Month: April 2019

Last month, ESPN joined TikTok with a video set to TikTok-sensation-turned-billboard-hit “Old Town Road” featuring ESPN sports analyst Stephen A. Smith in a suit and then a cowboy hat. ESPN’s next video is a montage of basketball players getting hit by imaginary Pokeballs. The network’s fifth and most recent video is a back-and-forth staring contest between Bran of “Game of Thrones” and basketball player Draymond Green.

Meanwhile, Group Nine’s The Dodo has animal videos on TikTok that are more than a year old. The publisher was active on Musical.ly, and it continued sharing videos on the app after the transition in August. But it has stopped contributing as of January.

NBC News declined to comment on its strategy, citing its early days of TikTok. ESPN could not provide commentary by press time. GroupNine said it plans to “ramp back up” on TikTok this year, but declined to offer specifics.

Publishers have been known to jump onto hot new platforms. But the question, as always, is how many resources they can afford to put toward an experimental platform, especially one like TikTok that doesn’t yet have a clear monetization path. Publishers’ early strategies don’t require too much time and effort. For example, “Stay Tuned” is simply having one producer record one host per 15-second video on TikTok.

Advertising is limited on TikTok at the moment. A biddable option for media buyers will be available in beta next week and to all this summer, per a buyer, and could open the door to more monetization options for publishers in the future.”

Last month, iHeartRadio decided to get back onto the app after abandoning Musical.ly a couple of years back. The company’s first video on its TikTok page is from 2016. It posted 31 videos to Musical.ly, stopping around August 2017. In March, iHeartRadio began actively posting on the app again to promote the iHeart Music Awards.

“We partnered with TikTok to present seven awards in the seven days leading up to our iHeartRadio Music Awards telecast on Thursday, March 14. Beginning Thursday, March 7, winning artists were presented their awards and gave acceptance speeches that aired exclusively on the TikTok app each morning,” an iHeartRadio spokesperson emailed.

Following the awards, iHeartRadio has continued to use TikTok. Last week, iHeartRadio shared a video featuring rapper Lizzo and another one with Korean boy band BTS, which received about 60,700 hearts.

While media companies have gravitated to new platforms quickly in the past, some have stayed away from TikTok. Publishers like CNN and BuzzFeed which are active on other social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat don’t have verified accounts on TikTok. A BuzzFeed spokesperson said the company is still looking into TikTok as a potential platform for entertainment content.

The post How publishers are using TikTok, the latest hot app appeared first on Digiday.

When Procter & Gamble’s top marketer Marc Pritchard met with board members from the Association of National Advertisers earlier this year, he asked whether it would be possible for TrustX — the non-profit programmatic marketplace the trade body backs — to remove the 12.5% sell-side fee it charged from the supply chain. According to one media exec with knowledge of the meeting, Pritchard didn’t have a problem with the fee as long as it didn’t impact its actual media spend. Instead, he said that for the sake of both transparency and accountability, fees should be charged separately rather than from inside the supply chain.

“The key take-away from the ANA Board was that today’s fee structure — one that typically reduces working media buying power at each step in our complex supply chain — needs to be blown up in favor of one that is both more transparent and far more accountable,” said David Kohl, president and CEO of TrustX. “Sophisticated programmatic advertisers have a right to know exactly who pays. When advertisers are the ones getting the bill, the ANA is advocating that fee amounts need to be lifted from within the complicity and made totally clear. It’s not that way today. Not even close.”

Discussions like this aren’t the norm, but they are becoming more frequent as advertisers start to work directly with publishers and the SSPs that sell ads on their behalf. “There are so many negative connotations around the tech tax, but I’m happy to pay for a well-defined service that adds value to my media buys,” said a media director who tried something similar at a global advertiser, and requested anonymity. “In order to do that, however, I need to understand what was happening at all parts of my supply chain, which was why I met with an SSP last year.”

In the U.K., there’s a project underway between trade bodies the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers, the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, the Association of Online Publishers and auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers to match data generated by the SSPs to the data created by the DSPs. Accessing those two data sets means advertisers can better understand how certain publishers sell their inventory through one ad tech vendor versus another. Armed with those insights, advertisers can then start to broker better deals with publishers and the ad tech vendors that sell inventory on their behalf.

