Month: April 2019

In October, Meredith announced that it was going to produce 10 shows for IGTV, Instagram’s long-form live video service.

Now, it’s doubling down. The publisher has, to date, premiered 14 shows on IGTV and plans to debut at least six more by the middle of this year, according to Andrew Snyder, svp of video at Meredith. While IGTV has struggled to break into the mainstream like Instagram’s Stories product, the publisher has upped its bet on the platform because it has seen IGTV pay off.

Meredith has received more than 20 million views  in total across its IGTV shows, said Snyder. The figure is promising given publishers’ early struggles to get views for their IGTV videos, but some publishers, like First Media, Group Nine and Whistle, have had single IGTV videos that have received millions of views. Nonetheless, Meredith’s IGTV shows have nabbed enough views to warrant advertisers’ interest and investment. The publisher has signed deals with more than a handful of advertisers to sponsor its show by integrating their brands into the programs’ content, said Marla Newman, svp of digital sales at Meredith. She was unable to name the advertisers but said they include finance, travel, food, auto and luxury marketers.

Meredith’s IGTV ad sales efforts may have been helped by the fact that Instagram has not yet opened its long-form video service to advertisers. And Meredith has seized on that opportunities by using IGTV to secure broader sponsorship deals with advertisers. “The interest in IGTV can often be the lead if you will, but because of the breadth and depth that Meredith can bring to our advertisers, we don’t ever just sell one thing,” said Newman.

Also aiding Meredith’s ad sales efforts may be that its shows appeal to younger audiences, according to Snyder, though neither he nor a Meredith spokesperson was willing to share the age ranges for the shows’ viewers.

Meredith has seen that IGTV shows focused on more niche topics perform particularly well. For example, Martha Stewart Living is a publication that covers everything from home decor to cooking to crafts. But for its first IGTV show, “Frosted,” the publication concentrated on showing how to make “pastry chef-worthy frostings, glazes and icings,” said Snyder. The weekly series has aired nine episodes since premiering on Feb. 11 and has averaged 490,000 views per episode. “It’s a great representation of how we can be very specific and very focused in the programming, and we’re finding that audiences are really responding to that strategy,” Snyder said.

Adhering to a regular upload schedule also helps to build an audience for IGTV shows. Instagram execs have previously said that regular, serialized programming performs particularly well on IGTV because it gets viewers in the habit of tuning in on particular days to watch new episodes. “Frequency and consistency matter. One of the things we’re planning around as we look to the future and beyond the next six shows that we’ll launch is how do we increase the frequency and consistency so that we can stay in front of that audience,” Snyder said.

Of course, it also helps when Instagram introduces features to draw people’s attentions to IGTV, as it did in February when it started inserting one-minute previews of IGTV videos from accounts that people follow in their main Instagram feeds. For Meredith’s IGTV shows, the introduction of in-feed promotion for IGTV videos spurred a “double-digit lift in terms of average episode views,” said Snyder.

The impact of that change is evident in the viewership of Food & Wine’s cooking show “Cooks.” The weekly series premiered on Feb. 1, and its first two episodes have only cracked 11,000 and 13,000 views, respectively. But the third episode debuted a week after Instagram began featuring the in-feed preview videos, and from that third episode through the show’s most recent episode that was uploaded on April 5, the show has averaged 287,000 views per episode. “Promotion matters,” said Snyder.

The post Meredith’s IGTV shows have surpassed 20 million views appeared first on Digiday.

A Digiday poll of 100 client-side marketing executives on their media-buying objectives found limiting their exposure to ad fraud as least important.

Using a weighted average for responses, where five equaled most important and one equaled the least importance, improving audience targeting came out on top with a score of 4.3, while restricting ad fraud stumbled in at 3.62. Issues around improving attribution measurement and avoiding unsafe brand environments came in between.

The post Digiday Research: Marketers aren’t prioritizing the fight against ad fraud appeared first on Digiday.

Brand groups that have struggled to grow sales are moving to offload their best-performing assets.

J.Crew Group Inc. confirmed last week that it is considering taking its denim brand Madewell public as a separate company, potentially during the second half of the year. The news comes after J.Crew announced last week that it was appointing Madewell president Libby Wadle as the brand’s first CEO. And in February, Gap Inc. announced that it would spin off Old Navy as a separate brand.

The respective parent companies of Old Navy and Madewell have used the growth of their crown jewels to buoy otherwise unimpressive results for a few years now. Last quarter, Madewell posted a 32% growth in sales, while J. Crew’s sales fell by 4%. Madewell generated more than $500 million in revenue last year, accounting for about a fourth of J. Crew Group’s sales, but has seen its sales grow faster than its parent retailer since 2014.

