Month: October 2018

Kavita Vazirani was working on the marketing side for Comcast, where she like many marketers struggled to know if their ads were performing as intended, much less if they were running at all. She and Linda Yaccarino, the head of ad sales for NBCUniversal, were on opposite sides of the negotiating table, but the two saw eye to eye on the need to improve media measurement across platforms.

What does an impression even mean, with people consuming media across a proliferating number of platforms and screens? What’s the value of a three-second ad versus a 30-second TV commercial? “Linda was more and more in meetings with clients like Comcast saying, ‘I don’t know if [your inventory] is driving sales for me, how do I get a full view of what my message is to our customers?’ It was always a pain point,” Vazirani says.

The post With TV viewing spreading across platforms, NBCU’s Kavita Vazirani is trying to get to the true value of an ad view appeared first on Digiday.

You can’t blame publishers for being wary when a giant Silicon Valley tech platform comes to them promising big new audiences and (someday) a way to make money off them.

But publishers, burned by Facebook, are now looking with no small amount of optimism to Apple, which has quietly wooed publishers over the past year with a small team of its own Apple News editorial staff, huddling with publisher editorial teams in publisher offices. The Apple News team is headed by Lauren Kern, who left a prominent editor job at New York magazine for Apple last year and whose new title, editor in chief, is straight from the news industry. Kern’s staffers invite publications to pitch stories to be featured in Apple News. The implicit message: We’re just like you, we get it.

“They’re attentive, and you have the sense they’re human beings that are trying to nurture a relationship of some kind,” said a publishing exec who has regular contact with Apple News editorial staff. CNN Digital has daily contact with the Apple News edit team, and it enables CNN to reach an audience for political news and non-political news alike, even though the monetization lags, said S. Mitra Kalita, svp of news, opinion and programming at CNN Digital. “This is very much a human interaction,” she said.

Apple’s hands-on approach and the traffic boom have enabled it to market itself as publisher-friendly. This has won Apple some favor with publishers — at least the elite ones that Apple courts — who have become weary and loathsome of platforms whose business interests seem out of sync with their own. On the surface, it’s easy to say this is a story that’s repeating itself with Apple — and gullible publishers are being taken for a ride yet again. At the Digiday Publishing Summit last week, New York Post digital chief Remy Stern groused that despite an audience of “millions,” the News Corp publication was making just “hundreds” in revenue. Slate calculated it makes more from an article on Slate.com that generates 50,000 pageviews than it does from Slate’s 6 million pageviews on Apple News. New York Media was getting as much as 8 percent of traffic from Apple News but monetizing those pages less than articles on its own sites.

The publisher bet is that, unlike Google and Facebook with their ad-driven model, Apple’s business model is built on sales of expensive phones that is a portal to an ecosystem of high-quality content and services that are a growing part of its business.

“They’re all content aggregators, but they all have different business focuses. [Apple’s] focus is on their devices and bringing services that add value to their devices,” said Stan Pavlovsky, president of digital at Meredith.

Apple’s relationship with publishers has gone through ups and downs. With its iPad launch in 2010, it held the promise of saving the digitally paralyzed magazine business. Then under Steve Jobs, Apple seemed like a good bet, with its devotion to quality and beloved devices (former publisher David Carey even gave a testimonial in an iPhone ad). But most digital magazines were straight replicas of print; Apple dragged its feet in letting publications sell subscriptions, not just single copies; and the iPad itself soon became a flop. Then Apple launched Newsstand, an app that gave newspapers and magazines a dedicated storefront, but its design made it hard for publications to promote repeat usage. Plus, publishers never liked that Apple took its 30 percent cut. In the iPad’s early days, Apple time and time again ignored the business needs of publishers, who depend on having a direct relationship with their readers, once even comparing publishers’ content to Angry Birds.

Today, Apple News is a light lift for publishers to run their content in the app, but it’s too early to tell how much revenue they’ll get out of it. Apple in May started letting publishers use Google’s DoubleClick for Publishers to serve ads on their Apple News articles, removing a big barrier to selling ads on those pages, but even then, the move was limited to display ads, it only applied to ads publishers sold directly, and it didn’t let publishers sell programmatically.

