Month: March 2019

Facebook is recruiting publishers, including BuzzFeed, Condé Nast and Complex Networks, to produce new Facebook Watch shows starring video creators, celebrities and other influencers.

Facebook has confirmed a new program through which it will fund and license new shows for Facebook Watch. Facebook describes this program, which has no official name but is referred to by some executives as “Facebook match,” as a video incubator to fund collaborations between publishers and video creators. At the beginning, the program features 12 publishers, including smaller publishers such as Attn, Shots Studios and The Players’ Tribune, as well as digital networks such as All Def Digital, Studio71 and Whistle Sports. Viacom, through its Viacom Digital Studios unit, is also involved in the program.

Initial pairings between publishers and video stars include BuzzFeed and YouTuber Hannah Hart, Condé Nast and singer Keke Palmer and Tastemade and actress Angela Kinsley.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the launch of this new program.

This new funding program is expected to run for 2019 and beyond — longer than some past Facebook video funding programs, said a source familiar with the matter. According to a previous Digiday report on this program, Facebook is willing to spend up to $200,000 per show. These shows are also not Facebook-owned “originals,” which means Facebook is only licensing the programming for a certain amount of time, after which the producers are free to distribute on other platforms, sources previously said.

The ability to retain ownership of the shows is proving to be attractive to publishers focused on developing valuable “intellectual property” over a longer term.

“Among our many goals is to build a strong library of IP that stands the test of time,” said Oren Katzeff, president of Condé Nast Entertainment. “What’s attractive about this opportunity is that it allows us to do exactly that, while also collaborating with Facebook and great talent.”

While 12 publishers are participating in the program at launch, each publisher is expected to produce multiple shows. Condé Nast could have up to eight projects as part of this program, Katzeff said. This includes “QueenPins,” a true-crime format hosted by Keke Palmer that will dive deep on famous female criminals. BuzzFeed, meanwhile, has at least three projects in the works, two of which are with its own homegrown talent The Good Advice Cupcake and Quinta Brunson and Freddie Ransom. BuzzFeed’s show with Hannah Hart will be for its Tasty brand, according to a BuzzFeed spokesperson.

Over the past year, BuzzFeed has focused more on producing “identity-based” content led by the publisher’s creator program, said Thespena Guatieri, director of show development at BuzzFeed. This new Facebook program allows the publisher to invest more and expand creator-focused series formats, she said.

Facebook’s role in this program is mainly to provide funding. The company is greenlighting projects that are in line with the type of programming that Facebook says is successful on Watch: short to mid-form formats that encourage conversation and use of other Facebook products and features such as Facebook Groups and Watch Party.

Facebook’s Match program is the latest effort by the platform to court video creators and other big influential stars with huge followings on social platforms. Most recently, Facebook picked up a new adventure series starring Will Smith; Jada Pinkett-Smith’s “Red Table Talk,” meanwhile, has been cited by Facebook in the past as one of its most successful series.

“This [new program] is an opportunity for us and for Facebook to create programming that leverages talent that audiences are excited about,” Katzeff said. “In general, on Facebook or on other platforms, we know that one thing that can drive volumes of engagement is celebrity- and personality-driven programming.”

The post Facebook is paying 12 publishers for Watch shows starring video creators appeared first on Digiday.

Amazon has walked back the decision to terminate a majority of the vendor purchase orders it stopped fulfilling last Monday, but the action has served as a bit of a wake-up call to sellers who are now planning how to protect their businesses by relying less on the e-commerce retailer.

On Saturday, after a sudden decision to stop filling weekly purchase orders from tens of thousands of vendors on Vendor Central, Amazon’s wholesale business, Amazon sent another email out to vendors. In the email, which was sent to Digiday by a vendor who received it, Amazon said ordering would resume following a “temporary pause.”

More importantly, it pushed the vendor to sign up for Amazon’s Brand Registry enrollment, a program that lets brand owners and licensees submit proof that they are authorized sellers of a brand’s products, which then grants them protection from unauthorized sellers on Amazon. The vendor who received the email is not a brand owner.

