Month: August 2018

Ogilvy, Google and the UN Women’s Unstereotype Alliance have joined forces to show how technology can be used to unite advertising’s female professionals worldwide, with the hopes that it will then empower them in their careers and drive change across the industry. The WPP creative agency and tech behemoth partnered to create the aptly named…

Forrester Research last week released a new report, “Agency Holding Companies Need A Brave New Business Model,” which concludes that agencies and holding companies need to adapt to meet the evolving demands of chief marketing officers. As CMOs expand their purview beyond communications strategy, agency relationships are threatened, particularly by the rise of in-house teams….

The core of the news business can be so intense and dynamic that it leaves little room for innovation. That’s why the ecosystem of the newsroom–and the journalists within it–is often last to implement technology and slow to revolutionize practices. Facebook turned its back has on news sites, serving as the catalyst to publishers losing…

“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 Alessandro De Zanche, an independent audience strategy consultant.  When I worked at Yahoo during the golden years, I met many extremely talented and knowledgeable people. In 2011, one of my… Continue reading »

The post Monoculture: The Biggest Threat To Digital Advertising appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. California, Here We Come The California Consumer Privacy Act rode a well-intentioned wave of activism into law but is out of sync with modern marketing, argues Ray Kingman at Ad Age. A company violates the law if it buys, sells or shares personal information… Continue reading »

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Starting with Facebook Watch, millennial-focused news publisher Mic is going long by producing exclusive and licensed shows for streaming video platforms.

Earlier this summer, Mic premiered “Mic Dispatch,” a twice-weekly newsmagazine for Facebook Watch. The show is paid for by Facebook, which, as part of its funded news shows initiative, is paying news organizations ranging from CNN to Mic to produce daily and weekly video series for Facebook Watch for at least a year. In January, Hulu will premiere a three-part documentary based on the infamous Fyre Festival scandal, for which Mic will serve as a producer alongside Billboard, Cinemart and Hulu.

Mic publisher Cory Haik said the news outlet is in “active conversations” with other streaming giants including Netflix and Amazon for more potential projects based off of its journalism. It has also formed a unit called Mic Productions, which has a five people — including Haik and Mic CEO Chris Altchek — focused on developing and selling long-form projects to streaming platforms and TV networks.

“If the era of early distributed media for publishers was to spray-seed everything, everywhere, the moment we are in now is more about being smart about how we create better relationships with platforms that are meaningful from not only an audience-reach perspective but also in terms of how we want to do great journalism and get an ROI from that journalism,” said Haik.

“Mic Dispatch” is the first example of the type of long-form work that the publisher wants to do, Haik said. The show, which is now more than one month and 10 episodes into its yearlong run, averages roughly 15 minutes per episode and features both studio interviews and field reporting from Mic journalists. Previous episodes have included high-profile interviews with New York gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon, U.S. congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and conservative commentator Candace Owens. It is produced by a team of 25 people.

Haik said a greater percentage of people are choosing to watch “Mic Dispatch” beyond the three-second view mark than for the type of short-form news-feed videos that Mic used to crank out. (Mic did not provide an exact percentage by press time.)

With other long-form content buyers, Mic is aiming to produce programs that follow a similar newsmagazine format of “Mic Dispatch,” as well as traditional documentaries focused on social justice issues and other key topics that Mic covers. Over the next couple of quarters, Haik said Mic will be announcing more long-form programs it’s producing for other platforms, but did not specify how many.

Mic’s shift to focus more on producing and selling long-form video to streaming video buyers is part of a change at the company to move away from short, news-feed clips that brought in a ton of Facebook reach but little revenue. The company said it hopes to get to a point where a third of its revenue comes from paid productions and licensing.

There certainly is an opportunity for Mic to produce or license long-form shows to different buyers. While Netflix has said that it’s not interested in hard-news shows, the company has been more willing to buy non-fiction and news-oriented shows from digital publishers including Vox Media and BuzzFeed News. Hulu also has bought a documentary film from BuzzFeed News. HBO, with its Emmy-winning show from Vice, has been the early poster child of these publisher-TV tie-ups.

One issue that Mic — and other publishers with long-form ambitions — will wrestle with is whether to become producers-for-hire for streaming and TV content buyers, which increasingly want to own the completed shows they’re paying for, or to find ways to license their productions without giving up all of the ownership rights. By producing for platforms, publishers can make money up front. If the publisher prefers to retain some ownership or distribution rights to the IP, then it might have to put up some production costs upfront, with the hope of making more money over a longer period time through licensing and syndication.

