Month: February 2019

As more Americans keep loaded guns in their homes, efforts to sell them new kinds of safety locks are getting stuck by policies intended to block ads for firearms online.

While Facebook’s earnings last Tuesday prove that marketers still spend, some wonder if consumer backlash against the platform could one day damage brands advertising on it. “The slow stream of press has caused more angst and questions,” said James Douglas, executive director and head of media at performance agency Reprise. “Every day it seems like… Continue reading »

The post What Would The Media Plan Look Like Without Facebook? appeared first on AdExchanger.

“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 Dominique Shelton Leipzig, partner at Perkins Coie. Major data breaches can tarnish brand reputations and call into question the safety of their data practices. And given the bevy of privacy and… Continue reading »

The post Marketers Should Treat Data As A Pre-Tangible Asset appeared first on AdExchanger.

Blavity CEO Morgan DeBaun saw a gap in the media market: a lack of content for black millennials like herself. In 2014, she left her tech job to launch Blavity. “We needed a place, a platform and a media brand that could speak to our stories as part of the young, black creative culture,” DeBaun… Continue reading »

The post Diverse And Diversified: Blavity CEO On Building A Media Company For Black Millennials appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Price Of Music Vivendi is in talks to sell its stake in Universal Music Group for $25 billion. That’s a striking number, considering that when Vivendi bought the record label in 2000, the music industry was collapsing under the weight of illegal downloads… Continue reading »

The post Vivendi In Talks To Sell Universal; Super Bowl Sets Streaming Record appeared first on AdExchanger.

Walk a block in New York’s Soho neighborhood, and you’ll find a storefront for what was formally known as digital brands. Everyone from Warby Parker to Glossier to Casper has set up shop, part of a growing maturation of the direct-to-consumer brand industry to move beyond digital channels and into the real world.

That’s provided Shopify, the technology powering many of the digital arms of these DTC brands, an opportunity to expand its platform to offer a multitude of physical retail support offerings in the past few months. That includes technology that can help brands launch ship-from-store offerings as well as buy-online-pick-up-in-store programs. The company has also created its own point-of-sale hardware and software that’s iPad-based and also works with Apple Pay.

To showcase these capabilities, Shopify opened a retail services store in Los Angeles late last year where merchants can buy hardware. The space also doubles up as a meetup venue: Brands in the DTC world, whether they have physical presences or not, can meet and talk to each other about best practices, cementing Shopify’s role as the plumbing that’s behind this growing ecosystem.

The company has also offered up space to brands to try to use it to run their own pop-ups — and test Shopify’s hardware. For example, two weeks ago, the store hosted bra company Lively, which set up shop and invited customers and guests to check out their products and make purchases using the Shopify POS and scanner.

Sources said there is also now a dedicated “retail” team at the Shopify merchant conferences — Unite and Pursuit — and the company has been holding physical retail training sessions to help brands who are thinking about getting into the space with established brands like Outdoor Voices — which now has nine stores nationwide and Allbirds — which now has two stores in New York and plans to open eight more in the U.S. this year.

Another big effort has been the launch of Shopify Locations, which lets retailers demarcate multiple inventory lines by location. Luke Droulez, chief marketing officer at home goods company Parachute, said that’s been the biggest boost for the company. Parachute, which sold exclusively online its first two years, now has multiple stores and plans to roll out to 20 stores by next year. But Shopify previously only managed one inventory line, so the company had to create multiple Shopifys in order to have separate inventory pools. But Locations has changed the game. “This helps us have unified customer accounts,” he said.

“We want to help more online-first merchants power physical retail stores, and more retail stores to run online – because ultimately, that will increase merchant success,” said Satish Kanwar, vp of product at Shopify.

Like Shopify’s online plan, the physical offerings work on a monthly subscription basis. Sources said that Shopify drastically undercuts competitors when it comes to pricing. The platform recently rolled out a standardized cost model that they all said is cheaper than literally any other payment process, POS or inventory management platform. Most other platforms cost 5 percent of the gross merchandise value. Shopify is less than half of that, coming at between 2 and 2.5 percent of GMV. But the standardized cost model is also proof of how much this company is growing up — previously, Shopify brought everyone in at what multiple customers called “ridiculously low prices” just to get them into the ecosystem.