The kicker: Going forward, only Brand Registry-enrolled vendors will have access to automatic purchase-order fulfillment from Amazon. It’s giving vendors 60 days to enroll. Non-brand owners are being directed to Seller Central, where they can sell products directly to customers in Amazon’s third-party marketplace. (See the full email below.)

The emphasis on Brand Registry suggests that Amazon’s Vendor Central purge was a move to eliminate vendors that not only aren’t profitable for Amazon to manage, but in some cases are also low quality, selling counterfeit goods or branded products without authorization. According to Juozas Kaziukenas, the CEO of retail data analytics firm Marketplace Pulse, Amazon is weeding out the vendors that are tainting the purchase experience for customers, compromising brand positioning and costing the company valuable resources to maintain, at lower profitability than if they were third-party sellers.

“Amazon wants to groom the number of accounts it’s buying from directly. Setting up a vendor account on Amazon has been easy in the past, with no requirement to authorize the brand in Vendor Central,” said Ryan Craver, the CEO of Commerce Canal, a retail and e-commerce agency. “We’re going to continue to see more of that grooming on Amazon’s part, and more pushing vendors to the marketplace.”

Vendors enrolled in Brand Registry get access to Amazon’s new counterfeit measures, including the Project Zero initiative, which enables an automated brand protection system that searches for imitated logos and trademarks, and lets registered brands remove fake or unauthorized sellers on their own. They also are able to build enhanced product pages and branded storefronts, using premium content products that help to improve customer experience as well as brand trust. To enroll, brands need to provide a government-registered trademark number.

“Amazon will invest more resources in Brand Registry from here, as it positions it as a requirement for vendors. It’s a positive for brands and customers,” said Todd Bowman, senior director of Amazon and e-retail at Merkle. “Amazon wants to streamline the retail processes that they have. To do so, they’re trying to clamp down on who’s selling what products and where, and ensuring that the brands are who they say they are, which is both for trust and its own streamlining, which will increase profitability.”

Amazon is essentially fine-tuning its flywheel, pushing toward a unified seller system that increases counterfeit protection and inventory rates, with heavy automation rather than its own heavy-lifting. By requiring all vendors to register their brands, Amazon knows that all vendors are authorized sellers of their products. Then, as those brands have the ability to quash unauthorized sellers or counterfeit peddlers without going through Amazon, fake and untrustworthy products will be limited on the site. On the third-party marketplace, Amazon has also rolled out Fulfilled by Amazon initiatives like an inventory performance index to ensure that FBA products are moving through the warehouse quickly enough. In October, it introduced a “brand health” index that third-party sellers have to follow to ensure they maintain their product listings and performance, around indicators like pricing, Amazon Prime eligibility and in-stock rate.

But as Amazon’s retail business progresses towards a more hands-off model similar to Alibaba’s marketplace, both vendors and sellers are eyeing growth elsewhere. While Amazon owns half of all e-commerce purchases in the U.S., diversity is becoming imperative. Relying on any one platform to do business is dangerous, and Amazon has shown in the past week that it can cripple multi-million dollar companies in one swipe.

“With any channel, we want to be really careful not to be super reliant. It just takes one change before a company selling there can crumble, and Amazon can make those decisions in a faster and less transparent way than other channels,” said Brian Hemmert, the CMO of keto cookie brand Fat Snax, that does its majority of business on Amazon’s third-party marketplace. “Because Amazon owns so much of the e-commerce space, it’s easy to become really reliant on them.”

Fat Snax is now spending more on marketing to drive customers to its direct site. A vendor speaking on background said that he wished he could pull his entire business from Amazon, but would be making an effort to increase sales elsewhere and take some of the eggs out of the Amazon basket.

“Diversity is really important in this situation. For brands, being reliant on one channel can cause your business to go under as soon as a lever is shifted,” said Bowman. “And Amazon has shown they can make a change really quickly.”

Here’s the full email:

 

The post Amazon walks back vendor purge as sellers look to reduce dependence on the platform appeared first on Digiday.

