Month: April 2019

Like the sudden popularity of avocado toast, CBD, also known as cannabidiol, is everywhere. It’s in trendy beverages geared towards millennials like Recess and in creams and other types of topicals that are entering the mainstream at retailers like Sephora, Ulta and CVS. Since the CBD market shows no signs of slowing down, we thought…

Why commit to just one Olympics at a time when you can lock in four consecutive Games at once? That’s the thinking behind a new offering from NBCUniversal and LA 2028, which will give brands media, sponsorship and activation opportunities for all four sets of Olympic and Paralympic Games from 2022-2028, culminating in the first…

At AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O conference in San Francisco on April 30, Laura Nelson, Disney’s SVP of advertising solutions and performance advertising, will share how it’s selling connected TV as consumer habits and advertising preferences change. Disney is on a mission to unify its inventory across platforms and offer buyers alluring scale against much smaller audience… Continue reading »

The post Disney In One Buy: How Disney Is Unifying Its Advertising Approach appeared first on AdExchanger.

While most agencies attempt to cultivate reputations as fun, dynamic and innovative places to work, beneath the surface many are grappling with various cultural and personnel issues including employee burnout, overworked staffers, high turnover, harassment and more.

As agencies are placed under growing pressure by squeezed margins, the in-house movement, increased competition from consultancies and increasingly demanding clients, agency staffers are bearing the brunt. Employees often find themselves subjugated to long hours and swelling demands for constant availability that threaten a healthy work-life balance. Meanwhile, the #MeToo movement has helped unmask sexual harassment within advertising and sparked important conversations surrounding toxic workplace cultures.

This report examines three key themes affecting agency culture and employment in 2019; employee happiness and burnout, workplace harassment and discrimination, and what influences employment decisions.

The post Digiday Research report: Agency culture and employment in 2019 appeared first on Digiday.

Healthline Media embarked on the road to recovery by taking a content-focused approach to health information. The profitable company racked up more than $100 million in revenue last year. With audience growth rates topping 60% year over year, Healthline is on the cusp of eclipsing slow-growing WebMD as the web’s top health property. The ascension… Continue reading »

The post How A Focus On Quality And Discipline Revived Healthline Media appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Best Of A BAM Lot BAMTech, recently rebranded as Disney Streaming Service, gets knocked because Disney took a $469 million writedown on its investment early this year after spending billions to acquire a controlling interest. Yet there’s a lot of upside there. “Everyone loves… Continue reading »

The post Disney’s BAMTech Investment Was A Smart Move; Walmart Launches Subscription Box For Kids’ Clothes appeared first on AdExchanger.

E-commerce companies are bringing backend logistics in-house to improve customer experiences.

Lulus, the online fashion brand, is opening its second owned and operated warehouse facility in Pennsylvania, to help speed up shipping times. Owning its warehouses — the company also owns its West Coast facility in California — lets it minimize the costs of free shipping and returns; having a second one on the East Coast will reduce free shipping delivery windows to two to four days.

Colleen Winter, the co-founder and CEO of Lulus, said bringing fulfillment facilities in-house was a better move for the company, as owning the end-to-end customer experience put Lulus team on the frontlines of anything that could go wrong, like delayed delivery times, as well as customer behavior it needs to take note of, like high return rates.

It’s become a more common tack for retailers. It doesn’t make for a hot marketing play or press release, but retailers say investing in backend logistics they once outsourced to third-party partners has made them more efficient, faster and helped them save money.

For Article, which brought last-mile delivery in-house earlier this year, it’s a way to get a competitive advantage over competitors like Wayfair by offering a more high-touch experience. Since Rothy’s owns its China manufacturing facility, it can easily jump on changing inventory demands to keep fast-selling products in-stock, or phase out slower sellers without wasting materials. Reformation, meanwhile, owns its Los Angeles factory so it can monitor sustainable production markers like water consumption.

Alongside opening its own facilities, Lulus has invested in building out internal developer, data and customer service teams. Winter estimates that these teams’ employees number in the hundreds. Its new facility is also surrounded by the manufacturing facilities of major retailers including Amazon and Walmart.