Old Navy, meanwhile, generated $8 billion in revenue last year, compared to the $9 billion generated last year by all of the other companies under the Gap umbrella. Gap’s sales have declined or stayed flat for the past four years, but they have risen at Old Navy during that time period.

Old Navy and Madewell are ideal brands to spin off, as both have managed to consistently increase sales for the past couple of quarters, and still have room to grow through new markets or untapped product categories.

For Gap, spinning off Old Navy ensures that that it will no longer compete with its namesake brand, and it can focus on new initiatives. Gap CEO Art Peck has said that he wants to build a brand identity for New Gap centered around “sustainability and social responsibility,” led by Athleta, which is a Certified B Crop.

For J. Crew, the benefit of spinning off Madewell is that it gets an immediate cash infusion. Madewell is still a relatively small brand, but time is of the essence. J.Crew needs some way to pay off its $1.7 billion in debt, and the surest path to doing that right now is by spinning off Madewell before it’s dragged down by its parent company. J.Crew has not yet given much indication about how it wants to position the brand sans Madewell, but J.Crew’s other sub-brands — the short-lived brands Mercantile and Nevereven were shuttered last November — implications that J.Crew believes that its best path forward is by entirely focusing on its namesake brand.

“The decision to spin off Old Navy and Madewell by their respective groups underlines the fact that there is a lot of polarization in retail right now,” Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail, said in an email. “When good and bad brands sit together in one group it is hard to maximize the value of the good brand and sometimes to give it the finance and focus needed to grow.”

Madewell, launched in 2006, first started selling only denim, and then expanded to other clothing categories, and has just 131 brick-and-mortar stores. Madewell has the opportunity by growing a lot simply by opening more stores, and by targeting the men’s market — Madewell just launched its first men’s collection last year.

Whereas Madewell is “the only part of J.Crew that’s working,” according to Saunders, Gap has two shining stars right now — Old Navy and Athleta. However, Athleta is a smaller brand with just 161 stores. And Athleta fits better with the “specialty brands” image that New Gap is trying to cultivate, with Banana Republic and Hill City also remaining with the parent company.

While Old Navy is fairly well saturated within the U.S., Gap’s CEO Art Peck said during the company’s last earnings call that he believed there’s still room to grow — particularly in areas that were once served by “general merchandise retailers” like Sears, JCPenney or Kmart, all of which are closing stores. Additionally, there’s a lot of room for Old Navy to expand internationally — the brand currently has no company stores in Europe, and just 15 in Asia.

“Old Navy’s growth will depend on continuing to introduce new trendy, low-priced clothes for its core target audience to retain their loyal customers,” Ken Morris, principal at BRP consulting said in an email. He added that “many people may identify and associate the Old Navy brand synonymously with Gap, and that the key for Old Navy will be “to clearly distance itself from Gap during the spin-off.”

The post Bloated brands are looking to spin-offs to save themselves appeared first on Digiday.

For nearly a century, products have played a starring role in some of the most iconic films and TV shows of all time, from a Hershey’s chocolate bar in 1927’s Wings through the Eggo waffles in Stranger Things. Throughout those decades, the product-placement process changed very little. Producers and ad agencies would strike a deal…

When it comes to foot traffic, brands have always had to take inclement weather into account. But with weather getting more extreme as the climate steadily changes, stores need to be more prepared than ever for fluctuations. New research from location intelligence platform Ubimo shows how rain, snow and freezing temperatures impact business. Rain actually…

A new wave of tech could dramatically change how we hear a digitally augmented world. Thanks to the new Bose Frames, anyone can hear personal stories from pilgrims hiking the famous Camino de Santiago trail in Spain–just as if they were walking alongside them. And T?nandi, a collaboration between the mixed-reality company Magic Leap and…

Too much of a good thing can be a recipe for disaster. Take digital video ads, powerful and increasingly popular tools for brand marketers. An IAB report from April 2018 revealed that two-thirds of advertisers planned to shift their TV budgets to digital video. So what’s the bad news? As with TV, there’s simply too…

Over the years, product placement has been become a character signifier, cultural touchstone and even meta commentary. These are some of the notable examples. 1927 Wings, the first film to win an Academy Award for “Best Production” (later called Best Picture), featured several prominent close-ups of Hershey’s chocolate bars. 1964 Starting with Goldfinger, James Bond…

A year ago, Nike joined Tiger Woods’ legion of fans in celebrating his return to the Masters and to the cultural radar more broadly, after a three-year absence from the tournament. His performance at Augusta in 2018 didn’t quite live up to the hype, but the real question was whether it put him back on…

Data is the future of marketing–but only when used to enhance the core creative services that agencies sell to their clients. This is the argument Publicis Groupe CEO Arthur Sadoun advanced to support the largest acquisition in his company’s history, confirming that it had agreed to buy Epsilon for $4.4 billion. First, however, he used…