Month: September 2018

Each month, like clockwork, CNN issues a press release crowing about its “dominance” in digital news and pointing to its comScore rankings, boasting an audience “larger than any other outlet in multiplatform visitors, mobile visitors, video starts, millennial reach and social following.”

One of the core promises of digital media and advertising has always been its measurability. Marketers would finally know “which half of their ad budget was wasted,” and publishers who could build engaged, loyal and sizeable online audiences would be rewarded accordingly.

The post How publishers inflate audience numbers appeared first on Digiday.

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Get ready for publishers to start grousing about the triopoly. 

New forecasting from multiple analysts places Amazon’s still-nascent advertising platform as poised to not only become the third leg of the advertising duopoly of Google and Facebook, but also overtake it.

First up was eMarketer, which said it expected Amazon to be No. 3 in digital ad sales in 2018 with $4.6 billion in ad revenue in the U.S. That would mean that its acceleration in growth in ad revenue is putting it on pace to overtake Oath and Microsoft.

There’s a few things Amazon has done right recently. One is that it is much more effective at monetizing its traffic than others are — even others in retail media. A quick look at Amazon’s own search results page shows how many more ads now appear above the fold than used to.

Amazon’s recent moves to streamline its own business, getting rid of its confusing terminology of Amazon Media Group and Amazon Marketing Services in favor of an “Amazon Advertising” umbrella, is also making it more palatable — not only to agency ad buyers, but an increasing number of direct to consumer brands and those selling directly on Amazon. Another big move, according to eMarketer, has come from Amazon’s own increased push to what it calls non-endemic advertisers like auto companies. The message: Even if you don’t sell on Amazon, you can certainly and effectively advertise on it.

Jefferies this week said that the advertising, as well as subscriptions, is growing two times faster than the core Amazon retail business, with analyst Brent Thill expecting Amazon to hit $1.5 trillion by 2020.

Meanwhile, L2 founder and industry prognosticator Scott Galloway expects Amazon advertising to hit $11 billion this year, which means it will get as much in ad revenue as Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter combined.

That’s what is perhaps most interesting about the Amazon story. In some ways, the under-covered story of the e-commerce boom is the story of media. While Amazon may be the biggest player in the retail media space right now, others are also making moves. Walmart has been out talking to more buyers about its own advertising capabilities, while other retailers, including Kroger, are of increased interest to ad buyers.

“Ignore the cloud, ignore the retail [but] one of the biggest media companies in the world is a retailer,” said Galloway.

Overheard
“Influencers don’t have a conventional design background, but they have a very strong point of view and aesthetic. Not being able to sketch doesn’t mean you’re not a designer.” — A Nordstrom rep, explaining the basis for influencer Arielle Charnas’ new line for the retailer

What we covered
Weight Watchers, which rebranded as WW this week, is building out its mobile app to become a personalized wellness platform that stands on its own, as opposed to an add-on to meetings that take place in person. The app will now feature an Instagram-like community and more ways to track fitness goals.

Shopify is the $17 billion company that has quietly become the plumbing and power behind the direct-to-consumer brand revolution. It’s done it by building a network and ecosystem of apps, vendors and agencies that work within it to help DTC brands — and more — do everything from sales to marketing.

Michael Kors Holdings Limited — now renamed Capri Holdings Limited — plans to build the Versace brand into a $2 billion business. To make this happen, Michael Kors is going to have to focus more on product, double down on luxury and make e-commerce a core focus.

The post Retail Briefing: Amazon’s making the duopoly a triopoly appeared first on Digiday.

If you’ve ever wanted to go to a Yankees game with your favorite New York Post columnist, next year might be your chance.

Rather than focus on a metered paywall like its crosstown rival, The New York Daily News, the New York Post is planning to pursue consumer revenue through memberships. The Post intends to orient them around extra services or experiences targeted at fans of its sports coverage, or its popular gossip news sub-brand Page Six.

“These loyal users want things we aren’t giving them now,” said Remy Stern, the New York Post’s chief digital officer, at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Key Biscayne, Florida. “They want to meet their favorite columnist. They want to come to the office and see how the headlines are written.”

The Post decided to focus on services rather than content after extensive user testing and interviews, which led Stern to conclude that its audience was not going to pay for The Post’s reporting and coverage. Over 85 percent of the Post’s audience lives outside the New York metropolitan area. Though it’s taken many years to expand its digital footprint — its network, which includes the New York Post, Decider and Page Six, attracted over 53 million monthly uniques in August, according to comScore — the membership plans are focused on serving an extremely engaged sub-set of its audience, one that spends upwards of 30 minutes a day on its site. Stern estimates the potential audience for a membership program at about 500,000.

While there are a few details that need ironing out  — The Post does not have a price point picked out, for example — the plan is to launch one membership product in the first half of 2019.