Snap is making a splash at SXSW, with a new dedicated space on Rainey Street and plenty of speaking engagements. The first-time SXSW sponsor has had appearances in the past, including Snap Bots distributing Spectacles in 2017, but this year represents a bigger commitment for the company.

“We thought it was such an important place because not only do we have important relationships with clients but it’s a great place to come and get inspired, with the startup community and the increasing investment within the awesome community around tech,” said Snap’s global head of strategy Jeff Miller.

Digiday spoke with Miller about going big into Snapchat AR and its plans for content in the coming year. This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Several of the SXSW activations have Snapchat AR integrations. Are those organic, or did you reach out to those companies?
Yeah, there’s Amazon “Good Omens,” “Game of Thrones,” “Detective Pikachu” posters using Snapchat lens. The markers are a new capability, and for us, it was intentional because we knew this was something that’s frankly a format that’s been out there before but this was incredibly contextual. If you look at the “Game of Thrones” experience, what we’re doing with that completely adds value. While you’re waiting in line, you’re not just sitting there waiting with 50 other people. You’re actually engaging with the experience.

Bleed #ForTheThrone with #Snapchat.
Use your phone to unlock animated character posters at #SXSW. pic.twitter.com/zp5sx7JakF

— Game of Thrones (@GameOfThrones) March 8, 2019

My favorite one with that is with Daenerys. She actually comes out with the Unsullied, and you have the music behind it, so it’s completely immersive, not just the visual. Hearing that theme song behind it just gives you chills as you’re seeing it. To us, it continues our investment in augmented reality. Everything we do is Snapchat lens, because we open to the camera, because our community is so ingrained with Snap codes, understands the behavior of a Snap code that when you see something like that you don’t even have to educate them. If you see a Snap code on a poster, there’s no call to action.

Beyond AR, have you had other partnerships at SX?
Our biggest is in AR, but you’ll see some stuff on the content side, but creatively speaking, we’re really focused outside of SX on everything related to scaling our business and driving ROI. Especially in my role in leading creative strategy and business marketing, our message that we’re trying to deliver to advertisers really clearly is, of course, you can do things on Snapchat that are leading the way in terms of engagement and innovation, but we’re really at this point in our business where we’re able to scale with our audience and drive really outsized ROI. Just a couple clear indications of that: our Commercials product, six-second, un-skippable, we’re able to deliver under 2 cents of effective cost per completed view. That’s full-screen. That’s sound on. That’s what we need to do a better job of telling our story about. People don’t think of Snapchat for that type of ROI or that type of scale.

So Snapchat isn’t just for cool AR?
The best advertisers are the ones who are using all of the [ad] formats. They’re using AR that they know are going to engage our community, but then they’re using that to build a relationship that they can then follow up with ads that are more down-funnel.

I know you have your partner summit coming up. Is there anything else you can tell about at Snapchat that you’re excited for this year?
One is what we’re doing on the content side. I believe Snapchat develops the best in-mobile content, and we’re getting crazy engagement with our entire community. They go in there, and they just understand that we’re building something that’s specific to the mobile device and content that’s specifically for the mobile generation. I’m excited about how we’re scaling that globally, localizing for specific markets, thinking about different sub-genres under our Snap Originals brand and then what we’re doing with partners.

On the business side, what I’m most excited for is our intentional focus on how we’re building brands, brands of all scale, not just thinking about how we’re doing things that are routed in novelty, but if we’re sitting down with whether it’s P&G or Warner Brothers or Coca-Cola, all the way down to local, small business, how do we add value, and how do we measure that at scale? That to me is the biggest transformation to Snapchat moving forward: We’re actually focused on scalable ROI for advertisers of all sizes. The way we add more advertisers into the system is, we prove out we’re a valuable partner for them.

The post ‘Biggest transformation to Snapchat is scalable ROI’: Snap’s global head of creative strategy Jeff Miller appeared first on Digiday.

In Austin this week, guests have their choice of CBD-infused Moscow mules, old fashioneds, or gin and tonics, all available for a taste right before a group yoga class led by L.A.-based yoga instructor and founder of NamastShay, Shayla Quinn.