As a result, advertising revenue has been off to a slow start. One, speaking anonymously, said it is on track to make a few hundred thousand this year by extending ad campaigns to its Apple News audience. The New York Post said it made around $600 in a six-month period. Like Facebook, Apple News by design keeps people within the app, which is counter to the interests of many publishers that want to build a direct (and maybe paying) relationship with readers. Two early adopters of Apple News, the Financial Times and The Guardian, have pulled out of it.

Apple’s maniacally secretive culture and disdain for advertising, the lifeblood of most publishers, haven’t changed, and it grates on publishing execs. Where Facebook and Google at least put themselves out as collaborative partners to publishers, especially when it came to devising subscription tools, Apple is tight-lipped about its own plans. Publishers can sell subscriptions through Apple News, but they get limited engagement data and Apple takes 30 percent of the revenue, more than Facebook and Google. The Economist is among publishers selling subs on Apple News, but relative to its audience there, subscription sales are very low, said Lydia Kaldas, svp of strategy and channel relationships at The Economist, who wishes Apple would do more to market subs.

“There is lots of room for improvement,” she said. One publishing exec recalled that in a meeting this year initiated by Apple, Apple News’ people asked the publisher all of one question.

“They’re very condescending in their approach,” this person said. “It’s, ‘We’re doing this and we’ll tell you when we figure it out.’”

Now, Apple’s pitch is about Texture, the Netflix-style service it bought earlier this year that gives subscribers all-you-can-eat access to digital publications for $10 a month. It’s expected to fold Texture into Apple News, and it’s trying to get big-name publications like The New York Times and Washington Post on board. Texture was started in 2012 by big magazine companies including Condé  Nast and Time Inc. but never really took off, but it has potential to grow if Apple really markets it.

For publishers that were just selling a handful of digital replicas of their publications in Texture, getting exposure to Apple’s millions of Apple News users is an attractive proposition. Top-shelf publishers have more to lose by being part of a bundle, where they’d get paid a fraction of the $10 subscription price based on usage, compared to the hundreds of dollars a year they can charge for an individual subscription. “What if it works? Then Apple News owns us,” fretted one publishing exec that’s eyeing the Apple-controlled subscription service.

Working with platforms is a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t proposition. Publishers don’t want to invest a lot in a platform, only to get little audience or revenue in return. On the other hand, if things go too well, the publisher is dependent on the platform that calls the shots, putting a lot of its business at risk if the platform makes a business decision that adversely affects the publisher. Publishers are aware of being burned before and have wised up.

“We’ve seen platforms make changes that have huge implications for publishers,” a digital exec at a major publishing company said. “The proof will be in the performance and monitoring.”

The post ‘They’re attentive’: Inside Apple’s pitch to wary publishers appeared first on Digiday.

Advertising Week is no longer about navigating the hellscape of Times Square. Now, advertising and media industry has been forced to navigate an Upper West Side movie theater, where panels were inside actual theaters. For the creatives in the room, dreaming of being Scorcese, it was probably nice to see their expensive work on gigantic screens. For everyone else, the day was walking through dark hallways, sitting in carpeted chairs and thinking about the minimal amount of popcorn.

Facebook swoops in to talk security
Facebook’s vp of global marketing solutions Carolyn Everson kicked off that day as a last-minute addition to the schedule. But Facebook didn’t tout a new ad format. There was a lot of other issues to talk about, obviously last week’s massive security breach that gave hackers access to about 50 million Facebook accounts along with the departures of Instagram cofounders and a Forbes profile of WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton that included damning comments about Zuckerberg. Oh and don’t forget about the saga of Cambridge Analytica and ongoing election interference. Everson, a familiar presence to the ad world, addressed each of those scandals.