“Phase one of programmatic was really about the technology and ownership of data; whereas, phase two is about looking at how the publisher side of the supply chain comes into play,” said Vincent Rinaldi, head of addressable media at Hershey’s. “We don’t want to be stuck in the margin game with publishers and the tech they have to use.”

The starting point is to address programmatic direct. When advertisers do direct deals with publishers and agree on fixed pricing, it’s hard for them to justify paying SSPs for managing these campaigns.

To do this, Rinaldi is considering supply-path optimization, a catch-all term used to describe the algorithms and processes advertisers like Hershey’s can use to ensure as much of their budget reaches the publisher. He added that it’s too early to discuss the specifics of how this might play out since he and his team are still bedding in a DSP they manage internally.

“We’ve been cleaning up our ad tech stack, but as we do that, we’re talking more about leveraging tools outside of the walled garden environment when it comes to measurement,” said Rinaldi. “The SSPs are going to play a pivotal role when it comes to that.”

Time will tell how serious advertisers are about making sure more of their money gets to publishers. After all, advertisers have talked about going direct to publishers for some time. It’s not easy managing multiple publisher and ad tech vendor relationships, which is why some SSP executives still haven’t met with an advertiser directly, despite having to complete several RFIs from them in recent months. Advertisers, for the most part, continue to talk out of both sides of their mouths it would seem when it comes to paying for transparency.

“We’re getting requests from advertisers mainly in the CPG and telco space,” said the exec, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “They’re asking more questions about auction dynamics and the transparency of the auctions we manage as well as a lot of questions about fees. There’s never any follow-through.”

The post Programmatic advertisers ramp up efforts to deal direct with publishers appeared first on Digiday.

Brands have been jumping on the experience-based loyalty bandwagon at a steady clip since 2017. Sixty-one percent of brands offered both experiential and monetary benefits in 2018, compared to 47% of brands in 2017, according to a recent Gartner L2 report. Experiential rewards, which include early access to products or sales, were driving this growth, the report said. Despite the recent uptick in experience-based loyalty programs, Edison contends that it’s a follow-on effect of Amazon Prime’s growth.

“Amazon Prime was a game changer for all retailers,” he said. “I think that’s really like the long play for physical retail — in-store experience and experiential rewards are advantages partly because they have lower hard costs, so less discount and markdown costs.”

Creating an emotional connection
The pivot to experience-based rewards is part of an effort to cater to those customers who spend the most, reminiscent of airline status rewards. For example, Sephora last year upgraded its offerings for the Beauty Insider Rouge tier, members who spend at least $1,000 in a calendar year. For Reebok, exclusive events and personalized training programs are the route to converting customers into brand advocates. Reward members who are part of Reebok’s highest loyalty tier can access limited-edition products, on-demand training, free fitness certifications and an all-access pass to events and concerts.

“The goal will be to create moments with our key partners, as well as through our own internal events,” said Reebok’s head of digital, Matt Blonder, speaking of the company’s recently launched loyalty program, Unlocked. “Some will be invitation-only as a reward for our best customers; it can be a very powerful way to connect and can be a very powerful way to reward our consumers for living that fit and active lifestyle.”

Tailoring to the target customer
Some brands are trying to maintain a balance of experience and discount-based rewards to keep pace with customers’ demands. The North Face, for example, has had its VIPeak member reward program in place since 2012. It was initially focused on experiences like trekking trips, race entries and movie passes. But the challenge the company faced was that customers wanted to be able to redeem rewards more frequently. As a result, the company two years ago moved to a hybrid system that included monetary rewards certificates as well as experience-based rewards.

“Through customer feedback, we realized that customers would rather get rewards more often, and wanted a combination of unique engagements and discount benefits,” said Ian Dewar, customer loyalty management director at The North Face. “The focus is not on discounting but on rewarding a combination of purchase behavior and activity associated with The North Face.”

While discounts can act as incentives for repeat business, too many price markdowns can devalue the brand in the eye of the consumer, creating an expectation that prices will consistently be low.

