GroupM Revises Ad Spend Forecast Down While Magna Anticipates Record Growth

GroupM and Magna both released global advertising spend forecasts Monday with very different findings. GroupM lowered its ad spend growth forecast for this year from 4.5% to 4.3%, reaching $543 billion. Magna, which measured 2018 in retrospect, said global ad spend grew by a record 7.2% this year to $552 billion. GroupM revised its 2019Continue reading »

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Verizon’s Oath Looks To Non-Advertising Revenue; Apple Lax On App Enforcement?

Shorting Ads Verizon is inching away from the grand advertising ambitions it once had for Oath. The ad unit has a new chief, Guru Gowrappan, following Tim Armstrong’s departure in September, and Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg, who took over in August, is more interested in network infrastructure than media. And after failing to meet adContinue reading »

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Digiday Research: 43 percent of media buyers say they avoid news content

In an era of instant boycotts against advertisers by organizations like Sleeping Giants, brand-safety concerns are forcing media buyers to avoid news-related content for fear of public reprisals.

A survey of 400 media buyers by Digiday this November found that 43 percent of respondents said they explicitly avoid advertising next to the news and half of those say they’re steering clear of news content more than they had before.

This article is behind the Digiday+ paywall.

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Confessions of a TV ad buyer: ‘Sometimes a client’s media plan makes no sense’

In 2018, digital ad spending accounted for more than 51 percent of market share, toppling TV ad spending for the first time, according to Magna’s September forecast for the year. TV ad buyers are feeling the pressure.

In the latest installment of our Confessions series, where we exchange anonymity for honesty, we spoke with a young TV ad buyer at a large media agency who executes on the television buys media planners bring to them. This person told Digiday that clients, looking to push their TV ad budgets as far as they will go, are asking for impossible buys and planners and buyers feel the need to accommodate as much as possible.

What is the most stressful part of your job?
Sometimes a client’s media plan makes no sense for us to execute. I don’t see what goes on between the planners and clients. I’m at the last rung in the process, working with TV companies to get ads placed, so if something is planned poorly, I can’t tell if it’s the planner’s fault, the client’s or a combination of both, and I don’t know who to be angry at.

What are some examples?
A plan might call for too many spots in late news and that particular market doesn’t have the inventory and can’t support it, or a plan might price spots at way too cheap, so it’s impossible to buy everything a client wants because there’s no way you can buy everything for so cheap. You end up having to do something that doesn’t fit the client’s plan as well or turn in something that the client doesn’t want because of the parameters that were given to you.

What is driving this pressure?
Clients want the most for the cheapest they can get. Because of all the digital options available to them today, clients are spending less on TV, but they still want it to make just as much of an impact. They don’t want to let go of any of the channels they are on, and TV is still an important channel to them. Clients just aren’t willing to shell out the appropriate amount of money.

How often does this happen?
At my old company, it was all the time. For certain clients, it was literally almost every time we had to do a buy for them. At my company now, it’s not as often, but still frequently.

Can you do anything about it?
When that situation happens, I talk to my boss and do my best to explain why what a planner has given me won’t work. My boss might push back on the client a little and the client might come back and give us a little more wiggle room with the budget, but, at the end of the day, you can’t spend more money than you’re given. What I really want to do is ask the planners: “Did you not look at everything? How did you decide this was a good idea?” It’s frustrating, but I have to go ahead with the plan.

Who do you believe the blame should fall to?
I generally blame the planners. Clients will dictate a flawed plan, and the planners, even though they might know it’s a bad idea, say, ‘OK, this is what you are forcing me to do,’ and then it comes down to me.

Do you feel like you should be in the room when planners are strategizing with clients?
I definitely think planners should ask buyers for input. I feel like I should have some input here and there. It would help the client because I would be able to help make sure a better buy was being placed in the market and the client would end up getting a better return on investment. If I was in on too many meetings though, it would take up too much time and keep me from doing my job.

In this age of consolidation, do you ever worry about losing your job?
At least for my job, I’m not worried. Since we work with multiple clients at once, it’s not as much affected if one client leaves. I have more stability in that sense, but if one of our larger clients were to leave, that would be an issue.

How much is your salary, and do you think you are being paid fairly?
My salary is about $63,000, and I feel like I’m being paid fairly.