In a prior interview, Jeff Weiser, chief marketing officer at Shopify, told Digiday that the “21st-century brand is the direct-to-consumer brand.” And those “direct-to-consumer” brands were mostly born online, seeking to cut out the middlemen and go directly to a customer, without a lot of money or costs involved in setting up leases or even carrying a lot of inventory. But that’s changing — just take a look at New York’s SoHo neighborhood, where formerly online-only brands like Glossier, Casper and Warby Parker have all set up stores. As DTC matures, they’re starting to look a lot more like traditional retail brands.

“Expanding into brick and mortar is a natural extension for brands to grow beyond their online presence. Consumers today don’t follow a single path to a purchase,” said Kanwar. “The ability to buy across multiple channels provides consumers with full control over their individual commerce experience, which is a key success factor for many DTC brands today. We’ve seen merchants experience a significant lift in online sales in certain geographies after launching a brick-and-mortar presence.”

Sutian Dong, partner at the Female Founders Fund, said DTC brands are “taking good opportunities in arbitrage, wherever that is. First, it was search on Google, then it was display, then it was out of home, and now it’s physical retail,” said Dong. “What you’re seeing is that as prices go up on social media, having a retail presence — despite the traditionally prohibitive issues around it like lease terms — remains the more cost-effective way to acquire customers.”

For example, a brand in the Female Founders Fund portfolio is a company called WinkyLux, which is a beauty company. Anu Duggal, partner at F3, said the brand found last summer that paid advertising on Facebook and Google wasn’t making enough economic sense. “So she decided to think about it upside down in a way, opening a small store instead that was carrying inventory but also was Instagrammable.”

It makes sense. Shopify has built a vast, $17 billion company powering a DTC brand revolution. Now, it’s model of “we’ll help you sell your goods online” is transferring to physical retail. For $29 a month, businesses get online stores and, now, access to the Shopify point-of-sale app. Pay more: $79 a month or $299 a month, and businesses get access to register shifts and more.

But it’s through Shopify Plus, the company’s enterprise platform, that it’s able to target growing direct-to-consumer brands most. The Plus program is for giant brands like Reckitt Benckiser but also larger DTC brands as they mature. At Brooklinen, which has been on Shopify for four years and now uses Shopify’s physical offerings for point of sale and inventory management, founder Rich Fulop says it is the easiest and most seamless transition.

“They’re very willing and anxious to collaborate, whether it’s changes to certain reporting or data or anything else.” The company, for example, had asked Shopify about data on discounts in physical stores, and the team complied straight away. “It’s a natural extension.”

All of this is coming in stark contrast to DTC experience with Amazon. As Digiday has previously reported, Amazon considers its customers its own customers, and so is much more guarded about its business — doesn’t share as much data, and doesn’t offer as much in return. For direct-to-consumer brands, who often don’t have much else to go on other than the strength of their own brand, doing a deal with Amazon is tough. Even though Amazon is trying to help with pain points like inventory management, DTC brands are overall wary. 

Michelle Cordeiro Grant, the founder of DTC bra company Lively, started with just using Shopify for payments and the online store and is now doing more. The company has been launching pop-ups and “happy hour” shopping events around the country.

“We fly into these towns, bring our products and bring our Shopify POS scanner and swiper.” Shopify has sent teams into Lively’s spaces to try them out and sent over tips and other ways it can be better, without even asking. “When you’re building a company, you’re looking at the things you want to do for the next phase. I want to keep cohesiveness and discipline close to the vest. I can do that, and they can do the rest.”

The post As DTC brands open storefronts, Shopify expands along with them appeared first on Digiday.

Recruiting the right people is the hardest part of building an in-house team. According to a content marketing director we interviewed in the latest edition of our Confessions series — in which we grant anonymity in exchange for candor –it’s easy to overlook someone’s personality for the skills they have.

Answers have been lightly edited for clarity and flow.

Why is recruitment so hard?
Agencies can seem more appealing to talent because they cover so many different brands. We have a mix of sub-brands, but essentially we’re focused on one message. I struggle to get investment because we’re not a content organization, and so people have a very binary view of the value we bring. It’s hard to navigate the internal politics that secure the budgets needed to build a team and then the subsequent pressure to hire the right candidate. I’ve had bad experiences where I’ve hired candidates on hope and optimism rather than placing more value on the interview part of the recruitment process.

