Month: April 2019

The first-ever Digiday Award will be presented during the opening of the Digiday Media Awards Europe gala on May 9, honoring leading individuals in European media who have been instrumental in creating positive change in the industry.

The Digiday Media Awards Europe recognize the companies, campaigns and technology modernizing European media. Over the years, the program has honored Refinery29, 24sata, Snickers, Jungle Creations and more.

The first-ever recipients of this acknowledgement of forward-thinking work are Katharine Viner, editor-in-chief of Guardian News and Media and David Pemsel, chief executive officer of Guardian Media Group. On Viner and Pemsel, Jess Davies, UK editor of Digiday said, “[They] have forged a new form of publisher business model which proves people will pay for quality journalism without the need to put content behind a paywall. The result is an important blueprint for the future of sustainable journalism.”

Viner, who has held her current post since mid-2015, began at the Guardian as a writer in 1997, since launching Guardian Australia and serving as editor as Guardian US, which is headquartered in New York City. Among other accolades, Viner received the Aiario Madrid prize for journalism for “How Technology Disrupted the Youth.” The list goes on.

When asked about the standing of the Guardian in a tumultuous [news?] climate, Viner said “Guardian journalism is thriving despite the turmoil around us. It’s inspiring to have forged this path towards securing a sustainable future for the Guardian through powerful journalism and a deep relationship with our readers.”

Pemsel, who also took his current role in 2015, is largely responsible for leading the commercial and financial business strategies of the group. After working in senior roles within the media industry, Pemsel officially joined Guardian News & Media in 2011 and shortly thereafter was named chief commercial officer.

In addition to his critical role at GNM, Pemsel is also a voting member of BAFTA, non-executive director of The British Fashion Council, and a member of the Marketing Group of Great Britain. Looking back on the last three years, Pemsel says “We’ve been able to create a unique, diversified business model that champions quality advertising alongside trusted relationships with our readers. This award is a huge tribute to the hard work and commitment of everyone at the Guardian.”

Digiday looks forward to presenting both Katharine and David with their honor, and naming the winners across all categories on May 9 at One Marylebone in London. Tickets for the event may be purchased here.

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U.K. media coverage of women’s sports has been neglected for years. But now an increasing number of U.K. publishers are starting to prioritize women’s sports as a major part of their editorial mandates. 

Of the national publishers, The Telegraph has been among the first to publicly pledge its long-term commitment to women’s sports. Last month, the publisher revealed it has appointed a dedicated team of four staff to run the women’s sports vertical along with a network of contributors like Judy Murray and England football vice-captain Jordan Nobbs.

Other digital media publishers such as GiveMeSport and Copa90 have also made serious commitments to readdressing the imbalance, both in terms of the staff they attract and coverage.

GiveMeSport launched its first women’s product on April 15, and has hired award-winning sports broadcaster Benny Bonsu to lead it. She has already hired 10 female staffers from GiveMeSport’s academy, a student initiative in which the publisher opens its doors to budding female sports-journalism graduates.

The publisher has seeded content related to the FIFA Women’s World Cup in June, on social media platforms for the last few weeks to drum up buzz before its official launch on the main site yesterday. The current plan is for 10 to 15 pieces of content — a mix of written-text articles and videos — to publish on the site daily. In time, the volume of content will match the amount of content that is posted on men’s sports, around 30 to 35 a day, according to Ryan Skeggs, chief commercial officer at GiveMeSport.

“It’s quite embarrassing the lack of media coverage on women’s sports,” said Skeggs. “By the end of 2020, we want the other publishers to get on board as The Telegraph has, and own this too, because once it’s become normalized, there won’t be any more embarrassing disparity.”

In 2017, U.K. women’s sports made up just 10% of all sports coverage during the peak summer season, which fell to 4% in the subsequent fall, according to Women in Sport. That inconsistent coverage makes normalizing women’s sport difficult, said Alice Pickthall, analyst and media firm Enders Analysis. “These new ventures by The Telegraph and others demonstrate an important shift in thinking.”

Not only that, but being ahead could be a useful way for a publisher to differentiate. “So far, no major U.K. [traditional] publisher has a dedicated landing page for women’s sport, and as a result The Telegraph ranks first on Google, so there is certainly a first-mover advantage,” added Pickthall.

Other publishers and broadcasters have in some way attempted to do more female-specific content. The BBC has a Women section within section landing pages for football and cricket, and Sky Sports has a section for Women under its Cricket tab. This week, broadcaster Channel 4 revealed a women’s football show hosted by sports personality Clare Balding and sponsored by Coca-Cola. The Guardian has also tried to ramp up its coverage. Last year, it published “The best 100 female footballers in the world 2018,” and integrates female boxing, rugby and cricket into its main sports coverage. “We’re seeing a noticeable increase in interest from brands in women’s sport, driven by the World Cup,” said Imogen Fox, executive editor of Guardian Labs.