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‘Bullying brands’: How a consolidated marketplace helps Amazon assert more control over sellers

The imminent arrival of Amazon’s consolidated selling system, One Vendor, could be another way the company continues to assert dominance over the brands that sell on its platform.

It’s set to roll out in the next six months, according to sources who work with brand clients selling on Amazon. The system, first reported on by Recode, is expected to combine Amazon’s two marketplaces — one for first-party sellers, which it calls Vendor Central, and Seller Central, for third-party sellers — into one. Internally, retail management teams have been consolidated under one svp, Doug Herrington.

Specifics on exactly how One Vendor will operate are scarce, and Amazon didn’t return a request for comment. But according to former Amazon employees that now operate agencies assisting brand clients in selling on Amazon, it’s both an efficiency play (one marketplace is easier to operate than two) and a way to exercise control over how brands appear on Amazon. There’s also the media play, as this could be a way to muscle brands into spending more on Amazon’s ad products.

Fred Killingsworth, CEO and founder of the Amazon consultancy Hinge and Amazon’s former principal business development manager, said that One Vendor would effectively eliminate brand choice around how they want to sell on Amazon. Right now, brands can decide to apply to Vendor Central, which comes with perks like Prime shipping and Amazon-supported content and marketing, or set up a storefront on Seller Central, which gives brands a clearer picture of customer insights but puts more burden on their shoulders to handle demand and inventory. Judging by Amazon’s communication with clients, One Vendor would put Amazon in control of what brands sell where. For customers trying to find legit products on the site, that’s a good thing.

“Given the vast issues with brand authority and control of unauthorized sellers, unifying it on one platform would make it easier to manage and mitigate the brand challenges to eliminate knockoff product,” said Killingsworth.

But it’s a hairier proposition for the brands in question. While wholesale sellers have a more simplified Amazon operation — since Amazon handles inventory and shipping — recent updates to the third-party marketplace have made it look like greener pastures, particularly as wholesale brands get their e-commerce operations and logistics off the ground on their own websites. According to Kiri Masters, the founder of the Amazon agency Bobsled Marketing, Amazon’s developments over the past year have added a slew of “bells and whistles” to Seller Central. Namely, third-party sellers get a better insight for free on customer data and behavior, and better Amazon advertising options.

And choice matters, especially for brands that sell third-party on Amazon because they understand the exposure potential, but don’t necessarily want to hand the keys to product pricing over to Amazon through a wholesale deal. Considering that more than half of Amazon’s business is third-party, such a shift in structure could spell trouble for the company.

“For a smaller, niche brand like ours, this is a worse deal,” said a brand founder who used to be a third-party seller on Amazon, and asked to speak on background. “It feels like Amazon is bullying its brands by saying, ‘The only way is our way, and we get to choose what’s better for us, regardless of how you want to run your business.’ If we were to be forced into a [wholesale] relationship, that would lead to price slashing, and that’s not something we’re comfortable with as a brand.”

Not to mention, the founder added, regardless of how much advertising horsepower Amazon puts behind its wholesale brands, there’s no telling how much access to data and insights that come as a result of those efforts it would provide. Amazon Retail Analytics Premium, a data feed system for wholesale sellers, costs a percentage of the retailer’s sales — sometimes costing as much of tens of thousands of dollars a year, said Masters — and gives insight around metrics like conversion rights, click-share and what their customers are also buying, so they can paint a better picture of their customer and strategize accordingly. The basic version of ARA, which is free, provides only rudimentary sales and traffic data. Third-party sellers, however, get a much clearer picture of the type of customer that’s shopping the seller’s products without charging them to get access to that data.

On top of that, wholesale sellers pay a percentage of their sales to an Amazon co-op fee, that Amazon uses to market the brand on the site. But wholesale sellers often complain they don’t really get a clear picture on how that money is being used and what the results are.

“For many vendors who have decided that being on the third-party marketplace is more beneficial to them, for reasons related to pricing and profitability and inventory availability, this would mean taking that choice away,” said Masters. “It’s not exactly surprising from an Amazon perspective, but it is a new dimension.”