What do you mean by “binary view?”
It’s easy for my bosses to equate the value of the videos we create to views or to the traffic they drive back to the site. It’s harder for them to see how those videos and the rest of the content we create have a long-term impact on the brand. I’ve had to explain why we can’t stick a link back to our site on every video we run in order to qualify it.

I’ve also had to maneuver myself in front of decision-makers to demonstrate how our content can create value that won’t yield an immediate return, but will have a bigger impact on the brand over time. I don’t have a mathematical way to show that yet, but I find it helps to try and compare the work we did to the PR team in the sense that they’re not always directly impacted to an outcome, but they’re still valuable. I tried this out recently when we needed better facilities because the current setup was stretched too far. I managed to get in front of the boss of my boss and explained the situation with the previous analogy and within two weeks we had a new edit suite.

Is personality more important than expertise when building an in-house team?
It’s not a clear-cut issue. When I hire people now, I expect them to have the skills to do the job. The harder area for me is the candidate’s personality. The content team I run is small, so I need people who are can to work to short deadlines without cracking under pressure. Despite those pressures, the dynamic within the group has to be relaxed enough that each member can come to me if they have a problem. One of our producers met me a few weeks back to ask for more ownership on projects because I was being too much of a control freak. I need those sort of characters on my team when we’re trying to be progressive as a small part of a wider marketing division that isn’t as integrated as it should, which makes our job harder.

What are those complications?
There are so many egos to try and please when you’re a small team that doesn’t have the same buy-in at the executive level of a business as with other parts of the marketing division. The marketers in other parts of the organization have their own priorities and don’t want to compromise them for ours, so we’ve had to work out how our expertise fits into the work they’re doing. We often get caught in the crossfire between the marketing and communications teams when the former want to do disruptive things that are going to get people talking, whereas the latter want to keep a low profile where we can. It’s not helped by the fact that we’ve been shunted around different parts of the business to the point where we’re now working with both the brand and sponsorship teams.

How do you retain talent?
We’ve had to accept that we’re going to train our content creators, and then they’re going to leave once they advance to a certain level. We don’t have the budget to compete with agencies, and there isn’t much scope for progression in a job like ours. I tell my team that what they’re doing has to be the start of a bigger career for them: It can’t be the end of the rainbow.

The post ‘There are so many egos’: Confessions of an in-house content marketer appeared first on Digiday.

Viacom has aggressively built out its studios businesses, in an effort to feed the seemingly insatiable appetite for content among streaming platforms, linear TV networks and other buyers. And it’s given the company, which has struggled for years to show revenue growth among its media networks and Paramount’s studio businesses, a positive story to tell.

The key hits:

• Last year, Viacom announced new divisions at its company to develop, produce and sell shows to Netflix and other third-party buyers.
• With a deep library of popular IP such as “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” Viacom has a shot at being a prominent supplier of programming in the “Peak TV” era.
• Studios businesses are already driving revenue growth, with Paramount TV alone projecting to grow revenue from $400 million last year to $600 million this year.
• Challenges for Viacom include: the possibility that Netflix and others stop spending wildly on buying content from studios, as well as the ongoing fear that supplying other platforms with more content only reduces the amount of time people might spend on Viacom’s platforms.
• Ultimately, Viacom has to play ball with Netflix and other third-party buyers, even if we’re looking at a future where Viacom is more of a studio than a media network operator.

Last summer, Viacom announced that it was going to start making TV shows and movies for third-party buyers including Netflix, Hulu and other streaming players and linear TV networks. Some of this programming, such as “The Real World” and “Daria,” would come from existing intellectual property, while others would be all-new titles. The move resulted in the creation of studio units within MTV and other Viacom networks with plans to develop up to a dozen projects in 2018 alone. (The company also announced two new shows, “The Loud House” and “Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” for Netflix as part of its earnings this week.)

The post Video Briefing: Viacom’s studio businesses are growing revenue appeared first on Digiday.

Those who work at marketing and advertising agencies have plenty of reasons to grumble. Demanding clients, long hours, and co-workers pilfering their ideas are just some of the reasons agency staffers are often considered notoriously unhappy.

But according to a Digiday survey of 446 professionals from marketing and advertising agencies this January, 63 percent said they are happy in their current job. A similar number of survey respondents, 62 percent, also rated their office’s workplace environment as positive.