“We can’t rely on outside players to serve our customer the way we want to,” said Winter. “Outside data is never going to be as good as our own, and our entire system is built on data and using it to make decisions. That can falter at any point.” — Hilary Milnes

3 questions with Azazie CMO Ranu Coleman
Azazie is picking up steam as bridal startups eat away at industry stalwart’s market share. Azazie, a made-to-order e-commerce company selling wedding dresses, bridesmaid dresses and other bridal accessories, is setting itself apart from tradition with an extended size range, crowdsourced designs and personalized marketing approach. CMO Ranu Coleman explained the strategy.

Azazie is targeting a more modern buying experience. How has customer behavior changed for the bridal industry?
People are getting married later, they’re not interested in buying off the rack, and there’s a push toward customization and personalization. Weddings have also gotten much more casual in nature. It also comes down to budget — people want to spend less, and our pricing plays a big role. Another piece is inclusivity; bridal has not been inclusive. You don’t have a sample to try on in stores that is anything outside of the standard 2-10 sizes. Since we started in 2014, we always offered our dresses in sizes 0-30. There’s a lot of improvement in competitors in catching up to that, but it’s taking a long time.

What’s the most effective marketing strategy for the brand?
For paid, Facebook has been really great for us. Our target demo is between 18 to 34 but the sweet spot is 25 to 34. We run ads on Google, Instagram and Facebook, and that’s where we see the most ROI. We haven’t had to brand out to many new channels yet, because a huge driver of our growth has been organic and peer-to-peer. So far, 60% of growth has been driven by word of mouth. Bridal is extremely referral based, and you get one opportunity to blow away the expectations of a bride, which is so different from other apparel markets. So it’s really important we get that right. We focus on the customer service end, and see that as an extension of our marketing strategy. We’ve done customer acquisition through paid channels and organic marketing, but it’s really all about how we bring the customer experience together overall.

How is Azazie rethinking the customer experience?
There are different elements to the experience we provide that set us apart. We have a sample program, where brides can order sample dresses to try on at home. We also crowdsource designs: Our in-house design team sketches 25-30 styles at a time, we put them on the site and then manufacture the most popular ones. We also have a virtual showroom on our app and site where bridal parties can vote on styles and discuss choices. We want to make it a considered process. A lot of the new players in the space are fast-fashion, and they don’t know the ins and outs of the bridal experience, with color matching or inventory management. We know how to avoid bride-specific issues. — Hilary Milnes

Malls get even more physical
A recent report from the International Council of Shopping Centers found that the number of fitness centers in malls — which includes both traditional gyms and boutique fitness studios for activities like yoga dance — have risen. In 2018, 14,044 shopping centers in the U.S. had fitness centers, compared to 6,218 in 2008. That gives traditional retailers opportunities to create “co-tenancy synergies” with their new, healthier neighbors, according to ICSC.

For mall owners, the benefit of bringing in a gym is that it’s a place that customers visit multiple times a week. That’s critical at a time when the mall is becoming less significant of a place for shoppers to visit weekly or even monthly.

ICSC believes that there’s an opportunity for food and beverage tenants to cater to this clientele, by marketing themselves as a stop for a healthy meal or groceries after a workout, and of course, athleisure companies who sell workout gear. But so far there’s few retailers who have been overt in trying to build a formal partnership with gyms and fitness studios.

One of the exceptions is Kohl’s, which announced earlier this year that it plans to lease extra space to Planet Fitness, in the belief that Planet Fitness’ members are also the type of customers who will want to visit Kohl’s, and vice versa. If Kohl’s sees good results from this tie-up, expect more retailers to follow suit. — Anna Hensel

What we’ve covered

Bot Watch: Robots are being used in retail stores to help manage inventory for online fulfillment.

The Best Buy blueprint: Best Buy’s outgoing CEO, Hubert Joly, led a turnaround for the struggling retailer.

Fighting the fakes: Unilever’s mission to eliminate fraudulent social media influencers has been easier said than done.