One Vendor essentially gives Amazon the best of both worlds. Big-ticket brands, like LG, Dyson and L’Oréal, would be automatically brought in as wholesale so Amazon could guarantee that high-demand items are always in stock and shipped on time and that these brands have a big presence in advertising on the site. But Amazon gets a 15 percent margin from those sales without having to do much on its own. That business will still be maintained, just now under Amazon’s own terms.

Both wholesale and third-party sellers, however, will have to carry more burden in general. Killingsworth said that Amazon continues to have a more hands-off approach to wholesale relationships by shrinking management teams and shifting support away from these wholesale brands, meaning that they’ve had to sustain business almost as independently as third-party sellers.

“It’s going to be more on the brands’ shoulders,” said Killingsworth. “From their seat, I’d wonder what other changes are coming. Amazon is always changing the rules and the operations. So what is this a signal of? Companies have hundreds of millions of dollars flowing through that site and one small change can make a big impact.”

That shift in support, however, could have one positive upside: Amazon could release ARA Premium to all wholesale brands for free, Killingsworth said, reasoning that it would give the brands more tools to operate efficiently on their own, and lift business in such a way that it makes the fees it receives from the data share less consequential.

Another upside can be that it would force out more unauthorized sellers or counterfeit product.

“When brands start understanding that value of Amazon, through the customer lens, that’s when they’ll start saying, OK, I need to work with Amazon. I need to figure out their terms,” said Eric Heller, the CEO of Marketplace Ignition.

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Why ‘news for millennials’ media plays never panned out

Once upon a time, news needed to be remade for millennials.

The 21st century’s second decade was new, and a perfect storm was brewing: Publishers, particularly digital-native ones, were hunting for scale; Facebook, fresh off an IPO, was hungry for content that would attract more user attention; and venture capitalists, watching geysers of free money shoot out of the federal reserve, were looking for new investment opportunities.

Suddenly, news needed to be quicker, video-and image-heavy and optimized for sharing (and mobile phone screens). It could live on a platform instead of a publisher’s website. It could be monetized, well, some way or other (that would be figured out later), and a whole new crop of millennial news purveyors was born.

In a dizzying four-year stretch, upstarts like Mic, Mashable, and Ozy raised tens of millions of dollars in funding; legacy media brands including Univision and Disney launched competitors of their own, and almost everybody who had bought into this strategy pivoted to video.

Today, the effects of these new brands’ efforts can be seen across the publishing landscape. But the layoffs, sales and revenue misses of 2018 exposed the fact that “news for millennials” was, for the most part, just a bit of marketing opportunism that didn’t work out. Without a firehose of cheap referral traffic or brands that engendered loyalty in audiences, the great changing of the news guard has yet to come.

“I don’t think you can target a demo,” media analyst Bernard Gershon said. “I think you have to create a high-quality product, and then figure out ways to monetize that.”

Take a look at the reach of news sites among 25-34-year-old internet users, and only three millennial-focused publishers crack the top 50. Just one – Insider Inc. – cracks the top 10. The next “millennial news” entry on the list, Mic, clocks in at 36, and it reaches just 2.6 percent of that age cohort, according to Comscore data.

Some of that is because the distribution mechanism these publishers rode at first stopped working for them. In 2014, the year Mic raised a $17 million Series B round of funding, Facebook accounted for 70 percent of the site’s traffic. NowThis, the video-focused news publisher that is now part of Group Nine Media, took the distributed news approach to an extreme conclusion by famously eschewing a website (a strategy it abandoned earlier this year).

But those days are over. After years of surging referral traffic, Google has since reclaimed the title of top referrer among publishers. “[These publishers] didn’t diversify how they were getting their audiences,” said Sachin Kamdar, the CEO of Parse.ly, a tool that monitors internet referral traffic.

Building to maximize reach, rather than community, proved another key problem. While engagement metrics and direct relationships are en vogue today, many millennial news publishers were born in an era where scale was prized, and they developed accordingly.

“There was a core misunderstanding of what makes for successful millennial journalism products,” said Raju Narisetti, former CEO of Gizmodo Media Group and director of the Knight-Bagehot fellowship in economics and business journalism at Columbia University. “There was no place to create a community.”

The most successful millennial products, publisher or not, nurture conversations, Narisetti said, rather than blast information out at a passive audience. And while platforms like Facebook theoretically offered users a chance to connect with one another, those connections were harder for the publishers to capitalize on. “You can’t build a community on Snapchat or on Facebook,” Narisetti added. “That’s Facebook’s community.”