Football video platform Copa90 has also begun to alter how it recruits its journalists in order to ensure it has a better balance behind the scenes in terms of the production of coverage, as well as the type of coverage itself, according to Tom Thirlwall, CEO of Copa90. That mainly consists of being comfortable with taking longer than usual to find the right hire, rather than spit out job ads to the usual recruiters. Big hires have included twice Olympic Bronze medalist and World Cup finalist Rebecca Smith as global executive director of the Women’s Game to develop content and work with influencers and leading football commentators such as Abby Wambach and Chelcee Grimes.

The challenge is that whenever it comes to commercial opportunities around new audience areas, it’s a somewhat chicken-and-egg scenario. It takes time to build an audience. For cash-strapped publishers, running a lean staff, launching into an uncharted area without clear sight of when they will generate a return on investment may seem too much of a risk.

That said, most are aware it will be a longer journey from a commercial perspective. “There is still work to be done to convince advertisers, but some brands are making great strides,” said Thirlwall. For instance, Visa became the first sponsor of UEFA women’s football in 2018, while car marque Skoda supported a campaign to highlight the lack of an official Tour de France women’s cycling team, by sponsoring 13 female cyclists to complete the race.

The challenge will be whether publishers can build the real size of the audience to ensure they can sustain the investment, said Richard Barker, joint managing director of M&C Saatchi Sports and Entertainment. “The core question for agencies is how much is audience cannibalization and how much is generating new audiences for advertisers to target.”

After all, women aren’t only interested in coverage of women’s sports but also men’s, and vice-versa. “This year will be critical for publishers to dig into those insights on who the audience is for female sports beyond just gender splits,” he added.“Media need to start creating heroes of female athletes as they do in men’s sports. Once the profiles of individual athletes start to build — that’s where it gets exciting.”

The post UK publishers turn to women’s sports as untapped growth area appeared first on Digiday.

Viacom plans to distribute some of its TV programming on its newly acquired streaming video service Pluto TV, as part of an effort to address ad buyers’ concerns about reaching fewer people through its TV networks, thanks to declining TV viewership.

Viacom will debut 15 channels on Pluto TV that will be tied to its linear TV networks, such as one that will air old episodes of MTV’s “The Hills” and others that will feature programming from other Viacom-owned networks such as Comedy Central, BET and Nickelodeon. The move is meant to highlight Pluto TV — which Viacom announced in January that it had acquired for $340 million — as the digital centerpiece of the TV conglomerate’s upfront pitch to advertisers this year.

In the fourth quarter of 2018, viewership across Viacom’s cable TV networks dropped by 13 percent year over year when using Nielsen’s C3 rating that counts live and on-demand viewership for the first three days after a show airs, according to Ad Age.

A streaming video service that features channels consisting of online videos stitched together into 24/7 feeds as well as a library of on-demand programming, Pluto TV attracts 15 million unique viewers per month — up from roughly 12 million monthly viewers at the time of the acquisition’s announcement — and half of those viewers are between the ages of 18 and 34 years old, according to John Halley, evp and COO of Viacom Ad Solutions. “Half [of that audience] don’t watch pay TV, so it’s incremental audience,” he said.

Advertisers’ interest in TV-like digital video streamed on TV screens continues to grow as a way to offset traditional TV’s diminished reach and rising ad prices. “Viacom has obviously been struggling with linear ratings for the past few years. They’re very smart to look at their portfolio and see what they can do to offset some of this,” said an agency executive.

Viacom will include Pluto TV within broader ad packages that include linear TV and digital.

The company will also offer Pluto TV for digital-only buys, which can require less of a financial commitment from advertisers and appeal to digital advertisers that may not yet be a part of the TV company’s client base. “Digital doesn’t require a half-million dollar budget to play in these pools,” said Halley.

Viacom is emphasizing that it is the only company able to sell ads across Pluto TV’s platform. While other media companies like NBC and CBS are sometimes able to sell ads against their own content that they distribute on Pluto TV, they are limited to that inventory and, as a result, typically use it as supplementary digital inventory.

Viacom will allow advertisers to target their ads on Pluto TV using the traditional age-and-gender categories deployed for traditional TV buyers. It will also enable advertisers to target their ads to more specific audience segments using advertisers’ own data as well as third-party data to identify those audiences. Advertisers will be able to measure their Pluto TV ads’ performance using Nielsen’s Digital Ad Ratings system, Halley said.

Halley said the average Pluto TV viewer spends two to three hours at a time watching videos on the service, according to Halley, mimicking behavior similar to linear TV.

Being able to offer up that TV-like audience for advertisers to reach through a digital platform that resembles traditional TV is compelling to ad buyers. “Pluto is interesting because it’s OTT but you’ve got that [programming] guide that looks really similar to live linear TV. It’s different than what we have been thinking about as OTT for the past few years,” said the agency exec.