“I was hoping to hear more about what this means for marketers,” Joseph Kozak, the founder of KTK Design, said after the 50-minute panel. To Kozak, even the latest security scandal didn’t seem like that big of deal overall, “50 million is bad. But if you look at how big they are, 50 million out of 2.5 billion is a percentage I can live with.” Meanwhile, the agency partners Facebook spoke with were saying, “I’m not worried. I’m more empathetic,” Everson said on the panel. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

As to what really matters to marketers, Oct. 1 was a pretty big day: Farewell to partner categories. Everson assured attendees that advertising isn’t going anywhere on Facebook despite calls for a subscription model, like WhatsApp’s Acton. Everson repeatedly used the example of a farmer in Kenya shouldn’t have to make a choice between feeding his family and paying for Facebook. (Let’s hope this mythical farmer would choose A.) As for Acton, Everson wants to hear for about the billionaire’s philanthropic efforts. (Zing.) Instagram is still going strong and won’t completely become Facebook 2.0, despite the founders leaving. Everson preached that Instagram is for following hobbies (For her: bulldogs) while Facebook is more about family and friends. Advertising, apparently, can work well with each. Marketers should be watching the Stories format — copied from Snapchat — due to its growth in usage by consumers, Everson said.

— Kerry Flynn & Max Willens

Overheards
“It’s too hot. There are no snacks. The coffee is terrible, and they’ve already run out of water.” — Ad tech delegate

“Please don’t bring up Facebook.” — Agency CEO before a panel

“Marketers are people, too.” — Carolyn Everson

“AI is still in the hype phase. There was a line out the door for the AI and data session this morning.” — Data marketer

“Wow, this must be important. They even have the windows covered.” — Student walking by

Not enough bite, but real dogs
Monday panels were overall quite dull, other than some superfans gushing over Emma Stone or simply enjoying the plush seats within the IMAX theater, home to the Target Media Network stage. But at least outside of that stage on the third floor, attendees could admire a live dog. Yes, Target brought their mascot, Bullseye. We heard there are four dogs, one of which is named Jack. Otherwise, Hulu’s booth, on the first floor, provided a bunch of phone chargers and mini water bottles. On the second floor, Captify had an all-day bar with booze flowing at 4 p.m. (Digiday’s Advertising Week team was in darkened theaters until the very end.)

Cannabis fights for legitimacy
Brand safety has touched mainstream brands, news publishers and platforms. Cannabis is having its own brand safety problem. While it’s gaining mainstream acceptance and making its way into more industries (CBD pet food and face cream, anyone?), its players still battle a negative stigma and misperceptions. Branding is its own issue; there are no big established cannabis brands yet (though just give the big CPG companies time, they’ll get there), and the varying legality from state to state makes it hard to create a consistent, nationwide experience. Some companies have to start up new companies or strike licensing agreements to expand to other states.

“It’s going to be a war of brands,” said Drake Sutton-Shearer, founder and CEO of Prohbtd, a cannabis-focused online media company, one of a handful of speakers at a cannabis-themed afternoon. And if other industries are awash in data, cannabis is just figuring out who is buying the product and what they’re using it for. (In a survey by one vendor of attendees at an event, 68 percent said they used cannabis to get a good night’s sleep.) Companies also talked about the need to educate people who still think weed is for stoners, and the role branded content can play. Publishers, are you listening?

— Lucia Moses

Brands do it themselves
For years, brands have talked about needing more content, but that doesn’t necessarily mean more work for agencies.

Namaste Technologies co-founder Sean Dollinger mentioned that his company, which sells vaporizers and other cannabis-centric products, has a 30-person content team cranking out content specifically designed to attract specific customer segments.

“If you have back pain from golf, we should be creating content for you that’s different from somebody else,” Dollinger said.

Others see content as something that must be considered at the earliest stages. Before Hatch Collective, a fashion brand focused on maternity-wear, decided to open its first store, it saw both an opportunity to drive sales and earned media. At its New York location, it throws 10 to 12 events every month, not just for their core customers but their partners too. At one recent event, it held a class for expecting fathers.

“We gave them beer and showed them how to change a diaper,” said Lindsey Bressler, Hatch Collective’s vp of strategy.

— Hilary Milnes & Max Willens

3 Questions with David Galinsky, director of customer data science at McDonald’s
If you thought the term big data was over, think again. McDonald’s hosted a panel titled “Bringing Big Data to Big Macs,” highlighting their work with Civis Analysis. We caught up with panelist Galinsky to learn more.

Why are you here now?
“We’ve really gone through digital transformations, installing kiosks and booting up a mobile app. That alone got us a ton of customer level data. We need to get more. [Civis] led the charge to help the company understand we have all this data we’ve never had before so we can start using it to make better decisions, understand what they purchase rather than third-party data attributed.”

