Month: March 2019

Pinterest may have a growing ad business, but because it’s still relatively quiet, buyers say it’s possible to land better rates for more impressions this year compared with last year when there was less competition to drive up prices.

Visit Florida, the marketing body for the state, has run five campaigns so far this year and is already seeing the benefits of less competition for impressions. The CPMs for two of those campaigns cost 34 percent less than they had been last year but were still able to secure 129 million additional impressions, said the advertiser’s vp of brand Staci Mellman.

“Having a decrease in CPMs while getting more impressions is a win-win for us,” said Mellman. “We’ve increased our social budget over the last two years so the investment in Pinterest is coming from that as well as share shift from other social platforms like Twitter and traditional ones like print.”

CPMs dropped 20.6 percent between the fourth quarter of 2017 and the first quarter of 2018, according to a study of over 19 billion impressions conducted between the second quarter in 2015 and the third quarter of 2018 by Brand Networks. “If there was ever a time to invest in the Pinterest marketplace, it’s the first quarter when things are quieter and the CPMs are less,” said E.J. Freni, chief revenue officer at Brand Networks.

It’s a different story for the rest of the year.

Visit Florida is among a stream of non-endemic advertisers pouring into the platform and subsequently creating more competition that’s pushing up prices. The aggregate average CPM on Pinterest across all advertisers buying ads through 4C Insights was $3.67 in the fourth quarter of 2018. That was up on the $3.30 CPM in the third quarter, $3.11 in the second quarter and $3.20 in the first quarter.

Mellman, however, still sees Pinterest as a cheaper alternative to other online players that are by no means less effective.

Compared to other online media owners, Pinterest delivers competitively. A CPM on Facebook sits at between £2 ($2.62) and £3 ($3.94) depending on the vertical, whereas a CPM on Pinterest is around £1.50 ($1.97), said a media buyer on condition of anonymity due to concerns over jeopardizing future deals with both platforms. Average engagement rate is around 5-8 percent depending on the business vertical and creative on Pinterest, said the executive, who has seen conversation rates as high as 2-3 percent for direct response ads.

The numbers aren’t too far off what 4C Insights has seen for recent campaigns. The aggregate average click-through rate was 1 percent in the fourth quarter, up from 0.62 percent in the third quarter, 0.48 percent in the second and 0.46 percent in the first.

“Pinterest is no longer seen as a platform that’s specific to females between 25 and 54 years old,” said Freni. “There’s a breadth and depth of audience there that advertisers are starting to wake up to. It’s no longer a test-and-learn media buy for many of the advertisers we’re working with.”

While some of the price fluctuations can be explained by the growing popularity of Pinterest as a whole, the platform’s maturing ad business has taken strides over the last year to attract more media budgets to the platform. Pinterest generated $700 million in ad revenues in 2018, up 50 percent from the previous year, per eMarketer. A similar growth spurt is predicted this year, with Pinterest set to smash past $1 billion the same year it goes public, forecasted eMarketer. In comparison, Snapchat earned around $825 million in 2017, its first year as a public company.

As big as its ad business is, Pinterest is not as widely used outside of certain verticals. That’s been changing since last year when executives from the company began pitching it as a place people go to look for inspiration rather than the feeling of aspiration Pinterest pages were originally meant to evoke. “It’s becoming clearer to advertisers that Pinterest is becoming the go-to planning and discovery platform for many people,” said Freni. It was a subtle tweak to Pinterest’s pitch that piqued the interest of the likes of Visit Florida to a platform that has traditionally been the domain of retail and CPG.

“Brands should be active on the platform now to take advantage of the best rates and, more importantly, learn what creative and calls to action will resonate with Pinners,” said Aaron Goldman, chief marketing officer at 4C Insights. “Armed with the knowledge about different campaign variables, brands can continue to bid higher as CPMs rise if they’re able to improve click-and-conversion rates commensurately.