As much Viacom is positioning Pluto TV to appeal to digitally curious TV advertisers, the company is also taking aim at digitally native advertisers that may concentrate their ad spending on Google and Facebook. The addition of Pluto TV’s TV-like inventory to Viacom’s digital packages could help the company to attract more digital advertisers, like direct-to-consumer marketers that are looking to spend more money on TV-like programming but may struggle to meet traditional TV’s higher budgetary requirements.

The courtship of these mid- to long-tail advertisers could help to reinforce the TV network’s business by bringing in new competition to push up its digital ad prices and counter any reduced spending from traditional TV advertisers that may reallocate their ad dollars across a broader set of TV networks, digital platforms and publishers as they bring their TV budgets online.

“OTT is a TV product. OTT is not a kid watching Netflix on the subway on his phone. OTT is people watching full-episode programming, typically in the living room, often with other people,” said Halley.

 

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Over the past seven years, Best Buy has become an example of how big-box retailers with large physical footprints can remain relevant in the age of Amazon.

That transformation was overseen by CEO Hubert Joly, who announced Monday that he is stepping down as CEO after joining Best Buy in 2012. Corie Barry, formerly Best Buy’s chief financial officer, will take over as CEO effective June 11.

During Joly’s time as CEO, he laid out a blueprint for staying competitive as the retail industry changed. He led Best Buy through two multiyear strategic plans, Renew Blue and Best Buy 2020, that emphasized using its stores as a vehicle for differentiated customer service as well as fulfillment centers, and building a closer relationship with brands.

The strategy resulted in a sales lift. When Joly took over Best Buy, the company’s comparable same-store sales had declined for nearly two years, and the company couldn’t figure out how to fend off Amazon from taking a huge bite out of its sales. Under Joly’s tenure, comparable same-store sales have risen for the past five years. Last quarter, Best Buy reported revenue of $14.8 billion and net income of $735 million.

“I wouldn’t declare complete victory because they’re in a pretty competitive category, but the turnaround has been pretty successful,” said Steve Dennis, analyst at SageBerry Consulting. “They didn’t just go about cutting costs and closing stores — they really thought about what are stores really good at, in concert to what digital and the internet is good for.”

“Hubert started literally at a time when the outlook was dim, and so what I appreciated about him was his customer focus,” said Michele Azar, Best Buy’s former vp of e-commerce, multichannel fulfillment and growth, who left the company in 2017. “His focus and sense of team spirit really unified the company at a time when we needed focus.”

Shortly after joining Best Buy, Joly announced a price-matching guarantee. At the time, Best Buy was getting crushed by showrooming — when shoppers enter a physical store to test out a product, and then buy it online from a site like Amazon that typically had cheaper prices. He also unveiled a five-point Renew Blue program that outlined how he would turn the company around: reinvigorate the customer experience, working more closely with vendors, attracting “transformational leaders” and building a greater sense of teamwork among employees, cutting administrative costs, and emphasizing the company’s commitment to social good through a recycling program.

Under the Renew Blue banner, Joly sought to build a closer relationship with vendors by developing what he called a shop-in-shop program, which gave brands like Samsung, Microsoft and Apple a dedicated, branded space inside Best Buy stores.

“He ensured the vendors knew they were going to get space, that was really a big change,” said Dave Marcotte, an analyst with Kantar Consulting.

By the time Joly had taken over, Best Buy had already added a buy-online-pick-up-in-store option. But Joly also leads the charge in leveraging stores as warehouses, reengineering the backroom operations of Best Buy’s stores so they could also ship an item to a customer from the store if a nearby warehouse was out of that item.

And Joly sought to double down on one of Best Buy’s existing strengths: Geek Squad. In 2016, Best Buy started piloting a free in-home consultation service, where a Geek Squad member would visit a person’s home and answer any questions they have hooking up new products, as well as suggest other tech products for the home.

When Renew Blue expired in 2017, Joly announced Best Buy 2020, a new plan for “expanding what the company sells and evolving how it sells.” Joly called for Best Buy to “build a leading position in the smart home market,” launching a new program that allowed customers to request Geek Squad support no matter if they bought a device with another retailer, and piloting a new service called Assured Living where customers could use tech to remotely check in on aging parents. To that end, Best Buy acquired medical-alert services provider GreatCall in 2018 for $800 million.

“They have a clear opportunity for doing a much larger, service-oriented business,” Marcotte said. 

In a note sent to employees, Joly emphasized that Barry “has been and remains a lead architect of our Best Buy 2020 strategy and our related transformation.” Before she took over as chief financial officer in June, she was the company’s chief strategic growth officer and also served as the interim president of Geek Squad for a year.

“Corie not only knows the financial health of the company but also was a business leader driving the service’s growth,” Azar said. “So she knows a very critical component of Best Buy’s growth very well and the current business model.”

The post Best Buy’s blueprint for surviving as a big-box retailer in the Amazon age appeared first on Digiday.

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