What have you learned now that you’ve collected more data?
“Some deemed conventional wisdom turned out to be false. What we started uncovering is various campaigns we were running resonated with different types of customers than what we thought. We learned McDonalds is truly a family-focused, family-centered business. You got convenience, value.”

Should everyone in the quick service industry make an app?
“It’s one thing to have an app. It’s one thing to properly collect and use the data.”

Coming Up
9 a.m.: “Advertising won’t work without engagement” with Publishers Clearing House, Viacom, Tastemade and more
10:30 a.m.: “The Rebound: Recovering from Failure” with Sundance, Equinox, Getty and GE
11 a.m.: NPR, Stitcher and Pandora discuss scaling podcasts.
3:15 p.m.: Uber’s programmatic display lead chats about the ride-hailing app’s media buying strategy.
3:30 p.m.: NBC’s Linda Yaccarino discusses the transformation of TV with Target.
4 p.m.: BuzzFeed’s Ze Frank and Omnicom chat about “supercharging influencers”
4:30 p.m.: Digiday’s Sahil Patel interviews Hulu’s head of advertising platforms and Blue Apron’s CMO about the future of advertising in OTT

The post Advertising Week Briefing: ‘Please don’t bring up Facebook’ appeared first on Digiday.

The first billion is the hardest. A year after introducing a native video player and giving its users the ability to record and post their own videos to the platform, Reddit says it’s now averaging one billion “native” video views per month.

Video is becoming a growing medium for how Reddit users interact with each other, the company said. In August, Reddit users posted or uploaded a total of 996,000 videos on the site, which is up 31 percent year over year. Reddit is now serving more than 400,000 hours of hosted videos per day and 13 million hours per month, up 38 percent since the beginning of 2018.

Unlike most publishers, Reddit is its own platform and does not rely on platforms like YouTube and Facebook to rack up video views (though users can still embed other video players on the platform). One thing in Reddit’s favor: the company said it has 330 million monthly active users, which means it has plenty of users who can learn to adopt video as part of their Reddit experience. (According to comScore, Reddit reached 73 million unique visitors in the U.S. across platforms in August.)

Reddit is not running in-stream ads against its videos but instead places ads within its various feeds and subreddits. The company said its ad revenue has more than tripled over the last three years, but declined to share a specific revenue figure as well as how much video is contributing to the overall ad business. Video ad clients have included Audi, Old Spice, Nintendo and Netflix. (An example of an in-feed video ad from Grammarly is below.)

“It’s driving greater adoption and interest from brands,” said Zubair Jandali, Reddit’s head of ad sales.

There is still plenty of room for video to grow on Reddit. Today, nearly 10,000 active communities on Reddit — roughly 7 percent of all 138,000 active communities — are posting or watching native videos. And roughly 20 percent of all Reddit users have watched or regularly upload videos, the company said.

“Video usage has been pretty organic,” said Alex Le, vp of product for Reddit. “We have seen over time more and more people incorporating videos into the way they are having conversations on Reddit.”

Reddit launched its native video player last August. The platform gave users the ability to upload videos directly onto Reddit instead of pasting YouTube links or embeds and the ability to record and upload videos directly from their phones. The tool also lets users turn videos into Gifs.

Video is getting users to stick around longer. Reddit users who watched videos during the second quarter spent twice as much time on the platform than those who didn’t, according to Reddit.

Reddit said the native video player is getting users to spend even more time on the platform. Today, users who watch embedded videos — regardless of whether the video is hosted by Reddit, YouTube or some other video player — spend 45 percent more time on site on a daily basis. Those who watch Reddit-hosted videos spend an additional 39 percent time on Reddit on top of that every day, the company said.

Moreover, more than 50 percent of all views on media content on Reddit now go through its own hosted video player, versus embeds of YouTube and other video players, Le said. (Reddit counts full views at three seconds.)

“From Reddit’s standpoint: why should they give all of that functionality and time that goes with [uploading and watching videos] to YouTube? Why not just give users the option to do it directly and keep people on your platform longer?” said Jim Nail, principal analyst at Forrester. “Rather than being a distribution platform for video, this allows Reddit to be a more multi-functional platform.”