As more impressions have become available — total Pinterest impressions served through Brand Networks jumped by more than 200 percent between 2016 and 2018, for example — advertisers have reassessed Pinterest’s role on media platforms after seeing that it can be effective across the funnel. Last summer, for example, it launched a larger video format which Adidas tested at the time and saw a 12..6 percent lift in ad awareness, per a Millward Brown study cited at the launch. Direct response, on the other hand, is set to play a larger role post-IPO for the business as evidenced by its decision to open its buyable ‘Shop the Look’ pins to all businesses last September.

“We have seen great success with Pinterest ads in reaching users at both top and lower funnel stages in our marketing campaigns,” said Maria Bain, planning director at iCrossing. Pinterest’s video and static ads were used for one of the agency’s travel clients as always-on elements in a media plan, driving “huge” volumes of “highly engaged” traffic to the client’s site as well as generated high volumes of engagement on Pinterest, said Bain.

The post Pinterest is attracting buyers with low CPMs for more impressions appeared first on Digiday.

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It’s been a chaotic week for vendors and sellers doing business on Amazon. To catch you up:

• Last Monday, tens of thousands of vendors found out their regularly scheduled purchase orders had been terminated, and that they could move their business to Amazon’s third-party marketplace instead.
• Then Amazon walked that back. On Saturday, the majority of these vendors received an email from Amazon that their purchase orders would be reinstated, but that the vendors had 60 days to enroll in Amazon’s Brand Registry, which verifies brand trademarks and opens access to counterfeit protection. If a vendor was not the brand owner or an authorized seller, Amazon pushed them to open a Seller Central account in that 60-day period instead.
• On Monday night, changes hit Seller Central. Axios reported that Amazon would stop prohibiting third-party sellers from selling products elsewhere at a lower price than they’re sold for on Amazon.

This pricing policy put limitations on sellers while ensuring Amazon’s marketplace always had the best, most competitive pricing for products online. It restricted not just pricing on other marketplaces like eBay, but also how sellers could operate their own direct e-commerce sites: A brand that also sold third-party on Amazon couldn’t run promotions for its own customers without also marking down prices for Amazon’s customers, too.

Essentially, it helped establish Amazon as the leading retail force in e-commerce.

The post Retail Briefing: Changes to Amazon’s pricing policy signal a shift in priorities appeared first on Digiday.

Concerns that the General Data Protection Regulation would negatively impact digital ad revenues haven’t materialized, publishers say.

Of 103 publishing executives polled by Digiday in February, 25 percent said they have seen programmatic revenues increase since GDPR was enacted last May, while 17 percent reported a decrease. Fifty-eight percent of respondents said their programmatic revenues have remained unchanged.

The post Digiday Research: GDPR has not reduced programmatic ad revenues for European publishers appeared first on Digiday.

Adam Cahill, the founder and CEO of agency Anagram, has had a simple philosophy since he founded his business three years ago: Let people work the way they want to. The company is inspired by a Swedish model of six-hour workdays and has unlimited vacation. But Cahill wanted to do more, and recently, inspired by the rash of news around long hours and the effect they have on mental health, instituted an after-hours communication ban across the company. It’s simple: No email, no Slack during evenings and on weekends. (Barring emergencies, of course.)

“This idea that everyone has to be on all the time and can’t leave is counterproductive. People feel pressured to be at work. That’s silly to me,” said Cahill. “We wanted to do something specific and simple. And so we just made it a rule.”

Cahill, a 20-year advertising veteran, said he himself has felt less pressure since enacting the rule. And he’s not alone. Agencies are figuring out new ways to avoid mental health and burnout problems inside their companies, from communication bans to dedicated peer teams. 

“I don’t think that agency expectations around work volume have changed in the last 20 years. Because it’s a business of deadlines, with big meetings, campaigns, and pitches happening over and over, there was always the sense that you had to put in late nights,” said Cahill. “The real difference is the smartphone, and the fact that even in the valleys between those peaks, people are still connected. When your mind never gets to quiet down and disconnect I think there’s a cumulative effect that makes it much more likely to burn out.”