“Mic Dispatch” is completely paid for and owned by Facebook, which means Mic would not be able to license the show to other platforms down the road. The proper approach to IP ownership is something Mic is currently weighing as it tries to pursue more production and distribution deals with streaming giants and TV networks, Haik said.

“We are in the thick of doing those exercises around the different opportunities available to us,” she said. “Ultimately, it’s going to come down to what those opportunities are — and with the streamers starting to dip their toes into news, which they haven’t done before, it’s a good problem to have.”

The post ‘The moment we’re in now is about being smart’: Mic aims to get paid to license video shows appeared first on Digiday.

In the fall of 2017, O’Connor, Medium’s first vp of editorial, was on maternity leave from her post as executive editor of Time magazine, and itching for a major change. It could have been anything, but when a recruiter from Medium called, asking if she’d like to have a conversation about a new job, she jumped at the chance.

O’Connor admired Medium founder Ev Williams and his decision to shift Medium away from advertising, which had been a slog marked by layoffs and intense scrutiny after it invited a bunch of publishers onto its platform, only to abandon that strategy later. She was also ready to take a risk.

“I was at a point in my career where I was ready to make a big change,” O’Connor said. “I was getting increasingly frustrated with the constraints of the advertising-based model.”

Medium’s pivot from advertising to subscription revenue in early 2017 is a high-stakes one for a company that’s raised $132 million in venture capital and has precious little to show for it, revenue-wise.

More than half a year in, O’Connor is feeling more than encouraged about her choice. In July, traffic has nearly doubled, to 13 million uniques, per comScore. More important, since February, Medium’s subscribers, who pay $5 a month, have grown in number 160 percent, with a retention rate of 95 percent, according to the company. (The company said it’s ahead of goal but wouldn’t share raw numbers.)

Driving the growth is a mix of professional and amateur content. A Medium spokesperson said through the first seven months of 2018, Medium has spent $2 million on content. Most of that goes to participants in Medium’s contributor program, where writers are paid from subscriber revenue based on how well Medium readers respond to it. The rest went to commissioned pieces in subject areas including health, politics and technology. A small slice pays for content syndicated from publishers including The New York Times.

Forging a new identity
O’Connor’s job is to give people amateur and professional content that they want to read while figuring out how to bring human curation and editorial judgment into an algorithmically powered platform used by 50,000 writers a week.

Medium faces the same question as other platforms in how to balance its editorial and platform identities. Along the way, it has to decide between super-serving its existing audience and investing in building a new one.

“Every day I find myself doing a lot of context-switching,” O’Connor said. “It’s super different day to day, in part because I’m working cross-functionally and also because I do strategy but I also edit stories and manage people.”

O’Connor’s role at Medium is similar to ones she’s held before and unlike any she’s held in 20 years of media.

The familiar part is helping Medium compete in a crowded digital media landscape by picking editors who can help it participate in popular subject areas such as health. It also means making some offbeat bets: Medium has a commissioning editor whose sole responsibility is to secure book excerpts that it can publish.

Seeking subscribers through packaging, personalization
O’Connor oversees close to 20 percent of Medium’s 90 full-time employees, though Williams said her team is small relative to its importance at the company and that he expects it to get “a good deal larger.”

Less familiar to O’Connor is building a library of content that gets people to subscribe and developing a contributor program that turns into a flywheel where more writers create more content, attracting more subscribers, whose revenue in turn pulls in more writers, and so on.

To get readers engaging longer, O’Connor works with Medium’s vp of product, Michael Sippey, to balance the user-generated and professional content they see through packaging and distribution tweaks.

To highlight user-submitted material, O’Connor’s team this month started to package their material into magazines. One, on the issue of toxic masculinity, called “Man, Interrupted,” debuted two weeks ago.

Distribution was another element. To make sure that users saw the first issue of a magazine’s issue’s contents, Medium tucked parts of the magazine into a section of the daily newsletter.

“The product is much more sophisticated than anything I’ve worked on,” O’Connor said.

Personalization is a big piece of the strategy for subscribers and non-subscribers alike. Aside from the homepage, which O’Connor and Sippey decided to stop personalizing earlier this year, every surface of Medium’s product — its email newsletters, its app contents, its article recommendations — are all personalized in some way. And while personalizing content makes some publishers nervous, O’Connor said there are ways to personalize that are not based on topics. “The way we do our recommendations are more sophisticated.”