Most Reddit videos are short, ranging from user-generated videos and Gifs that last no longer than 30 seconds to short clips that run for a minute or two, according to Le. A year in, the product exec describes three dominant types of Reddit-hosted videos: soundless Gifs that can go viral across communities; videos centering on large “passion-based” communities such as gaming; and niche, evergreen videos such as how-to clips on how to keep succulents alive.

With mobile apps accounting for 70 percent of Reddit’s video consumption, it makes sense that users would use Reddit’s camera feature to record and upload video clips to the platform, Le said.

Reddit’s video rollout initially consisted of testing the feature with a group of 10 “alpha” subreddits, followed by 200 “beta” partners such as the subreddits for “The Daily Show” and another for the “hold my beer” meme. Video hosting is now available to all subreddits and users, with the exception of private communities and those dedicated to NSFW topics.

While a billion monthly video views and growing adoption among users is a promising start, Reddit still has a long way to go to catch other platforms, which capture billions of video views per day, said Paul Verna, principal analyst at eMarketer. And for most of Reddit’s history, video has not been an integral part of the largely text-heavy platform.

“There is a mental leap that users have to make,” said Verna. “It’s a start, but if they’re going to compete with other platforms, they’re going to have to keep doing it better and more.”

Le said video is already creating more active users: “Since we launched video hosting, we have seen a huge percentage of people — something like 45 percent — who have uploaded a video who previously never had a conversation on Reddit before.”

“If all other platforms are any indication, once you open up the floodgates, there’s no going back — it wasn’t that long ago that Instagram was purely a static image platform,” said Verna. “The users that are uploading directly and watching more videos now see that as part of the Reddit experience; and more and more people who will be new to the platform will see that as part of what Reddit’s all about.”

For the foreseeable future, Reddit is focused on growing video adoption among its users — specifically, getting more people to record, share and watch videos. Professionally-produced content from media companies and online video creators is not something the company is actively courting, Le said. But Le also acknowledged that Reddit sees an opportunity in and plans to explore longer-form video, which is something that professional video makers excel at.

“What we wanted to do was set out on a path where video is another tool that our communities can use,” Le said. “That’s where we have seen the most uptake.”

The post Reddit hits 1 billion video views per month a year after launching its own video player appeared first on Digiday.

Axel Springer is now using fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal to press its case that advertisers should be wary of Facebook.

The German publishing group’s sales house, Media Impact, commissioned a study after the Cambridge Analytica scandal erupted in March, to gauge whether user trust in the social platform in Germany had dropped. Just over 50 percent of the 4,000-plus respondents aged between 16 and 49 years old said they make false statements on social media platforms including Facebook to protect their identity.

When respondents were asked their views on which news sites or social media sites were likely to lose popularity in future, 46 percent said Facebook would become less popular — more than any other site. Three-fourths said Facebook-owned Instagram that would stay or get more popular.

Naturally, Axel Springer is making the study a selling point with advertisers.

“We’re giving Facebook a harder time,” said Carsten Schwecke, chief digital officer of Media Impact. “The Cambridge Analytica scandal has caused a big shift in terms of user trust in Germany. We have done internal research that supports this. There could be real plus points for us as publishers from that.”

Facebook didn’t comment for this article.

According to Facebook, 32 million Germans use Facebook monthly, while over 2.23 billion use it globally. Although, Facebook also lost 3 million daily active users in Europe, the company said in July. Facebook is growing its European publisher partnerships team, having hired one of its biggest critics and, until recently Spiegel CEO, Jesper Doub. His remit is to improve relationships between Facebook and European news publishers.

Axel Springer has a history of pushing back against the dominance of both Facebook and Google. The publishing giant has gone public about how it has intentionally weaned itself of being reliant on Google’s ad tech tools and has since been active in encouraging other European publishers to follow suit. The publisher also created an open-source consent management platform for publishers and ad tech vendors that needed to safeguard their compliance to the General Data Protection Regulation but that didn’t want to be beholden to using Google’s CMP. The publisher has developed its own grading system for approaching its partnerships with both Facebook and Google. The concept is that if a platform like Facebook doesn’t meet three of its criteria, the publisher halts all activity.