Troy Wade, founder at design agency Brown & Co., who previously worked at a large holding company-owned agencies, said that the pace of the business has become very fast. Wade took time off to travel and freelance between 2002 and 2006, after noticing many of his peers suffering from burnout, taking drugs and finding their family lives were suffering. “There was a creative reward that came at a high expense. And it worried me.”

When Wade came back to the industry, it had stayed the same.

The turning point came when he had a sick pet at home and asked his boss if he could take some time to take it to the vet. “My boss said no,” he said. “That was the start of another long thought process where we expect of people to go over and work weekends but when we need time out of your day to give personal commitments or do things for ourselves, we don’t allow it.”

When Wade founded his agency, which has about 50 staffers, he decided to go fully remote in an attempt to stop this from happening. The agency has no offices and unlimited vacation time.

The company, which is global, also reduces “time zone bands” so people rarely have to work with others in time zones vastly different from theirs. “The thought has been: ‘My time is my time, but your time is also my time,’ but never, ‘your time is your time.’ We have to change that.”

In research conducted by Digiday+, 32 percent of agency professionals reported being worried about their mental health. This is in line with national statistics, and a national conversation around so-called millennial “burnout” has also reignited the issue.

There are specific issues within agencies, say execs, that make the problem worse. Long hours are common, and being a client-services business means it’s often hard to create schedules.

The Digiday survey points to a correlation between mental health and the number of hours agency employees work. About 40 percent of people who work between 50 and 59 hours a week said they were worried about their mental health, compared to 27 percent of those surveyed who work between 40 and 49 hours a week who said they were worried.

“Ad agencies are often notorious for being stressful environments, yet we have found that the nature of our industry actually presents wonderful opportunities to alter the way in which we work,” said Kathy Delaney, global CCO at Publicis Health and Saatchi Wellness. Her agency makes it a point to tell people to get out into the real world and work from home. “Seeing, feeling and experiencing life outside of office walls not only relieves halogen-induced stress, but it also yields work that connects better with audiences.”

One change is more companies creating ways for employees to discuss mental health and stress challenges. Delaney said that’s meant encouraging them to discuss it with managers and encouraging managers to feel free to give time to recoup mentally.

At Peter Mayer, an indie agency based in New Orleans, there’s an employee assistance program that’s been created as a resource to specifically tackle stress, crisis and health. The company now offers up to six free consultations to employees with professionals to help with stress, grief, behavior and even nutrition. About 23 percent of their employees have signed up to it.

There’s also an internal team, called “Be Better Together,” which works to create events that help to avoid burnout, said Andrea Labbe, HR manager at the agency. And the agency has, of course, an open pet policy.

At indie agency Rightpoint, a newly formed team of volunteer employees called the “Compassion Crew” act as peer counselors, listening to employees about issues as well as other needs, and then getting that to the leadership team.

And at Essence Global, which recently put “happiness buttons” in some of its offices to measure how employees were feeling at certain times throughout the day, there is a reverse mentoring program that provides an outlet to discuss not just careers, but also stress and burnout issues. That goes alongside a psychotherapist on staff and coaches that help with conversations before, for example, big presentations, difficult conversations or a “challenging experience.”

The post No Slack on weekends: Agencies look for ways to tackle employee burnout appeared first on Digiday.

Dick’s Sporting Goods is accelerating its strategy to grow its collection of private-label brands, in an effort to become less reliant on wholesale partners like Nike and Under Armour.

The company plans to expand its in-house Calia athletic wear brand to 80 stores, and it will also launch a new, yet-to-be-named outdoor apparel brand in the second half of this year in time for the back to school season. Dick’s new brand rollout will replace Reebok products Dick’s offers as part of licensing deal that is set to conclude (the company did not say when the deal expires). The retailer is setting a sales target of $2 billion for private-label products (it didn’t specify a time frame), and to do so, the company is putting resources into product development, CEO Ed Stack told investors Tuesday.

“Our private brands will continue to be an integral part of this strategy to drive differentiation and exclusivity in our assortment,” he said. “The brand that we’re going to [launch] is more of an opening price point product. It will have meaningful floor space.”

