale retailers have still had to win back the trust of brands seeing them as lacking a point of view or relying too heavily on promotions. So, they’re presenting brands with a more equal-footing, exchange-based relationship. With The Vanguard, Net-a-Porter is not just giving these young brands exposure by selling them alongside well-known designers on its site, it’s also opening up access to resources like the Yoox Net-a-Porter Tech Hub and prioritizing their promotion across the retailer’s marketing channels. While Net-a-Porter will have no financial stake in their businesses, it will be the only retailer selling the designers’ collections until they’re no longer in The Vanguard program.

Moda Operandi launched a similarly modeled incubator program for new designers last year, called “The Platform,” which helped emerging designers with marketing, forecasting and planning advice. In exchange, the designers in the incubator can only sell online through Moda Operandi. (They can have brick-and-mortar partnerships at the same time).

“Emerging designers have to face big challenges with production and logistics. In a saturated fashion industry, [you also] have to create a cohesive brand image, thoughtful storytelling, art direction and imagery like big brands do, but with very limited budgets, which is a challenge,” said Souliers Martinez designer Julien Martinez. “Net-a-Porter’s teams have been helpful.”

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