Other German publishers, such as Gruner+ Jahr, have long been vocal about where Facebook needs to be more accountable. On the one hand, publishers like Gruner + Jahr continue to work with Facebook to combat fake news and hate speech on the platform. Yet on the other, Facebook’s role as a distributor has diminished for publishers. The volume of referral traffic that Facebook generates for media publishing house Gruner + Jahr, has dropped between 50 and 80 percent over the last year, according to Arne Wolter, chief digital officer at Gruner + Jahr.

“Publishers are definitely giving Facebook a harder time here,” said Oliver von Wersch, an independent consultant for publishers in Germany. “Facebook as a publishing channel is not as relevant for them anymore. The [referral] traffic decrease from Facebook has been significant here over the last nine months.”

Germany isn’t alone in losing Facebook traffic referrals over the last year, but it’s lost more than some European counterparts, according to Chartbeat data pulled for Digiday. In France, Facebook referral traffic dropped 18 percent in August from January 2017, while in Germany it dropped 50 percent. In the U.S., referral traffic dropped 40 percent over the same time period, and the U.K. has seen a 26 percent drop.

With Germany’s tough stance on data privacy has meant that the Cambridge Analytica scandal didn’t unseat the German market the same way as it did in the U.S., according to some agency executives.

“In Germany, we’ve always had to argue the case for people being skeptical about personal data,” said Max Embert, social media director at Publicis PixelParks in Germany. “But since this whole affair [Cambridge Analytica] the U.S. [Facebook] team now gets huge pressure on this kind of topic, and finally understands why the German market is this way.”

However, others believe that Germany’s conservatism around data privacy isn’t what it was.

“For people aged over 50 that had first-hand experience of Eastern Germany, for example, it’s still critical,” said Oliver Gertz of MediaCom Germany. “But the younger generations don’t feel the same.” While people may voice concerns about privacy, there isn’t much evidence to show they proactively change their privacy settings, he added. “U.S. consumers care more about data privacy than they did 10 years ago, and Germans care less about it now than they did 10 to 20 years ago.”

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Lowe’s has been using Pinterest for five years to help users visualize home improvement projects by serving up products or collections that are a fit based on their Pinterest profile interests.

Now, it’s going a step further — it’s going to add transaction data to customer Pinterest profiles so it can suggest products to customers.

Transaction history will further personalize suggestions for customers based on data; for example, if the retailer knows a customer repeatedly purchases living room furniture, it can offer up pins that align with these interests.

The retailer wouldn’t say if the test would be applied to all customers who are Pinterest users or a selected group of them, but Lowe’s is growing Pinterest as a product discovery tool to learn more about customers’ future intent — a way to target sponsored ads and content as it builds its relationships with customers and prospects.

“One of the things we’re exploring is the value of sharing our transactional data; we think there’s an opportunity to better understand the customer journey using that combined data, to show interest and inspiration and when they pull the trigger to buy,” said Shannon Versaggi, vp of targeted marketing at Lowe’s, at Advertising Week New York on Monday. Lowe’s plans to test the addition of transaction data with customer Pinterest profiles beginning next year; the company is also partnering with a location-based data provider to test the relationship between Pinterest interactions and traffic to physical stores.

Retailers that are selling or marketing home improvement projects to consumers are increasingly looking to Pinterest to assess and build customer intent to purchase products. Lowe’s was an early mover among home improvement brands using Pinterest, but more brands have come on board this year. For example, in late September, Chase Home Lending rolled out a Pinterest planning tool called Chase Dream Boards to help customers consider the financing aspects of home improvement projects. In June, Home Depot rolled out a feature called “Shop the Look” that lets customers peruse through curated Pinterest boards that suggest and pair products of interest to customers.

For Lowe’s, Pinterest stands out among platforms because customers keep coming back to it as they plan their projects. According to Versaggi, many customers who use Pinterest look at the boards months later — a strong signal of future intent. Customers on Pinterest also are more likely to click through ads. For example, Lowe’s said customers on Pinterest have a 20 percent higher click-through rate on shoppable pins compared to the average rate from Pinterest campaigns. While customers searching on Amazon or Google likely already have an idea of what they’re searching for, Pinterest lets customers get creative with design and conceive of ideas even though the purchase may take place months after the initial Pinterest exploration.