The launch pushes forward Dick’s private-label strategy, which has become more relevant in recent years. The company has steadily moved its focus to its owned brands: Two years ago, it dumped 20 percent of its vendors to focus on private-label brands, with an emphasis on footwear and apparel, like Calia, which was designed with singer Carrie Underwood. The same year, it rolled out its second private-label brand Second Skin, a “compression apparel” product for elite athletes that has been compared to Under Armour. The new brand will focus on quality at an affordable price point, Stack said.

Dick’s increased investment in private-label offerings speaks to a broader industry shift in the relationship between retailers and wholesale brands. As larger brands like Nike switch gears to sell directly to consumers, retailers like Dick’s, Target and Walmart are beefing up their own brand selection to stay competitive. With private-label products, retailers see higher margins on products that customers can’t buy elsewhere.

“If you look at Under Armour, they’ve increased distribution; Nike is doing a lot more to go direct to consumer through stores and online, and the same is true of Adidas,” said Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail. “This is a big problem for players like Dick’s.”

Dick’s will still be maintaining partnerships with wholesale brands: CEO Stack reinforced his positive outlook on its rollout of Nike products; he’s also optimistic on Under Armour despite earlier comments about it being a drag on sales.

While increased attention to private-label offerings makes sense for Dick’s, the challenge will be to keep up with the bigger players.

“It can be more challenging because you’re up against some powerful brands as they invest in scientific research on performance — it’s doubtful that Dicks would be able to manage that level of investment,” Saunders said.

However, private-label investments are part of a bigger strategy for Dick’s to hedge its bets on the performance of owned-brands versus more common household names.

“The expectation is that all stores are going to need private label for margin and profitability, but I don’t think it adds any risk to [vendor] relationships,” said Jane Hali, analyst and CEO of investment research firm Jane Hali & Associates. “Nike sells different levels of product to different distribution [channels] – they sell their ‘better line’ to Dick’s.”

Private-label products were a bright spot in an otherwise disappointing fourth-quarter same-store sales report Tuesday. Though the retailer reported a 2.2 percent drop in same-store sales, private-label brands, as a percentage of total net sales, grew 14 percent, compared to 12 percent last year, Stack said.

The post Dick’s Sporting Goods is strengthening its private-label assortment to lessen reliance on brands appeared first on Digiday.

To the programmatic ad vet, unified ad auctions are nothing new. But it’s only in 2019 that they will become the default, thanks to Google entering the fray.

Google’s news last week that it will introduce a unified auction into its ad server, along with switching its exchange from second-price to first-price, has caused tongues to wag across the industry as to the ramifications.

But for those who want a better understanding of all the jargon surrounding the announcement, here’s a primer.

WTF is a unified auction?
Unified auctions have replaced the more traditional waterfall model. In a unified auction, multiple ad exchanges can have access to the same publisher inventory, at the same time and bid accordingly. The former waterfall model was more like a hierarchy where Google had first (and often last) dibs on bidding, followed by the next exchange in the waterfall. Anything those two vendors didn’t want, was then passed to the next SSP in the chain and so on until the inventory sold. Unified auctions helped publishers make more ad revenue because having more SSPs and exchanges bidding for their inventory drove up prices.

How common are unified auctions versus waterfall?
Pretty common. They have mushroomed over the last two years. For instance, 90 percent of publishers across the U.S. and Europe operate unified auctions for desktop inventory, with the remaining ten percent still using the waterfall, according to estimates from Rubicon Project. Globally, 70 percent of all publishers have unified auctions, and 30 percent till use waterfall.

Unified auctions just sound like header bidding.
Yes, header bidding paved the way for unified auctions. Publishers were able to put a Javascript code onto their headers (or browsers), and via wrapper tags send ad calls to multiple exchanges and SSPs simultaneously. But the method has had drawbacks, such as page latency which affects user experience. Plus, header bidding was only ever a hack created to avoid inefficiencies in the waterfall structure (like passbacks) and level the playing field for independent ad tech vendors who didn’t have top positions in the waterfall. In the process, it helped publishers bump up ad yields. Google, later on, introduced its header bidding product Exchange Bidding. But with this announcement, Google has introduced a unified auction to run in its ad server Google Ad Manager, not its exchange.