But Stern said that he sees thinks Post assets could add value to a membership offering. For instance, it recently finished a two-year effort to digitize an archive of millions of photographs it has exclusive rights to; a member might be able to order prints from it, or get a print of The Post cover that the day they were born.

Stern said it is also figuring out whether the membership offerings will be Post-branded or otherwise. It has a pair of sub-brands, Page Six and the Decider, which grew out of sections in the print product. Page Six, in particular, has been a standout: It got its own site, pagesix.com, four years ago, and it unveiled an overhauled version of its mobile app earlier this year. The digital team is three times the size of the print team. It also has its own broadcast television show, “Page Six TV,” which is heading into its second season. “It’s become a separate brand,” Stern said.

That suits Stern and the rest of his colleagues just fine. “We are not a newspaper,” Stern said. “We’re a media brand.”

Publishers hunting for consumer revenue have cast a wide net, exploring subscriptions, commerce, events, and even donations. Many have focused on established tactics like paywalls, though some have modernized them by doing things like making them dynamic. The hope is that those incremental revenue streams can help minimize the pain of declining print advertising revenue. Some are skeptical that these new streams will totally make up for those losses.

Stern said he’s not yet done modeling to figure out how many people might take on a membership offering. “It’s not going to become the single-biggest revenue stream, but as a publisher today, you have to be doing everything,” Stern said.

The post The New York Post plans paid membership program appeared first on Digiday.

When Cosmopolitan senior vice president, publisher and chief revenue officer Donna Kalajian Lagani was looking at ways to rethink the title’s October print advertising pages, she turned to the beauty category. Beauty is crucial to the Cosmo audience, she said — it’s made up about 60 percent of all of its advertising volume in 2018, which is up 55 percent from last year.

Thus, Lagani spearheaded a partnership with Perfect Corporation’s YouCam to enable readers to virtually try-on makeup on Cosmopolitan.com after snapping a photo of a special QR code in an eight-page native content package in the magazine. As of last December, Perfect Corporation boasted over 500 million downloads across brands, globally; meanwhile, Cosmopolitan’s monthly print readership is nearly 15 million and it sees 21 million unique visitors per month online. Digital has been a high point for Cosmo: Since the magazine’s site relaunch in May, traffic is up 12 percent compared to last year.

Cosmo’s beauty-minded collaboration with YouCam makes it the fourth publisher to invest further in the beauty category in a matter of weeks. In September alone, Condé Nast announced the debut of its Beauty Studio, a 2,600-square-foot physical space at Condé Nast’s 1 World Trade Center headquarters for in-house editorial brands and external advertising clients to create beauty content; Dazed Media in the U.K. launched its new platform, Dazed Beauty, aimed at rethinking beauty coverage with a bent towards inclusivity and diversity; and women’s online media site Refinery29 launched its first beauty product collaboration with Revlon, called Make Your Mark, which features a lip kit of lipsticks and lip balms.

According to Euromonitor International, the global beauty and cosmetics market was worth $465 billion in revenue in 2017 and is expected to grow by more than 14 percent by 2022. Beauty is a sizable opportunity for publishers as they are looking for new ways to resonate with their readers. This is especially true as print magazine advertising sales continue to fall: Ad buying firm Magna reported a 13 percent decline in 2017 and a similar double-digital decline rate for 2018.

Certainly, the push for publishers to focus more on beauty partnerships comes at a time when traditional advertising revenue is dwindling. As companies like Hearst, Condé Nast and Dazed Media look for alternative revenue streams, it’s hard to ignore the excitement around the beauty industry on channels like Instagram and Snapchat.

“Trying to look outside standard business decisions with their customers and make an emotional connection with them is very powerful; that builds longterm trust,” said Ken Pasternak, president of branding agency Marshall Strategy. “Beauty is a category that has tremendous personal relevance, so publishers have to engage with consumers in a new and personal way.”

Appealing to a beauty-centric audience
According to parent company Hearst, Cosmopolitan has more than 81 million monthly beauty-obsessed consumers across its print and digital audiences, so the content is endemic to its millennial demographic. Furthermore, the Cosmopolitan reader finds beauty content the most compelling compared to fashion or lifestyle, said Lagani.

“The YouCam makeup try-on amplifies the beauty experience,” she said. “It’s gets our Cosmo reader to actually connect more with her favorite products and products she is interested in learning more about.”

Creating Condé Nast’s Beauty Studio, where Condé Nast editors will help navigate video and social production and still-life photo shoots for clients, came from a similar vantage point, according to Lucy Kriz, Condé Nast chief industry officer. Across its print, digital and video brands, including Vogue, Glamour and Allure, the publishing company reaches more than 120 million consumers — beauty is also its largest category.

The same can be said for Refinery29: Philippe von Borries, co-founder and co-CEO, said, “Beauty is central to Refinery29 — over 90 percent of our audience comes for beauty content.” In 2018, alone, the website’s editorial content within its beauty vertical outperformed other verticals by 50 percent in terms of average visits.