“The visual nature of what Pinterest is, ‘sometimes I can’t articulate what I want, I know it when I see it,’” said Pinterest’s U.S. head of partnerships Bill Watkins.

While customers don’t directly convert from initial interactions on Pinterest, it’s an early indicator of future intent that’s measurable as part of a multichannel attribution strategy where customer journeys can be mapped. Because of its character as a brand discovery tool, Pinterest also has the added benefit of not presenting sponsored pins or ads in an obtrusive manner for the customer; rather, they’re just seen as part of the product discovery process.

“A lot of brands are using Pinterest because it seems a little more authentic — a sponsored post seems a little more authentic than looking through your Instagram feed where an ad comes up out of nowhere,” said Lauren Smith, associate director of growth at branding agency Sullivan.

Despite the brand lift with Pinterest, the challenge is to generate the level of interaction to ultimately build a noticeable bump in sales, said Peter Chun, vp of platform partnerships and strategy at SourceCode. Lowe’s Pinterest page has more than 3 million followers and 10 million monthly viewers, according to the company.

“The question is can you drive enough customer adoption through the 250 million monthly active users that Pinterest has right now,” he said.

The post How Lowe’s is using Pinterest to build customer intent appeared first on Digiday.

Last week, The Independent rolled out its subscription product, Independent Minds, which has been in the works since January. For £55 a year ($71.71), members get access to premium content, a daily newsletter, event tickets, e-books, an ad-free site and the option to help shape editorial coverage.

The ESI Media title shuttered its print edition in March 2016. Since then, it has used Facebook as a way to grow audiences overseas, particularly in the U.S., monetizing this mostly through programmatic ads. This year, it recorded profits of £2.5 million ($3.3 million).

Like other publishers, diversifying revenues in a volatile digital ad market is a key part of The Independent’s strategy. Advertising is still its dominant source and is growing, while content licensing and subscriptions to Daily Edition, its daily digital newspaper, make up other revenue streams.

With Independent Minds, the publisher said it plans to break even in a year.

“We’re leveraging the journalists and international footprint we already have, this is additional without having an adverse impact on the business,” said Zach Leonard, managing director of digital at ESI Media, who has previously worked at subscription publishers the Times of London and The Financial Times. “This hasn’t been about hiring extra heads to create content.”

The Independent has around 20 on staff in the U.S., 15 of whom are editorial, and it plans to hire an additional 10 over the next year. Roughly a third of its audience comes from the U.K., a third from the U.S. and a third from the rest of the world. It has around 10 correspondents across Europe, India and the Middle East.  In addition to more journalists, the publisher staffed up in data analytics, product development and marketing in the U.K. for Independent Minds.

Pieces behind the paywall include longer features like whether Barack Obama caused Donald Trump’s presidency, a look at what happens to jihadi orphans, a feature written by long-distance runner Paula Radcliffe and an opinion piece critiquing Theresa May’s Brexit plans from the Tory Conference.

The challenge will be in creating content that people want to part cash with to access.

The Independent was hit hard when the Facebook made changes to its news-feed algorithm at the beginning of this year, by referral traffic and Instant Articles revenue. Staff were focused on writing headlines to fit mobile and different social media channels, posting the volume and time of day to move the needle. Now that team is more focused on driving up The Independent in search rankings.

“There’s a refocus and emphasis on Voices [opinion pieces from columnists] and commentary, the DNA of The Independent,” said Leonard. “We have more foreign correspondents in situ than five years ago. Independent Minds will lengthen and strengthen what The Independent has always been known for: Strong political commentary, foreign affairs and increasingly more business and economics.”

The challenge for The Independent is marrying a mass model with a focused membership model, said Aron Pilhofer, who teaches journalism at Temple University.

“You can’t have a strategy built for massive scale and to drive memberships,” Pilhofer said. “You can have a mix, but you need to have a direction of travel. The challenge is it’s very difficult to have it both ways.”

