Month: March 2019

French pop-culture publisher Konbini is making its Snapchat a little bit more serious, shifting to focus more on hard news versus pop-culture and entertainment.

Since November, around half of its Snapchat content is news, like coverage of protests against Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, youth demonstrations against climate change and a tour of the ruins of Mosul, Iraq. Previously, all Snapchat coverage was entertainment and pop-culture focused, like an interview with Kendrick Lamar or details of a music album drop.

“There is something in the air, a new [kind of] journalism,” said co-founder David Creuzot. “If you have a huge community, you have to report, support, act and engage your community. The volume in terms of views is important; the real measurement is how you are able to act and change something.”

The 10-year-old lifestyle publisher noticed that its younger audiences wanted to read more of its political coverage on site during the 2017 French Presidential elections. Konbini added a sprinkling of news items to its Discovery edition, kicked off by an interview with then-President François Hollande. Branching into news from entertainment and lifestyle content as a way to gain credibility is a common path for publishers, but building up recognition takes time. And so monetization is slower than lifestyle content.

According to the publisher, Konbini has 7.4 million monthly viewers on Snapchat Discover, and 1.5 million unique viewers a day. And 40 percent of viewers return between three and seven times a week.

As well as a weekly Discover edition, created by a dedicated team of 10, Konbini publishes a weekly Show, Konbini Original Stories, a mini-documentary series hosted by journalist Hugo Clément. Since January, it has also published a daily Curated Story that features content from other Snapchat users. The publisher said that its Shows and Curated Stories are also getting viewers above a million per episode, and its news content performs as well as its entertainment content. Around 30 people work on Snapchat along with others from the company when needed; in total, Kobini has 180 global employees.

A recent Snapchat Show followed the issues of starvation in the Congo and led audiences to pledge €500,000 ($566,000) in one week, through a Go Fund Me page. Another episode followed a retired man who uses his garden to bury the bodies of migrants who drowned during crossings. Konbini’s Snapchat Show led people to a fundraiser page and within two days had raised enough to buy an additional plot. Another episode followed a factory where the animals were kept in inhumane conditions. The publisher said it attracted the interest from politicians interesting in shutting down the factory.

“These are stories that are emotional, something that’s true,” said co-founder Lucie Beudet. “You don’t see it in all other media, and you can act on it.”

Snapchat’s younger-skewing audience is a draw for publishers. Across social platforms — not including Snapchat — Konbini is 11th in France for the most video views, according to Tubular Labs. According to data from Mediametrie and NetRatings, Konbini’s site audience traffic has nearly halved to 2.2 million compared to the previous year when it had 3.9 million unique monthly users. Like a lot of publishers, the changing Facebook algorithm had an impact on its referral traffic.

Konbini relies on advertising revenue and branded content. It said that its Snapchat presence is profitable, but wouldn’t share revenue. The publisher’s creative department runs workshops with brands on how to create Snapchat-focused content, and it has also has worked with research firm Millward Brown to show the impact of Snapchat to advertisers. According to Konbini, there has been a 30 percent increase on average spend per advertiser from 2017 to 2018.

“There is 10 percent of the market that is perfectly aware of what’s going on [with Snapchat advertising;] then there’s 60 percent who are interested and want to test but don’t have strong knowledge of new ways,” said Creuzot.

“In essence, they are reproducing the general-interest-news model,” said François Godard, European media and telecoms analyst at Enders Analysis. “Many of those general news brands are already on Snapchat and have bigger resources.” And even they are re-assessing the platform: The New York Times stopped publishing to Snapchat in December. “Konbini needs to have a strong view of what they want to cover and a personality.”

The post French lifestyle publisher Konbini pivots to news on Snapchat appeared first on Digiday.

Since it acquired Allrecipes seven years ago, Meredith has worked to turn it into an integral meal-planning tool for its audience and a shopper marketing and commerce ecosystem for advertisers. For its next trick, it will try to position the site as a sommelier.

On Tuesday, March 5, the legacy publisher plans to announce a partnership with Ste. Michelle Wine Estates, a vintner in Washington State, which will include a wine-recommendation tool that suggests bottles of wine to pair with certain recipes on Allrecipes. The tool, built using technology Meredith acquired four years ago, works by comparing a recipe’s ingredients and attributes to metadata the winemaker has compiled on its own products. The tool then makes a recommendation based, in part, on conventional wine-pairing wisdom: A hearty red meat dish should be paired with a full-flavored red wine, such as a cabernet sauvignon, for example.

Though the recommendations function as contextual advertisements, which Allrecipes will mete out gradually over the year, they will be shoppable in U.S. states where it’s permitted. In cases where it drives a digital transaction, Allrecipes gets an affiliate commission. In states or circumstances where that’s not possible, the tool will suggest the nearest liquor store that carries that bottle; Ste. Michelle will have the Allrecipes logo in its in-store marketing displays. To start, the tool will have 17 different Ste. Michelle wines to recommend, which Ste. Michelle chose because they are the most widely distributed, on 20,000 recipes, approximately one-quarter of Allrecipes’ most popular ones. As results roll in, it may expand the list of recipes and wines involved.

The deal between the two companies also involves a “substantial” investment in more media across Meredith properties — neither party would share a specific dollar amount — and includes a two-year window of exclusivity around the recommendations tool. But over time, Meredith sees potential to expand its use, either by involving other winemakers, or by licensing it to retailers who are looking for ways to grow their customers’ basket sizes, according to Meredith’s head of innovation, Corbin deRubertis.

“This intelligent pairing algorithm works for more than wine,” deRubertis said. “It can do it for side dishes, paper plates, pretty much any category of consumer good where there’s a class of a product that goes well with the class of another product.”

Meredith is now years into turning Allrecipes into an intent-driven engine that captures brands’ shopper marketing budgets. Since it began making parts of Allrecipes’ content shoppable back in 2016, it has been able to drive millions of incremental in-store visits and “tens of millions” of incremental purchase increases, deRubertis said. Within a year and a half of turning those capabilities on, shopper marketing and commerce were responsible for a quarter of Allrecipes’ digital revenue. Today, they account for around 30 percent. “We’ve proved that this works,” deRubertis said.

Though driving sales is the main goal for this deal, the Allrecipes recommendation tool solves multiple marketing challenges at once. Even if an Allrecipes visitor doesn’t buy a bottle on the spot, showing them one at a moment of such high interest should help raise awareness and purchase consideration.

“It gets us in front of people when people are actively planning their meals,” said Miia Suortti, Ste. Michelle’s director of digital marketing. “That’s a perfect spot for us to build awareness as well as entice conversion.”

That helps because selling alcohol on the internet in the United States is complicated by a web of state-specific regulations. Though there are some apps, such as Drizly, that will allow visitors to buy wine and other spirits directly in some states, both Meredith and Ste. Michelle expect that a vast majority of the sales this partnership drives — 90 percent, de Rubertis said — are likely to occur in a brick-and-mortar retail location rather than online.

The post Meredith’s Allrecipes is using AI to sell wine appeared first on Digiday.

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