These execution errors obscured a lot of fine work by young reporters that were attracted by the opportunity. BuzzFeed News has amassed multiple Pulitzer Prize citations; Mic was nominated for an Emmy; NowThis secured exclusive interviews with politicians including President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

And if millennial news sites didn’t succeed in supplanting the old guard, they do deserve credit for spurring them to modernize their advertising and distribution operations. “They pulled the whole industry forward,” Mediaradar CEO Todd Krizelman said. “All these guys paved the road that every publisher is going down now.”

And not everybody has soured on the idea that millennials deserve their own style of news. But the publishers that believe in it are more pragmatic about the economics of content creation and social distribution.

Brut., a global video news publisher that launched in France two years ago, is betting that short-form, scaled news video can easily be translated and syndicated across numerous platforms and markets. It currently ranks as a top-five new publisher on Facebook, according to Tubular Labs data.

“At least 60, 70 percent of the videos we produce are global,” said Guillaume Lacroix, Brut’s CEO, who added that by the middle of next year, each video Brut’s global team produces will be available in 14 markets, across an average of eight different platforms.

“When you have 112 videos for the production cost of one, I think you are in a position where you can navigate a very complex world where you have a 50 percent cut of ad platform,” Lacroix said. “If you don’t have that scale, it becomes very hard to navigate that cut.”

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How The Financial Times is making marketing services a central part of its ad offering

The Financial Times is betting on its newly assembled marketing-services business to bump up its paid-content revenue by 30 percent per year, according to the publisher.

Over the last six months, it has finalized a commercial offering that integrates the capabilities of its advertising and events departments, along with its branded content production studio AlphaGrid and research and thought-leadership agency Longitude, which was acquired in January.

The concept is that whenever a client requests a combination of research and thought leadership strategy, content creation, ads, events, and distribution, the FT can assemble a marketing services team that includes all the necessary skill sets from each of the existing departments. In total, 250 FT staffers globally have been trained on the new marketing services product offers, 170 of whom are in the U.K., 30 in Asia and 50 in the U.S.

A project can have between 10 and 20 people working on it depending on its size and requirements. The FT sales team is structured around sector verticals such as technology and professional services, financial services and energy. To ensure clients never see any of the complexity that comes with new team integrations, the FT hired an integration director, who has ensured that the various teams are joined up and a unified project management team assigned to each client. Credit Suisse is the first client to take advantage of the new capabilities, with a campaign called “The Value of Knowledge,” which launched earlier this month. However, the FT also caps the number of staff who attend client pitches at three people, to ensure there is no risk of clients being overwhelmed or confused by too many voices.

FT marketing services incorporate the FT’s advertising sales department, along with its events team FT Live, Longitude’s 40 staff and the 25 staff from AlphaGrid. The FT’s branded content studio was formerly known as FT², a name that’s now been retired. Most of the Longitude team are still based in their original office, though they will move to the FT’s new headquarters near St Paul’s Cathedral next spring.

The FT’s chief commercial officer Jon Slade believes the new marketing-service capabilities will help boost its existing content marketing revenue, while offsetting any declines in print ad revenue. The FT’s print ad revenue is down low single-digits, according to Slade. That’s low compared to what others have reported, such as the Mail’s 9 percent drop in print ad revenue reported last week.

“It was 2016 when we last saw a big decline in print ad revenue, but rather like Californian earthquakes you know another is coming, you’re just not sure when,” said Slade. “The longer there is political uncertainty, the longer print ad revenue is likely to suffer. So FT marketing services is an important step to ensuring our revenue streams are diversified, and it moves our conversations with clients away from being transactional advertising revenue partners, to having deeper, sustained partnerships that last years.”

Credit Suisse’s four-month-long campaign explores how to meet the world’s changing knowledge needs, investigating the skills, education and investment strategies that will prove critical to global sustainable growth. The campaign comprises 10 videos, such as one that explores whether skills such as emotional intelligence have been undervalued by school education systems in countries like Singapore. The campaign includes 30 text articles such as “Books and bold decisions: Eradicating childhood illiteracy and gender inequality requires system-level change” and interactive infographics that are the culmination of extensive research on the project conducted by Longitude. The FT will also run ads on its own site, as well as on social platforms.