How does having a unified auction in the ad server change things?
Most publishers use Google Ad Manager as their default ad sever. By creating a unified auction in its ad server DSPs can bid directly into a publisher’s ad server (that ad server being owned by Google) rather than an exchange. That, in theory, simplifies the process.

How so?
With header bidding, exchanges see the impression, solicit for bids and run an auction before the ad loads. There can be four or five different auctions occurring at once. They’re then put into the wrapper, which selects the best bids and sends those to the ad server, which then competes with the other sources in the same ad server. “They’re [Google] trying to make it so that the ad server makes the decision,” said Matt McIyntre, head of programmatic for EMEA at Essence. “The reason you want the ad server making the decision is that it sees all publisher demand including direct deals as well as real-time programmatic ones.”

And there are fewer auctions?
Yes, that’s the idea: the auction for who gets to show the ad and how much is paid for it happens only once, in the ad server.

Does it change much for buyers?
Google’s shift to first-price auctions is more significant for buyers, who have been bidding in unified auctions for years. They’ll have to radically alter their bidding strategies, so as to avoid overpaying. In a second-price auction world, a buyer could in theory bid a crazily high amount for inventory knowing that they wouldn’t pay it — they’d likely win the bid but pay just a penny over the second-price, which would be far lower. Now, they will have to pay whatever they bid, which will require smarter planning. Some buyers already with advanced bidding strategies will welcome Google’s unified auction plans. “We won’t have to understand the different header bidding auctions, it simplifies things a lot for us,” said McIyntre.

What are the drawbacks?
There aren’t drawbacks to unified auctions, it’s already a method publishers have widely adopted. Third-party exchanges are already integrated with Google’s EB tool but given most publishers already use Google Ad Manager as their ad server, many may think that they needn’t use separate header bidding wrappers if they simplify the process and run their auctions via Google Ad Manager.

“Why do I need header bidding on my side, if all [third party ad tech partners] are integrated with EB, Google’s server-to-server platform,” said an executive at a digital publisher. “EB is so quick because it’s server-side. It’s directly integrated into my server, which is Google’s server. These other exchanges have started to work with Google. so there will come a point where client-side header bidding wont be relevant to us anymore.”

Other publishers, that already feel uncomfortable relying too much on Google’s tools, will likely try and build their own server-to-server offering or work with an independent version.

The post WTF is a unified ad auction? appeared first on Digiday.

Hearst UK is investing more in its video team, nearly doubling the headcount from five to nine over the next few months after seeing viewer and revenue gains in 2018.

Hearst’s new hires will focus on creating more original video for luxury titles Elle and Harper’s Bazaar, as well as fitness titles Men’s Health and Women’s Health. While the focus is on growing on-site video views, Hearst wants to create more original video series for YouTube. Currently, three videographers are focused on creating news-style videos that can be shared across Hearst’s 22 titles, while two others support Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping, respectively.

According to the publisher, videos like this on the characters that are leaving popular U.K. TV shows have had nearly 1 million views on-site. Tubular Labs data shows that Cosmopolitan, Hearst’s most video-heavy title currently, had nearly 20 million video views across social platforms in January. The number of views that occur on Hearst’s sites compared to social platforms varies by the title. According to the publisher, pre-roll revenue grew 1000 percent in 2018, albeit from a small base, thanks to the publisher’s focus on creating more video fit for platforms.

“Previously, we were wading in [to video]; now we’re jumping in,” said Betsy Fast, executive director, digital edit strategy. “We’re evolving our video strategy and growing original video. The hunger for video content has been so strong, we’ve been providing readers with what they want.”

Like a lot of publishers, Hearst transitioned from emphasizing fast video fodder for platforms before dialing up more on-site originals last year, partly after Facebook’s algorithm dented views, forcing publishers to re-assess their strategy. Publishers can more effectively monetize views on their own site while retaining more control over their strategy and audience relationships, often in exchange for reaching more people.