“It can be a slippery slope, where it’s ultimately a race to the bottom, where you are essentially sort of sending off commoditization,” said Owen Frivold, co-founder of customer experience agency Hero Digital, which works with retailers on building loyalty programs. “It affects your bottom line, and that means you are sort of pigeonholing yourself into that world and then the cost of experiences and developing with experiences becomes harder and less accessible to you.”

Loyalty as marketing
Experience-based rewards also enable social media and influencer-driven campaigns, content that can be repurposed by brands for their own marketing strategies.

“We always looked at it as a way to incentivize more data sharing on the part of the members; now I think it is very much not just the internal data structures, but also kind of impacting the external marketing and social media campaigns,” said Mike Froggatt, director at Gartner L2. “We see higher interaction rates when brands are incorporating their loyalty programs on their social media posts and organic social media posts on Instagram and Facebook, and we also see them adopting influencers.”

As a result, experience-based loyalty programs have an additional follow-on effect beyond just loyalty and repeat purchasing: the creation of organic influencers. It’s part of the reason why Reebok awards customers who share their brand experiences on social media with loyalty points; in turn, these posts can be shared by the brand to generate and additional marketing lift to new customers.

“We know that the addition of user-generated content significantly increases conversion because it helps people to understand the product,” said Blonder. “The intention, of course, is to make the experience that much more real for a consumer — it’s critical for consumer understanding how a particular product can extend into her lifestyle.

In rolling out experience-based rewards, the challenge is to devote enough resources, said Froggatt.

“A lot of times your store employees are already overrun, and it’s adding on event management to that space,” he said. “A lot of the brands that are doing it well have people that manage it from a higher level and also incorporate this into the idea. Sephora, for example, has a great legacy loyalty program that has built out a whole infrastructure of team members to manage events, and the loyalty program itself, and that’s made it really successful.”

The post ‘Amazon Prime was a game changer’: Retailers are rethinking loyalty programs appeared first on Digiday.

Zomorodi spoke to Digiday about the future of podcasting, whether subscriptions can work and the missing pieces that might be key to the real success of podcasts. Answers have been edited for clarity.

The pivot to paid is happening all across digital media, but podcasts have remained free. Do you think people will pay for an app to listen to podcasts?
We risk hitting an inflection point where people are sick of subscribing and paying for things. But I don’t think we’re there yet. Tech needs to get more intuitive to get people listening to podcasts and not just for people who are good with gadgets. And then, podcasters never get any marketing. My name is on a billboard at the corner of Houston St. and Lafayette [for the Note To Self relaunch.] That’s amazing.

But most people still use Apple to listen to podcasts. Can you see podcasts exist in a non-Apple, paid environment?
I don’t know if [subscriptions for podcasts] will work, but if you’re a John Cameron Mitchell fan, you’re psyched and you’ll pay your $8 to hear what that man is making. That’s the key to it. The billboard doesn’t have show names. It has people’s names on it. It’s about the relationship with the host.”

It’s still a niche medium, though. Do podcasts have any stretchability that goes across platforms?
For anyone running their own business, the concern is long-term financial stability. [Stable Genius] is looking beyond podcasts. We’ve leaned more into topics like tech, society, business, culture, work and ethic. I want Stable Genius to be a clear entry point for people, whether they want a guide on how to deal with kids and screens or understand ethical investor models. Stable Genius is going to be about podcasts and, potentially, newsletters. Not sure if it’s going to be videos or not. It has to be about ways to get people together and presenting information that’s digestible, clear and actionable.

Ad models aren’t working for digital media the same way as they used to. Does the podcast ad model still work?
When [a publication] scales, fake news, data collection and micro-targeting happen. Quality drops. Podcasts have proven that when you have high-quality content delivered in an intimate way, the relationship between creator and consumer is extremely strong. We have stories of people who have made changes to their lives because of our work. I don’t want to scale just that and make videos. You have to have a personal voice that touches the narrative. We’re about slow growth and making sure we deliver what the audience says they want. We want to believe that you can make a living on deep relationships with fewer listeners rather than having to scale and have a relationship with the consumer that is on the surface and fickle. The return on our ads is far bigger than on some podcasts that are much bigger.