This project took roughly four months from the ideas phase to campaign launch, according to Longitude CEO Rob Mitchell. “The integration of the different teams was key, because the strength of the idea only works if we work as a single team,” said Mitchell. Credit Suisse wanted to position itself at the forefront of education and having a strong point of view on investment in education. “They want to be known as an institute that supports that,” added Mitchell.

On top of those brand-association metrics, the FT project team will motor the usual metrics closely such as video view-through rates, and article traffic, according to Alpha Grid managing director Roslyn Shaw. “We’ll ensure we’re doing everything to hit the target, and will tweak things along the way and boost our marketing of the project where necessary,” added Shaw.

Although a higher proportion of the FT’s revenue comes from its 910,000 print and digital subscriptions, advertising remains a core revenue driver and all marketing services revenue will go to the FT’s advertising P&L, according to Slade. The publisher doesn’t break out the exact split between advertising and subscriptions.

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Chive spins out new company for streaming content to bars, cruise ships and elsewhere

Two years ago Chive Media Group started distributing its Chive TV streaming channel through connected TVs in bars and on Royal Caribbean cruise ships, adapting connected TV into a form of digital out-of-home advertising. Now the digital media company is spinning off that business into its own company called Atmosphere, which is expected to make at least $10 million in revenue in 2019, according to Chive Media Group co-founder CEO Leo Resig.

While other publishers were licensing user-generated videos mainly to post to Facebook and other platforms, Chive Media Group was arranging deals to extend its usage rights to connected TVs through its Chive TV OTT app, which it began distributing through connected TVs inside of bars in 2016. That app served as the proof of concept for what is now Atmosphere, which Resig claimed is “the only digital out-of-home app on what is essentially an OTT platform.”

Atmosphere effectively converts the TVs inside of 4,000 business locations currently — primarily bars and restaurants and eventually gyms, hotels, casinos, gas stations, cruise ships, etc. — into digital billboards, interspersing ads among videos licensed from regular people, Instagram stars and media companies, including Cheddar and Fatherly, which will distribute 30-second to one-minute video compilations on Atmosphere’s channels.

Given the context, the videos are intended to be watched with or without sound and are currently packaged into five channels within its OTT app, including Chive TV, which features a variety of viral videos, and Escape TV, which features nature videos. The company plans to add at least four more channels, such as Beach Bum TV, which will show videos of people surfing and doing other beach-related activities. Each channel streams five hours’ worth of videos on an endless loop, and the videos are updated weekly.

Atmosphere offers businesses free Roku devices to plug into their existing TVs and distribute its content, through its app is also available on Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV and Google’s Android TV. Atmosphere doesn’t pay businesses to play its channels but has commissioned independent studies that showed people spend 60 percent more time in bars that air Chive TV than those that don’t, Resig said.

To get a business to distribute its channel in a location costs Atmosphere $77 per install, but the company is able to make that money back within five weeks, according to Chive Media Group co-founder and president John Resig, brother of Leo. Atmosphere is not profitable because it is investing in hiring people to work at the company and is currently raising funding from outside investors, said Leo Resig.

Chive Media Group, which has never raised outside funding, decided to spin off Atmosphere into its own company in part because it would be easier to raise money for that specific business versus trying to convince investors to put money into a media company amid the industry’s ongoing business struggles.

“It’s hard to scale TheChive. If you’re an investor, it’s like, ‘Love what you’re doing over here with Chive TV and this Atmosphere idea,’ but investors want but to be able to show growth and quite frankly that’s the only thing that’s growing,” said Leo Resig.

Atmosphere primarily makes money by selling ads that appear between videos. Those ads can be targeted to specific venues or even specific devices within a venue, and locations can be geofenced so that advertisers can retarget people who may have seen an ad on Atmosphere with a follow-up ad on their phone. Anheuser-Busch InBev has signed a deal with the company to run ads in eight markets promoting its craft beers, said John Resig.

Atmosphere also operates a subscription business, in which businesses pay $37 a month to insert their own ads, or “digital signage,” to promote things like happy hour deals or loyalty programs. While Atmosphere is primarily a business-to-business play, regular people can also access its app through their connected TVs and watch its videos with ads or pay $3 a month to watch them without ads.