“On-site pre-roll can yield about three to five times the amount as off-site, but it is harder to scale on-site, and there are more costs to consider,” said James Pringle, founder and CEO of video recommendation platform Suggestv. “The Current CPM ad model only really works for publishers with high volume, but useful also for data capture or driving subscriptions.”

According to Fast, with the new team in place, it wants to increase its video output by at least 20 percent and increase video views on-site and off by 59 percent.

Hearst has seen digital ad revenues grow 30 percent over the last year, according to the publisher. Digital advertising accounts for around 60 percent of its total digital revenues, the remainder is made up of branded content, licensing, events and accreditation [affiliate] through its Good House Institute. Digital audiences have grown 40 percent year over year to 21.5 million unique users, according to Comscore.

The 1000 percent growth in pre-roll revenue comes from high traffic, but also Fast attributes it to Hearst’s brand-safe environments in lieu of multiple brand-safety scares on platforms.

Hearst’s editorial video on Cosmo and Good Housekeeping has also won it branded-content campaigns.

Over the last 18 months, Hearst has been figuring out what works with its audience across platforms. On Digital Spy, Hearst’s title focused on entertainment and film, audiences want video explainers, questions theories. This video on Kathleen Zellner from “How to Make a Murderer” has had half a million on-site views, according to Fast. Watch time has been around 75 percent on average, she added.

Figuring out the facets and algorithms of YouTube will take experimentation, audiences tend to be more engaged and loyal than Facebook but tougher to build up. “Beauty Lab,” Cosmo’s Snapchat Show, had 56 million viewers on Snapchat while the beauty influencer series gets a few thousand views on YouTube, partly because the beauty influencer space is more mature on YouTube.

Despite the focus on originals, Fast said the quicker news-style videos that pulled in big views will still have a place in its ecosystem.

“We have had to experiment and pivot a lot,” she said. “Speed still matters; they may not be marquee brands out there, but they serve a purpose and complements our other stories.”

The post Hearst UK doubles video team to focus on original series appeared first on Digiday.

Pandora is back at SXSW, but with a much more subdued presence than it had in years past — no dedicated event space, just meetings. Digiday spoke Lauren Nagel, vp, executive creative director, about the push for brands to create their own signature sounds and audio measurement. This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Why are you at SXSW?
I always say Pandora has been at this party for a long time and finally people are coming to the party. The main panel that I’m on focuses on consumer behavior shifting to audio and how are brands getting to that space. Having this broad perspective on everything from mom and pop, local to the global campaigns that are translating potentially large video or TV commercials into an audio experience. I’m so endlessly fascinated on this creative shift to brands needing to understand their sound and feel.

Does every brand need its own sound or need to participate in audio?
Every brand needs to consider sound as a key part of its initial strategy. It’s the same way as everyone is looking across mediums and thinking about the expression of the brand, with the goal of meeting audiences where there are. When you start looking at the stats of people consuming audio, your audience is listening, and in that sense, it seems amiss to me to not be considering a sound in an audio strategy. That said, that’s the beginning of the conversation. That doesn’t go to every brand needs a jingle. The manifestation of a sound strategy could be a voice activation, jingle or just how does the expression of our brand exists in the space. Because people are less familiar with audio as a creative medium, you see the shortcut into a jingle.

What do you think about the state of maturity for measuring audio ads?
I think when you think about traditional formats of audio messaging, it’s radio, and it’s going out into an abyss of no metrics. Did someone hear it? Switch stations? Those are the metrics, and insights have traditionally been really poor. But Pandora operates differently. Not only do we know did [the ad] play; our entire insights lab is around measurement — who is hearing this, how are they responding? — to really drill down and demystify: Did someone skip, is someone hearing this or is it jarring? Some of that comes down to the way that audio advertising shows up on Pandora. Having one to two ads every four or five songs is very different than AMFM blocks. I think one of the challenges Pandora has had is helping people understand we’re not in that old school terrestrial radio space. There are ways to measure audio and the consumer behavior of audio.

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