It’s part of an activation by CBD brand Medterra, which is using SXSW to show visitors that CBD can be woven into an everyday lifestyle.

“There is still a lot of confusion about CBD. People ask all the time, ‘Is this legal,’ Will this get me high,’ ‘Can I use this every day,’ so we see this as an education opportunity,” said Medterra CBD CEO Jay Hartenbach.

Medterra CBD, which is known for its cooling creams, sleeping and anxiety aids and tinctures, knew it wanted to be a part of the SXSW conversation and hired WellHaus, an event activation agency known for its cannabis pop-ups at the Sundance Film Festival for the activation this year.

CBD and cannabis both have taken Austin by storm this year. The film, interactive and music festival this year also has a “Cannabusiness,” track, where  SXSW’s 70,000 plus attendees can choose from 44 sessions that are more business- and marketing-focused with industry changemakers like MedMen co-founder and CEO Adam Bierman and Dosist CEO Gunner Winston.

For other cannabis companies, they’ve chosen to go the wellness route, working with the festival’s expanded Wellness Expo that hosted 171 brands this year. Companies like Elixinol, a brand that sells CBD oil drops, was in attendance at the Wellness Expo, as was Buddha Box, a small business out of Boston that sells Himalayan Salt Lamps, rose quartz bracelets and CBD body oils and balms.

“I’ve been to a lot of events like this and it seems like at SXSW, there seems to be more of a conversation around CBD and its benefits, versus as a recreational drug,” said Buddha Box founder Maren Quigley. “People understand that many of the beauty products or medicines they are using aren’t good enough and as they are making the move to cleaner eating and living, they want a natural alternative.” WellHaus founder Ryan Heil agreed, “We developed WellHaus as a way to bring health, wellness and education t= major festivals to help educate attendees and Austin locals about CBD.”

Bringing your brand to SXSW is also one way to increase awareness, especially through PR and physical activations, as online marketing channels like Facebook, Instagram and Google still do not allow drug and drug-related promotions. Though Medterra CBD’s business is 60 percent direct-to-consumer and 40 percent wholesale through 2,500 smaller pharmacies and mom-and-pop chains around select areas of the U.S., Hartenbach emphasized there are still challenges.

“We’re still limited to what we can do with marketing as a CBD brand,” he said. The company said it’s about to launch in a major nationwide retail distributor this month, declining to say where.

Even Goop is interested, with CEO Gwneyth Paltrow mentioning during a fireside chat that her company is increasingly interested in the space. “It’s something we are looking at, but waiting for it to be above board,” she said.

Medterra CBD, for its part, is not deterred. Along with its upcoming retail expansion, it is launching a line of female-focused skin-care products as a subbrand of Medterra CBD, slated to come to market in May 2019. “We’re just at the beginning of what CBD brands could look like,” said Hartenbach. “There is the demand from the customer and the companies that get their first will be the authority, that’s what we want to be.”

The post ‘We see this as an education opportunity’: CBD brands take SXSW appeared first on Digiday.

The Guardian is seeing its investment in podcasts pay off, buoyed by a new daily show that it’s using to increase ad revenue, but also drive people to its membership program.

Last November, the publisher launched a 25-minute daily news podcast “Today in Focus,” which has become its most popular show, accounting for a quarter of all total listens. Average daily listens for the show have grown fivefold since launching, based on first-week listens compared to last week’s listens. The publisher also said that audience figures have grown 30 percent month-on-month but was unwilling to share more specific figures.

The Guardian has 10 active podcasts.

High listen and download numbers are useful to show advertisers, but in the last few weeks, the publisher has used the format to drive people to its membership scheme, by running ads within the podcasts. It says it’s working, but it’s too early to share results.

Numerous publishers are moving podcasts higher up the value chain as audiences grow and ad revenue continues to show promise: Ad rates overall have stayed buoyant while demand is still high, audiences tend to be younger and focus on the show. While there’s a wealth of podcasts out there, only the top tier with listen numbers in the six-figures can get meaningful ad revenue.