Another challenge for O’Connor’s was growing Medium’s awareness to the point that people would pay for it and that people all over the world would feel comfortable using as a platform for expressing themselves.

“It’d be much easier to do one or the other, for sure,” Williams said. “It doesn’t come naturally, either at the product level or the cultural level.”

Embracing the human element
While other platforms, notably Facebook, have shown ambivalence about bringing human editors into the process, Williams decided to add a human element to Medium’s editorial product, in part, because of the limitations of technology. While machines can detect a story’s average scroll depth, or read time, or share counts, or highlights, they are bad at figuring out if that story is actually branded content or mere aggregation.

Williams also realized after pivoting to a subscription model in the spring of 2017 that consumption did not lead directly to subscriptions.

“We’ve found that things we previously thought people would consume does not directly correlate to what they’ll pay for,” Williams said. “That’s what made us put more emphasis on human curation and human judgment.”

O’Connor sees value in personalization and human judgment alike. “I’d never worked anywhere that kind of tech [personalization] existed,” she said. “It’s that that’s driving the business forward.” Later this month, she plans to start publishing more personal advice content. In the fall, an entire book will be published on Medium too.

“When you do this for a while,” she said, “you know where the white space is.”

The post How Siobhan O’Connor is trying to grow Medium’s subscription business appeared first on Digiday.

After nearly two months of posting to IGTV, Instagram’s longer-form video hub, female-focused publisher Stylist is pulling back from the platform to focus its efforts on Apple News, which has a more proven monetization model.

Stylist began posting to IGTV when it launched at the end of June. Since then, it has published seven videos under three minutes each with views rarely scaling 5,000. According to Owen Wyatt, managing director at parent company Shortlist Media, this is 5 percent of the views it gets on the platform’s more low-fi video hub, Instagram Stories.

“IGTV has been a similar process to every new video product development from Facebook and Instagram: Built without consideration of a revenue share ad model,” said Wyatt. “I can’t be the only managing director getting tired of trialing products without a proper revenue share behind them. That’s why last week I pulled resource out of IGTV.” Instead, that resource is being directed to Instagram Stories — which delivers referral traffic — and Apple News.

Apple News, where Stylist gets video views in the hundreds of thousands, which it monetizes through pre-roll, according to Wyatt, is the title’s highest platform referral traffic driver. Direct traffic and SEO are the top traffic sources. Each quarter, the publisher sits down with editorial and commercial leads from Apple News to discuss where the platform’s product updates align with the publisher’s editorial focus.

The roll-out of IGTV has been fairly typical of Facebook’s and Instagram’s products: The platform evaluates audience behavior and grows the amount of premium content before turning on the money. For Facebook Live and Facebook Watch, the platform paid some publishers and creators to boost the amount of premium content on the platform, which it hasn’t done for IGTV.

According to ad buyers interviewed for this story, Facebook hasn’t set a date for IGTV monetization, based on previous products, it’s likely in the next three to six months, depending on the growth and behavior of the audience.

IGTV is still in the early stages, and there are plenty of publishers and creators posting to the platform. However, not all publishers are willing to create the kind of premium content Instagram wants without monetization prospects. And without a cohort of publishers to kickstart premium content on the platform, audience behavior and monetization will be slower to materialize.

Instagram didn’t comment on the record for this story.

“A lot of the use cases we’ve seen have been with influencers, that’s a big part of the approach and a key area of focus for our clients,” said Katie Manor, head of paid social, worldwide at Mediacom. “Influencers see IGTV as a complement to their YouTube content.” Even so, influencer marketing on IGTV is nascent, according to influencer measurement company CampaignDeus, which hasn’t yet had any briefs that include IGTV.

But the buzz around IGTV has piqued advertiser interest. “IGTV comes up every week. It’s on the radar of 80 percent of our clients and how it will ladder up to their broader video strategies,” said Manor, “particularly around driving the top- to mid-funnel metrics for now.”

Like in the early days of Facebook Live, there’s a lot of experimentation that’s happening on the platform as publishers work out what the audience wants and how to create content in a cost-effective way. Some such videos include Netflix’s hourlong video of “Riverdale” star Cole Sprouse eating a burger, and BuzzFeed’s 24-minute stream of a presenter folding down all the pages of a Harry Potter book.