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Inside Studio71 UK’s podcast push

In the U.K. digital studio network, Studio71 is building up its podcast slate, using audio as a springboard for growing franchises from the network’s YouTube talent.

The studio’s core model is talent management, production and development of shows for TV and online in millennial, lifestyle, parenting and kids verticals. The release of two podcasts last week brings its total to four shows, with another launching before the year’s end, and it’s planning an additional 10 in 2019. “Power Hour” is hosted by fitness coach, influencer and global Adidas ambassador Adrienne Herbert, and focuses on realizing personal and career goals. The second, “F**ks Given” comes from YouTubers Florence Barker and Reed Amber and aims to break down taboos around sex. According to Studio71, they spotted a gap in the market for young female-fronted shows.

“We’re broader than a TV production studio, and we don’t always want to wait for commissions for the privilege to make something; that’s where podcast comes in,” said Jody Smith, creative director at Studio71. “We know the type of audience who are watching that talent through our YouTube network, we understand millennial viewers and we’re focused on that.”

Until a few months ago, Studio71’s podcast efforts were more ad hoc, now the focus is growing a diverse slate quickly. Its first show, “Educating Josh,” where YouTube creators Luke Cutforth and Lucy Bella Earl discuss the week’s news with Josh Winslade, launched in April. The show has had downloads in the six figures, according to the company, and growing each week. This August, Studio71 hosted a live recording during London’s online video festival, “Summer in the City,” to 800 people, and it recently announced plans to take the show on the road. The studio said in total, podcast streams are up 30 percent from last month, and from its four current podcasts, it’s expecting 1.5 million streams over the next 12 months.

“It’s about how can we build IP around it,” said Tom Payne, head of video at the network, adding that it’s quick to build an audience in audio. “Podcast’s themselves don’t make a ton of money; it’s what else can we do with it, whether that’s a TV show, a live tour, books, merchandise. It’s a starting point to build a brand. We want them to all to feel they live in a similar world.”

The network followed a similar path in the U.S., announcing the Podcast studio division in July this year. As creators can move their audiences from one platform to another, the thinking is Studio71 doesn’t need a big marketing push to amass an audience it could sell to advertisers.

In the U.K., Studio71 has a deal with Acast where it monetizes the shows through ads. “This makes it a decent enough revenue source; it’s a sustainable business, but it’s really about exploiting the format beyond the audio show,” said Payne. The company is in the development stage with three more shows with a U.K. comedian. The next release will be a scripted comedy and entertainment podcast. More scripted series are starting to gain traction in the U.K., although at a slower rate than in the U.S. where there are more mature examples of podcast companies selling film and TV rights to their shows.

European broadcast giant ProSiebenSat.1 has a 70 percent stake in Studio71. Studio71’s U.K. expansion kicked off in July 2017 with the appointment of James Stafford managing director of U.K. operations, who served as SVP of Europe at StyleHaul and, before that, head of branded content for EMEA at YouTube. At this time, Studio71 also received strategic funding from French TV network TF1 Group and Italy’s Mediaset to set up in those regions too. The U.K. team, mostly in creative and production roles, has grown from eight at the beginning of this year to 30. The company said that it’s worked with 100 brands this year, and total revenue is up eight times year over year but didn’t share exact figures.

The podcast landscape is crowded, and the low-cost and quick turn-around appeal of producing podcasts has lowered the barrier, letting in a lot of dross. This extends to the artwork, which are usually pretty uninspiring, Studio71 has graphic designers working on the podcast artwork in the hope this helps them stand out.

“We’re not creating shows where people sit in a room or putting [podcasts] out for the sake of it,” said Payne, adding it wants to use formats that deviate from the traditional weekly episode. “It has to have the format to draw in the audience. We’re turning down as many as we’re taking on.”

The post Inside Studio71 UK’s podcast push appeared first on Digiday.

Marriott’s Starwood Missed Chance to Detect Huge Data Breach Years Earlier, Cybersecurity Specialists Say

Marriott says it responded quickly when it learned in recent weeks of a colossal theft of customer data, but cybersecurity specialists say the company missed a significant chance to halt the breach years earlier.