Month: June 2019

The publishing industry isn’t alone in these challenges. Let’s take a look at how one iconic brand took advantage of a shifting technological landscape — and changed its mindset — to get ahead.   

As technology began to progress at incredible speeds, LEGO, the producer of the famous building block toys, began to lose market share and was even on the brink of bankruptcy in 2004. To remain relevant, the company began to fuse the physical and digital worlds by adopting new work methods, altering their infrastructure and releasing new offerings. 

In order to become the ‘Apple of toys,’ LEGO promoted Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, who took over from the grandson of the company founder Ole Kirk Christiansen. Knudstorp spearheaded the company’s digital strategy with the understanding that kids were spending more time on screens then with traditional toys. This included the launch of the LEGO Life app, a social network community allowing users to play in the online space. LEGO also successfully entered the video game market with the creation of a LEGO themed adventure game.

LEGO has made huge strides from where they were in the early 2000’s. Much of this success stems from their shift in mentality while remaining true to their brand identity. As Knudstorp described it, the company went back to basics and got back to the core of what LEGO had always been about: a process of discovery.

If LEGO got kids to play with LEGO Bricks online, stacking virtual bricks on top of each other on their computer, the publishing industry’s main asset — content — can still be profitable with a revised holistic approach, recognizing the shift in market trends and consumers in order to take it to the next level of sustainability. LEGO in particular focuses on its “KSFs,” or Key Success Factors. These factors prioritize measured actions and a clear chain of command; ideas that can easily translate across industries.

For publishers, this means going back to basics, doing what they do best and creating content, all while mastering the play the pay-to-play game of distributing content on social and native channels with a clear understanding of how it contributes to the bottom line. 

This is a great opportunity for publishers to take a bird’s-eye view and consider the multiple factors affecting their content distribution potential. They should analyze costs and benefits, and which positions within their organizations can join forces to accomplish this new strategy. It would require the effort of several departments: Audience development to drive traffic, editorial for understanding which content performs well in which channels, and ad ops for connecting revenue generated with its source. With this synergy, decision makers can survive the changes the industry is going through. 

But paid content distribution is not a magic wand. Willingness to make changes in website layout and content performance is key to maximizing the revenue potential of your content. 

There’s no need to start from scratch. With the right mix of content, technology and experience — and with a significant change in mindset — paid content distribution works. 

Gil Bar-Tur is the CEO of PubPlus, a revenue attribution platform for publishers. You can check out their site here.

The post Why are publishers struggling to master paid content distribution? appeared first on Digiday.

“There is no doubt that the consumer is going to OTT and moving to gaming and e-sports,” said Charlie Chappell, head of media at The Hershey Company. “We’re going to move at the rate the consumer moves. If they move faster we’ll move faster. If not, we won’t.”

In 2018, 94% of the $453 million Hershey spent on media went to TV; in 2017, it spent $565 million, and 93% went to TV, according to Kantar Media. That trend is continuing; 95% of the $109 million Hershey spent in the first quarter of 2019 went to TV, also per Kantar.

While the company has an in-house team, C-Sweet, which handles creative, media and design insights, it also works with media agency UM. Programmatic planning and execution are run by Dentsu’s Accordion; for demand-side platforms, the company uses The Trade Desk and Google’s DV360. As previously reported by Digiday, the company has taken control of its programmatic contracts, which makes it easier to move money out of areas that aren’t working faster.

Chappell declined to share how much more The Hershey Company is spending in either area or where OTT and e-sports rank within the company’s media spending hierarchy or how much it has moved away from linear television, citing competitive advantage.

With regard to OTT, the company has spent the last five years spending money on what it calls “full episode players,” like Hulu or traditional network streamers. Today, it is looking at other offerings in the landscape, including streaming devices such as Fire TV or Roku, or aggregators Sling or YouTube TV. The company is spending everywhere through its programmatic platform to figure out which one will work best for its business. At the same time, it is moving dollars away from linear TV, where Chappell said it spent the least it has ever spent this year.

“The OTT space is fairly complicated because it’s still kind of emerging,” said Chappell. “We’re investigating all the different ways in. When I say investigating — we’re spending meaningful money to be able to understand how it works and what impact it has on our business to figure out which one’s going to work the best for us going forward.”

As the company increases its spend on OTT it has zeroed in on the frequency of its ads, as it doesn’t want to serve the same consumer repeatedly. It uses frequency capping and examines where its media runs to figure out exactly how many times its ad was served to a particular ID, either through the partner it used to run the ad or through its programmatic ad-tech stack. That the company has a programmatic team in-house as well as agency partners has made this possible.