Using what’s worked in the past
In many ways, Cosmopolitan’s YouCam partnership plays off of past learnings. In December, the brand placed Snapcodes in its pages to unlock special content, like beauty and style tips, gift ideas and streaming workouts. In March, Cosmopolitan placed scannable Amazon SmileCodes, or branded QR codes, on its print pages, which linked to sales pages when using the Amazon app — Seventeen did the same on its pages.

While neither activation was beauty-focused, Cosmopolitan reported that the March SmileCodes had a 13 percent conversion-to-sale rate. Using the tech-enabled click-to-buy data, Lagani felt confident Cosmopolitan could capitalize by offering a similar makeup experience to beauty junkies — this time with AR at the forefront. This paralleled a company-conducted survey: Cosmo found that 72 percent of readers would like to virtually try-on makeup, and that once they do, they are twice as likely to make a purchase. That Cosmopolitan’s millennial readers are already so selfie- and phone-focused provided further fervor around the YouCam play.

The Cosmopolitan/YouCam experience is also live on the magazine’s Instagram page via Stories, and the title will add the feature, which is currently sponsored, to editorial content in early 2019: One editorial beauty page per issue will feature the try-on technology, as will one beauty look online and one on social – other Hearst titles, like Women’s Health and Seventeen magazines will follow suit.

Refinery29 has been partners with Revlon for over five years. Most recently, the two brands partnered on a sponsored, custom content featuring model Ashley Graham around Revlon’s “Live Boldly” campaign. In 2015, they collaborated on an astrology-focused “Sign of Love” custom series that combined makeup looks, photography and video how-tos. Von Borries called out the latter as “one of our most successful branded partnerships to date,” though he wouldn’t provide figures.

The Make Your Mark collaboration around lipsticks and lip balms was smart business for both brands, as Refinery29 content around lipstick is viewed on average 33 percent more than other beauty stories. According to Debra Perelman, Revlon president and CEO, it helps that Refinery29 appeals to millennials, a demographic Revlon, like many heritage cosmetics companies, is after.

“Refinery29’s voice is very much aligned with Revlon. They’re optimistic. They’re inclusive. They’re speaking to the younger generation in a culturally relevant way,” she said. “We know today’s millennial consumer sees companies who are passionate about female empowerment as innovative.”

Tapping into Refinery29’s audience through Revlon product allows the cosmetics company to change its existing market perception, said Pasternak. “What better way for advertisers to find new groups of consumers than to align themselves with a brand or publisher, where there is already built-in loyalty?” he said. “Borrowing some of Refinery29’s credibility is helping Revlon, and the revenue opportunities are real for Refinery29. It’s a worthwhile endeavor for publishers and beauty brands to figure this formula out.”

The reach for revenue
Cosmo’s YouCam try-on experience, Dazed’s beauty platform, Refinery29’s Revlon product and Condé Nast’s beauty-centric studio are all ways to reinvent beauty revenue. They are also welcome departures from the idea that magazine-branded subscription boxes, events and affiliate-link marketing are the only way to create increased overall company value in the beauty category.

Refinery29’s product partnership will pad the bottom line, but it’s not the only option. Dazed Beauty, which debuted on Instagram first on Sept. 6 and launches its website on Wednesday, plans on monetizing itself via branded content and display ads. Dazed Beauty’s first ad campaign for a Maison Margiela fragrance is set to run at the end of September. Creative director Isamaya Ffrench told Business of Fashion Dazed Beauty’s launch was a way to modernize heritage beauty brands’ marketing formulas with a bent towards digital. Currently, Dazed Media makes 35 percent of its revenue through display advertising and 65 percent from branded content.

Condé Nast will be creating revenue opportunities for itself through the short-form content (both branded and white-label) it creates for brands in its Beauty Studio, as well as through studio sponsorships. For the September Beauty Studio launch, Neutrogena and Dyson Supersonic are presenting sponsors and have created white-label, social-first campaigns with Condé Nast. In exchange for studio sponsorships, Neutrogena and Dyson products will receive placement in the studio through the end of the year.

And Cosmopolitan is also paying forward the sponsorship opportunities: Its October native spread is sponsored solely by Macy’s, and the product featured in the unit is by Juicy Couture cosmetics, which is sold exclusively at Macy’s. Beauty brands can also choose to activate and sponsor the virtual try-on experience digitally- or socially-only, as Shiseido is doing at the end of October around its recent color cosmetics relaunch.

Though Hearst is featuring the YouCam virtual-try experience in Women’s Health and Seventeen as of 2019 (both on the sales and editorial fronts), Lagani wouldn’t specifically say if the same opportunities will be presented to the other Hearst titles, like Elle and Harper’s Bazaar. Still, it is likely.

“Nothing is confirmed, but based on the success we had with Amazon, other Hearst titles are interested and want to follow our lead,” she said.

The post Why publishers are tapping the beauty category for newness and growth appeared first on Digiday.

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