The Independent’s pricing is lower than competitors like The Times of London, which charges £39 ($50.84) a month for a print and digital subscription, and The Economist, which charges £179 ($233.33) for an annual print and digital subscription. The Independent Daily Edition is £12.99 ($16.91) a month. While this attracts new audiences, the potential challenge is cannibalizing Daily Edition customers to trade down to a cheaper alternative.

“Communication of member benefits and understanding how they drive value perception is critical here,” said Greg Harwood, director at strategy and marketing consultant Simon-Kucher & Partners.

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With more than 1 billion active monthly users, WeChat rules China.

Well, at least, mobile in China, which is becoming an increasingly critical area for retailers to sharpen their chops. According to eMarketer data, mobile e-commerce sales in China are on track to top $1 trillion by the end of this year. Since WeChat essentially is China’s mobile industry, retailers need to understand the ins and outs of the social-plus platform, the way users interact on it, and how they want to be talked to by companies on the app.

Speaking at Advertising Week New York this week, YinYin Gao, WeChat parent Tencent’s senior product director at its Smart Retail division, called WeChat a “connector,” and a significant part of her pitch to retailers is how the platform can be used as a way to reach customers through multiple ways — not just as an official brand account.

WeChat sets itself apart from platforms like Facebook and their relationships with companies through its other two formats primed for retailers: WeChat Work and WeChat’s mini programs. WeChat Work is a messaging format connected to users’ work accounts, meaning it takes the place of messaging interfaces like Slack or Gchat in the U.S. What this means for retailers is that store employees have a direct line to customers digitally after they make a purchase, to follow up on customer service questions, set up new devices and offer related product recommendations.

In a luxury retail setting, WeChat is the new preferred interface for brands that have to personally tend to high-spending customers’ needs. Through WeChat’s messaging app, brands can also make sure that employees don’t take all their clients with them if they move jobs.

WeChat also provides a platform prime for personalizing. The mini programs are a customizable, shareable interface within the app that can be used for anything from pop-up shops, to product launches to in-store checkout. Around Valentine’s Day, Dior launched a mini program for gifting: users could pick a range of items, leave payment on file, and then share the program with their recipient, who then chose which of the gifts he or she wanted.

According to Gao, the most important thing for retail partners to know is that the company is investing in user data technology that will unlock features like in-store product recommendations, personalized gaming and content components, and more.

“People spend so much time, and so much time shopping, on their phones in China, that it’s a way of life,” said James Rogers, the managing director of CR Retail, a retail consultancy firm based in Shanghai.

Overheard
“There’s so much people don’t understand about the cannabis industry, and so much bad information out there. If we can weed that out — pun intended — and become a source for education, then that’s a win.”
–Sean Dollinger, CEO, Namaste Technologies, an e-commerce cannabis platform

What we’ve covered
Amazon’s new 4-star store, where customer feedback determines what’s on the shelves isn’t just a way for Amazon to appeal more to sellers — it’s also a look at how Amazon is shaping how the department store of the future looks like. The store is a new take on a traditional model where buyers decide on inventory, not customers, which means added pressure on big-box retailers to curate selections based on customer feedback rather than market research alone or raw assumptions.

GoPro is now making direct-to-consumer a core part of its strategy. To do that, it’s revamping its e-commerce site and investing in technology to help it obtain a detailed view of how customers interact with it, including where they are clicking and how much time they spend browsing different parts of the site. And while the brand continues to sell on Amazon and eBay, selling through its owned and operated channels is a major priority. Knowing the customer will unlock detailed insights to help grow the brand.

To compete, eBay is making a core part of its pitch larger, non-DTC brands. Part of this is a new way of marketing itself, as an e-commerce “concierge” that can help large brands like KitchenAid or Acer build their online stores on its platform. It’s doing that by pushing personalized service, help with directing customer traffic to branded stores, and assistance with marketing and advertising.

Fashion brands can’t just be brands; they have to be retailers. Brands up and down the fashion ladder, from Michael Kors to Milly, from Alice + Olivia to Theory, from Acne to Vince, from Burberry to Gucci, are focusing business efforts not on their wholesale partners but on direct retail channels. On their e-commerce sites and in their own stores, they control the product arrangement, the merchandising, the pace of inventory drops, the shipping times and fees, the return policies, the product recommendations and the look and feel.

By the numbers

Stitch Fix earnings TK

 

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