The post Retail Briefing: E-commerce companies are bringing logistics in-house appeared first on Digiday.

After consolidating its programmatic buying into one ad tech vendor, Hershey’s is starting to see the benefits.

The advertiser spent much of last year deciding which ad tech vendors it would use to buy its ads. Eventually, it opted to spend most of its programmatic budget through one demand-side platform and then went live with The Trade Desk at the turn of this year.

Historically, Hershey’s bought most of those ads through one main DSP and then used specialist vendors to chase specific impressions. But that approach is no longer feasible. The more ad tech Hershey’s used to buy its ads, the harder all those bids were to track. Each DSP implements its own technology in its own proprietary way that makes it harder to compare and contrast what impressions are bought across several different vendors. Furthermore, there are fewer DSPs on the market now, which makes it easier for Hershey’s to inadvertently bid against itself and subsequently drive up the price it pays for impressions.

“We were using a mixture of DSPs, but then we decided to scale back to one or two providers instead of being agnostic,” said Vincent Rinaldi, head of addressable media at Hershey’s. “We learned quickly when we were agnostic that it’s harder to bring everything back together for reporting.”

Other advertisers have made similar moves. The number of DSPs used by advertisers dropped 40% between 2016 and 2018 to around four per month, per a Pathmatics study of its top 100 advertisers. Rinaldi declined to reveal how the consolidation of its own ad tech stack has impacted its programmatic buys, but did say the upturn had been significant compared to its old setup. “Switching DSPs allowed us to reassess the programmatic marketplace, and since we made the transition in January, we’re seeing strong improvements to where we were a year and a half ago,” said Rinaldi.

The overhaul also expedited the advertiser’s ads away from the long-tail of sites. “That number has heavily gone down because there are stricter criteria,” said Rinaldi. As it stands, Hershey’s spend leans slightly more toward private marketplaces over the open market. “We’re not turning our backs on the open marketplace because it’s an environment where we can learn while focusing on places where our audiences are,” said Rinaldi.

Having that insight is the result of managing the DSP directly. An internal programmatic trader at Hershey’s runs the tech day to day, which is an arrangement built on the advertiser’s ownership of the contract and, therefore, the performance data its programmatic bids generate. Agencies have traditionally owned this data, which has made it harder for advertisers to get rid of them.

“We own the contracts, which is the most important thing for us because then we own the data,” said Rinaldi. “Fee transparency was important but it wasn’t the only criteria we used to pick our ad tech partner.”

The data shared by the DSP influenced Hershey’s choice as did the user experience of the platform, given the advertiser’s trader would be the one logging into the system to manage campaigns. The tech used by the DSP to make bids was also important. Bid shading, for example, was briefly discussed during Hershey’s review of vendors, said Rinaldi, who said it could become an important tool amid changing auction mechanics and unfair auctions.

Phase one of Hershey’s plan was about understanding how its programmatic ads are bought, while phase two focuses on knowing how they are sold via supply-side platforms and exchanges. “We’re starting to assess the reality of supply-path optimization and what that really looks like because we don’t want to be stuck in the margin game,” added Rinaldi. “Transparency is much around fees as it does around the people you work with and the teams you’re budding around.”

Hershey’s has a small team managing its programmatic investments. Alongside Rinaldi and the programmatic trader there are four other marketers on the team: an audience planner who oversees the advertiser’s targeting efforts, a social media marketer, a media and integrated comms planner, and a data scientist, who manages the repository of ad server, bid and social media data generated by the advertiser’s ads. Despite having the in-house expertise, Hershey’s marketers still rely on its agencies to do tasks like curate massive volumes of impressions. Curation of inventory is another means for agencies to get closer to the sources of supply, and manage it now that the advent of ad tech has pushed them further away from publishers.

“I don’t see our in-house team becoming 20 or 30 people,” said Rinaldi. “Yes, we need to keep understanding the ecosystem, but we’ve seen a shift in our ad tech and agency partners in that there’s more willingness to listen to our challenges and really work together to tackle them.”

The post ‘We own the contracts’: Hershey’s is taking control of its ad tech appeared first on Digiday.