The post Digiday Research: Surprise, most agency staffers say they are happy appeared first on Digiday.

When it comes to the General Data Protection Regulation, the honeymoon for businesses seems to be over.

Google is the first company to be hit with a serious financial penalty for what France’s National Commission for Informatics and Liberty, known as CNIL, has deemed a violation of GDPR. This week, The Telegraph reported that the U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office is also investigating the tech giant’s approach. Google has said it is appealing the CNIL’s decision.

“In common with many other [data protection agencies] in Europe, we have received complaints relating to Google and are reviewing with our EDPB [European Data Protection Board] counterparts partners how these will proceed,” said an ICO spokesman.

As with anything GDPR-related, nothing is straight-forward. Here’s a rundown on the latest implications.

CNIL’s case against Google:
Burying privacy terms so that users have to click five or six times to find details on for example, how their location data is used — and that Google has conflated multiple processing purposes to use personal data to target ads.

Key numbers:
95,000: Number of GDPR complaints received by data protection authorities since last May.
42,000: Number of data breach notifications received by DPAs.
€50 million: ($57 million): size of fine French DPA has levied.
Jan. 22: The date the Irish DPA was made the official lead GDPR supervisory for Google’s European operations.

15: Number of statutory investigations open at the Irish DPA, and filed against multinational technology companies. None of these include Google, according to the regulator.

It’s all in the timing
CNIL moved quickly to make its verdict ahead of a key bump in the road: the Irish DPA attaining sole power over the decision of whether to fine Google for breaching GDPR. That’s an authority the Irish DPA was only granted on Jan. 22, the day after the CNIL revealed it had fined Google for violating the law. In GDPR speak, this is known as a “one-stop-shop mechanism” and was put in place so that any business with cross-border operations would only need to deal with one lead DPA — and, in theory, avoid any further confusion. It meant that Google’s U.S. entity was responsible for processing EU user data, whereas now its Irish unit will do so. CNIL headed this off in its announcement, stating that it began investigations long before Google’s one-stop shop mechanism was applicable. All in all, clever timing by the French regulator.

With 28 different member states in the European Union, each with its own national DPA, alignment on the law’s enforcement was always going to be messy. But according to the European Data Protection Board — the body established to ensure consistency and a joined-up approach among the different DPAs of the European Union’s 28 DPAs — as of Jan. 22 the Irish DPA’s Google verdicts are the ones to watch.

“For any potential GDPR violation taking place once Google has a main establishment in the EU, the relevant lead supervisory authority will be the only one, in principle, to take coercive measure against Google,” said an EDPB spokeswoman.

DPA jurisdiction is a minefield
So far, it’s only France’s regulator that has come out with a clear verdict and proposed a penalty for Google. The ICO has confirmed it is liaising with other DPAs in other countries, to discuss the CNIL verdict. The ICO has not confirmed whether or not it will align with CNIL and fine Google, although it has stipulated it is reviewing complaints people have made against Google.

Since the Irish DPA only gained lead regulator for Google in Europe on Jan. 22, the CNIL verdict will stand. But there is a question mark over which and how many DPAs have the right to fine Google in the future.

A spokeswoman for the Irish DPA said that it has received complaints against Google, but that it currently has no plans to investigate the tech giant. However, although the Irish DPA has, in theory, the lead position, other DPAs can still contest its verdicts with relation to Google, according to the EDPB spokeswoman. Any DPA can challenge the decision made by another, and the same goes for the Irish DPA. Should that occur, the decision would then be kicked up to the EDPB, which would facilitate the discussion among the various DPAs.

In other words, should the Irish DPA decide not to fine Google for any proposed GDPR violation, it could be challenged by the other DPAs — who would then discuss it en masse and likely agree to some kind of compromise.

Honeymoon is over
While the majority of GDPR warnings and fines have come from the French regulator, it won’t likely remain that way. The ICO’s decision to look into the CNIL verdict, along with the momentum of various privacy activists continuing to lodge complaints will continue to build, according to publishing and ad tech executives.

“Publishers should be OK, but ad tech vendors should be worried,” said an ad tech executive who spoke anonymously. “They’re [publishers] not mining people’s profiles and using that data to target people across the web. It’s other ad tech vendors that should be worried. And it looks like CNIL has emboldened other DPAs across Europe.”

The post What to know about Google’s GDPR troubles appeared first on Digiday.