“Publishers would have rushed in and not seen numbers because the expectation is high up front, but it will take time for the audience to get comfortable,” said Mark Holden, global strategy director at Starcom. “It’s not a case of switching on the audience tap but experimenting slowly over time to see how it will augment with what you’re currently doing.”

For Stylist, there’s little point in experimenting on IGTV when the user behavior isn’t there and while its audience is converting to site traffic through Stories. “Stories has helped our digital audience grow by 100 percent through traffic referral, but how long will it be before that functionality disappears?” said Wyatt, “With IGTV there’s been no material impact on our digital audience development.”

Like many publishers, Stylist has been working to reduce dependency on Facebook as a traffic referrer. Currently, Facebook accounts for 12 percent of referral traffic; Instagram Stories is less than 10 percent, but it won’t be long before it closes the gap, according to Wyatt, adding that Stylist digital revenue has grown 30 percent over the last year.

The post Lifestyle publisher Stylist quits IGTV in favor of Apple News appeared first on Digiday.

PepsiCo’s acquisition of Sodastream adds heft to its role as a direct-to-consumer retailer.

Hugh Johnston, the company’s chief financial officer, said the $3.2 billion acquisition Monday lets it play in a new business area. But it also gives it an opportunity to extend direct relationships with customers online.

Sodastream, which sells on its e-commerce site, Amazon, and physical and online stores of major retailers like Walmart and Target, is a new revenue area for PepsiCo, which has historically sold its products through third-party retailers (grocery stores, mostly.) The acquisition lets PepsiCo grows its e-commerce footprint, an opportunity for it to gain more data from direct-to-consumer relationships.

“Large holding companies like Pepsi are going to have more direct relationships with consumers,” said Jonathan Smalley, CEO of Yaguara, a data analytics company that serves e-commerce brands. “The big thing is owning the end-to-end data — even with a company as seemingly small as Sodastream, it’s an opportunity to own that interaction.”

PepsiCo did not respond to requests for comment, but Smalley said that by studying customer behavior patterns, PepsiCo can figure out how best to market to consumers and what kinds of future acquisitions will make sense as it adds products. It also offers a group of customers already committed to Sodastream through an in-home device, a cohort through which it can test new products.

The company’s Sodastream acquisition plays into a couple of broader trends, including the growing demand for healthier products and a shift to online shopping from physical stores, said eMarketer retail and e-commerce analyst Andrew Lipsman. Through its Amazon and e-commerce store, Sodastream has experience as a direct-to-consumer brand, insights that will help PepsiCo learn how to grow revenue through what he calls a “razor blade” sales model — an affordable base product and margin that comes from the complementary items like razor blades and printer cartridges.

“Sodastream has done well on Amazon; a lot of CPG brands are trying to figure out how to do that effectively, and the acquisition is effectively a way of buying into that expertise,” Lipsman said. “If you look at Amazon’s top-selling products within the food and beverage category, a high percentage of that are Keurig and related products.”

As food and beverage products grow their reach on Amazon and other e-commerce marketplaces, brands are increasingly getting into direct-to-consumer relationships. According to eMarketer, food and beverage is the fastest-growing category on Amazon’s U.S. store; sales increased 40 percent year over year. PepsiCo’s e-commerce business in 2017 generated approximately $1 billion in annualized retail sales.

While moving into direct relationships with consumers via e-commerce stores may have worked for brands like Keurig or Nespresso, success often hinges on levels of customer service. Despite the do-it-yourself fizzy-beverage trend, PepsiCo may endure challenges because the product category lies outside of its core offerings, said Sucharita Kodali, principal analyst at Forrester.

“Nespresso has a huge e-commerce business, but it’s also got excellent high-quality service,” said Sucharita Kodali, principal analyst at Forrester. “I think the best thing that Sodastream has going for it is the anti-plastic trend … if you can make your own drinks at home and that makes you fell like you’re doing your part for the environment, I think it will resonate.”

In recent years, PepsiCo has also been trying to diversify product lines. The company rolled out an initiative called Performance with Purpose, which seeks to evolve its offerings toward healthier, more environmentally conscious product categories.

“Our customers, employees and partners feel good knowing that there is a shared journey of sustainable transformation making our products more nutritious and more resource efficient, dialing up the taste while reducing our environmental footprint,” said CEO Indira Nooyi in an earnings call last month.

The post How Pepsi can use Sodastream acquisition to grow its e-commerce business appeared first on Digiday.