So you still like the ad model?
I have two fantasies: One is that people will pay a premium to be on a small and intimate community-based and ethically oriented shows like ours. People are not just listening; they are making changes to their lives based on our shows. The second fantasy is a curated ad network, where you know that if you heard an ad on our show, it has a Stable Genius seal of approval and it sticks to the values of the content that we make. We’ve done as much research as we can on where the sourcing is. I don’t know if it’s possible but it’s my fantasy.

The post Note To Self’s Manoush Zomorodi: Podcasting needs to experiment with new revenue models appeared first on Digiday.

Other retailers making a big push in China are also being forced to pick a local giant to partner with — Starbucks partnered with Alibaba to offer delivery, while countless other U.S. brands have made inroads in China by selling through Alibaba’s Tmall.  China is a big market that’s hard for retailers to forego entirely, and it can be a useful testing ground for next-gen technologies. But Walmart faces an added challenge in trying to make inroads in grocery. Demand for grocery delivery is rising in China like it is in the U.S., which requires expensive logistical investments.

To make inroads in China, Walmart’s formed a strategic alliance with Tencent-owned JD.com, to fend off a joint competitor, Alibaba. Alibaba is the largest e-commerce marketplace in China by percentage of total retail e-commerce sales, while JD.com is the second. While competitor Amazon recently announced that it was shutting down its third-party marketplace in China, Walmart’s alliance with JD.com is one of the major reasons why it has managed to survive in a tough market.

“Amazon pulling out of China was a great example of how hard it is for foreign brands to succeed in the China market without a local partner,” said Liz Flora, an analyst for Gartner L2.

Walmart hasn’t always picked the right partners. One of its first investments in a Chinese startup was in Yihaodian, another online grocery startup, in 2011. Walmart then acquired a controlling stake in Yihaodian, and then sold its controlling stake to JD.com, as the once-hot startup failed to evolve to become a serious competitor to Alibaba.

But selling off that controlling stake proved to be the start of other partnerships between Walmart and JD.com. In 2018, Walmart and JD.com jointly invested $500 million in Dada-JD Daojia, an online-to-offline grocery business that uses crowdsourcing to fulfill deliveries. Walmart has also launched online stores for both Sam’s Club and Walmart on JD.com’s website, a joint online/offline promotional campaign called “8.8 Shopping Festival” in the vein of Alibaba’s Singles Day in 2017.

Additionally, when Walmart opened its smart supermarket last year, there were heavy influences of JD.com throughout — at the time, Walmart said that 90% of the in-store inventory was also located on JD Daojia. Customers could also use a program on WeChat (Tencent, which has a significant stake in JD.com, also owns WeChat) to scan and pay for items, without having to download a separate app.

Enabling payments via WeChat is one of the most important advantages Walmart has gotten through its partnership with JD.com, according to Flora. Alibaba also has its own next-gen supermarket chain, Hema, which it launched in 2016. Customers can use the Alibaba app to scan barcodes to find product information and recipe ideas, in addition to paying for items. Alibaba’s also taken the idea of doubling stores as fulfillment centers to the extreme, by placing conveyor belts throughout the store that allow employees to move and fulfill online orders more quickly.

Humphrey Ho, the managing director for Hylink Digital, an agency that helps U.S. brands market to customers in China, said in an email that there are a few trends working in Walmart’s favor right now as it and JD.com hope to make inroads against Alibaba. He said that he believes Sam’s Club still has room to grow in the southern part of China, most notably in Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Shanghai. He said that Sam’s Club has already proven popular there — even though loyalty to domestic brands is high in China — because car ownership there is higher compared to other parts of China, and it’s a part of China that “is more value-oriented and [has] bigger family structures.”

“They have seen more success there, and will likely see more see success there,” Ho said.

Additionally, Ho said that there are other ways Walmart can leverage its partnership with WeChat via JD.com to its advantage. Walmart could roll out drive-through pickup, like it has in the U.S., through WeChat in parts of China where car ownership is high. It could also create a membership program through WeChat, and offer access to more exclusive deals.

The post Why Walmart’s China strategy focuses on grocery appeared first on Digiday.