“Podcasts are not just a story on memberships; they have been successful on ad slots — they are a mix of revenue streams,” said Christian Bennett, executive editor of visual journalism at the Guardian.

“Today in Focus” covers one big news story and two shorter stories less tied to the news cycle. The second-most popular episode to date has been on climate change, a story that media organizations struggle to tell effectively. Trump and Brexit also pull in big numbers but the podcast has also covered stories like racism and the healthcare industry.

“‘Today in Focus’ humanizes our journalism and brings it to a new audience,” said Bennett. “There’s a gap in the morning to have a clear in-depth look at a story and have it talked out in front of you. The judge is it’s interesting whether you know about a story or not; we try and cover it in a way that’s different.”

The daily news podcast has eight people working on it, as does The Economist’s version. “We went into this thinking it will be a very important property, eventually as important as paper, this isn’t secondary,” said Bennett.

The daily news podcast space is a busy one and publishers like The Financial Times, The Economist and The Washington Post have released daily news podcast. According to podcast platform Acast, in 2018, there were 230 million listens to daily news podcasts on its network, 6 million of these were in the U.K. The Guardian broadcast a daily news podcast from 2006 until 2010. The monetization of podcasts has matured since then, making it a more viable product.

“You need a clear identity and branding to offer something different in this space, but there’s enormous room for growth,” said Susie Warhurst, global head of content at Acast. “People are only just waking up to the possibility of podcasts, and it the deeper engagement from a daily rhythm.”

The Guardian runs 30-second geo-targeted audio ads that are run across Acast’s network, as well as sponsorship ads that are produced by the Guardian for specific podcasts and audiences from advertisers like Bose, which fetch a higher premium.

“That’s two bites of the cherry,” said Howard Bareham, co-founder at audio media buying and creative agency Trisonic, adding that sponsorships are the fastest area of growth in audio ads because they maintain the sense of endorsement from the brand. There are no public figures for the size of the podcast market in the U.K. — Bareham estimates about £25 million ($33 million) — so it’s a small but rapidly growing market.

According to an Acast research study from 2018, 76 percent of listeners take action after hearing a podcast ad, which could be visiting a site, making a purchase or taking out a subscription.

As with all routes to subscriptions, there are obvious limitations with attributing the sale to the final format before conversion. For the Guardian, “Today in Focus,” and podcasts in general, offer multiple revenue streams.

“Podcasts are additive to the relationship with the audience; people listen to podcasts when their hands and eyes are busy,” said Bennet. “‘Today in Focus’ is a big investment and a big audience; we want to seriously invest in the opportunity.”

The post How The Guardian is making podcasts pay off appeared first on Digiday.

Microsoft is releasing a new set of artificial intelligence courses geared toward business leaders. The free instructional videos and case studies focus on the less technical aspects of the technology as it applies to top execs attempting to integrate AI, including strategy, company culture and ethical responsibilities, into their operations. They’re the latest in a…

Acura is heading into March Madness at full throttle with the Acura #SuperHandling Challenge. The campaign–a play on words off the automaker’s Super Handling All-Wheel Drive technology–combines college basketball personalities and user-generated content from fans, and it will run throughout the 2018-19 NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Championship tournament. Participating “basketball influencers” will include: ESPN…

Last week, news spread quickly that Amazon suddenly–and perhaps heartlessly–cut off thousands of vendors by simply not placing orders with them. This, in turn, prompted panic, as these companies would have no choice but to sell directly to Amazon customers or be forever estranged from 150 million unique monthly U.S. visitors. But fear not, Amazon…

Touring Adweek staffers through their huge, humming activation on the first Sunday of SXSW, Jamie Posnanski, head of global content for Accenture Interactive, demoed and described new tech and platforms designed to meet the demands of the rapidly evolving customer journey. That ranges from getting help picking out the right pair of earrings or sunglasses…

New York Media is laying off 16 full-time staffers and an additional 16 part-time and freelance staffers in a “restructuring” that is intended to put it on firmer financial footing, the company said today. The cuts primarily affect New York’s audience development and circulation teams, its copy and fact-checking desks and its video and production…