The move to OTT makes sense to Christophe Jammet, director of social media and mobile at brand agency DDG. “The shift to the OTT space and away from live TV has been a macro move years in the making,” wrote Jammet in an email. “Younger audiences have generally watched less and less linear, live TV over time (live events and traditional sports can be exceptions). I expect this trend to continue.”

As for e-sports, the company ran a media exercise to figure out how to reach males under 25 who they were unable to reach on other media channels. That led The Hershey Company to e-sports. First, it did a media buy on Twitch in 2017. Last fall, it had a presence at Twitchcon. This year, it is growing its overall e-sports budget, though it is smaller than OTT, as there is broader reach in OTT.

“CPG brands have been some of the first brands to jump on the opportunity that the e-sports and larger gaming verticals afford them,” wrote Jammet. “Consumer brands that have a good cultural alignment to the participants and audiences have a good chance of connecting with said audiences.”

The post The Hershey Company is moving ad dollars away from linear TV to OTT appeared first on Digiday.

How did being called “hostile” make you feel? 
I don’t think [my boss and my coworker] understand what the word “hostile” means for a person of color. Even just talking to friends who are black whenever they hear the word “hostile” or “aggressive,” they are taken aback. When that was said to me I literally started crying. 

Do you think the lack of diversity currently is why the microaggressions are happening?
Absolutely. I believe because agencies are on their way to becoming a lot more diverse, [but in the meantime] that microaggressions happen in the workplace.

How do you handle the microaggressions when they happen?
That’s where the “hostile” thing comes from. I was standing up for myself. A lot of microaggressions turn into micromanaging. So it’s like, “Oh, I feel like you can’t do this because I don’t know if you can or not, so I’m going to take ownership.” It’s more of an assumption that I can’t do something, as opposed to me saying that I can’t. I do speak up for myself. If anything, I look to others first before speak up because I want to make sure that I sound very professional and that I’m being very clear and concise. That’s why I got upset when someone called me “hostile” because when I do speak up for myself it’s not like I’m just saying it. I’m actually consulting with people of color who might know exactly what to say or have dealt with something like this before. But then I’m being told that I’m wrong for speaking up.

If anything, microaggressions are one of the big things that happen — at least in this agency. It’s something people can’t really control. When people have prejudices and bias there’s nothing you can really do about someone’s first impression. 

Are they happening to other employees as well? Do you ask other people for advice? 
People do see microaggressions here. It’s a lot of the women and people of color and definitely women of color. I did the MAIP program and they taught us how to deal with these things. I speak to my mentors about diversity at agencies and they give me advice. I speak to other people and they’re also dealing with microaggressions. That’s why a lot of the time I’m confused because if they’re giving me advice it should work. It just feels like there’s something combative whenever I speak up and it kind of makes me feel like I should just stop speaking up.

If someone doesn’t know what a microaggression is and they’ve been the one to do it, do you end up in a position where you have to define it for them?
Yeah. It’s funny because sometimes I have to find another word for it for them to understand what it is. Honestly, my agency overall does a really good job at trying to get people to understand different cultures and being in a diverse environment but it’s really up to the people to take initiative and actually go to the workshops, actually do those programs. I take the initiative. It’s almost like going back to the narrative where black people always educating others and it’s really tiring.

Do the microaggressions have an impact on you other than the workplace relationships? 
I think it’s been detrimental for my mental health. It keeps me up at night. I don’t know a better way to say it. The company culture, I already knew coming in advertising was not as diverse as I thought it would be. Even just other people, the way they look at you or the gossiping that happens. It really gets to me and I feel like I have to be grounded. I know everyone has to be grounded but when you are dealing with coworkers that don’t seem like they’re interested in getting to know, like they might be a little bit prejudiced because of certain things, whether it’s because of your age, color, gender it can be really hard to do your work. You’re kind of just thinking, “Well do they even like me?”

Do you go to HR?
I wasn’t planning to. But being called “hostile” changed things. There wasn’t much progress [without HR]. I also just started to feel uncomfortable on the team, and that’s why I brought it to their attention.

What was the result?
We were separated. We’re still on the same team but we just do different tasks.

What were you hoping for?
Training. That’s what I wanted. I do these things. At the end of the day, it’s all about communicating and collaborating with each other making sure we’re all doing the work and coexist in this environment. But it’s like, that’s not the case. Some people feel like, “Oh, I don’t really need to change anything about myself.” No. Just like how I have to adapt to your work style other people should have to adapt as well.

The post Confessions of a black agency employee: ‘I’m being told I’m wrong for speaking up’ appeared first on Digiday.

CBS and Viacom, which share a controlling shareholder in theater company National Amusements, have discussed merging twice before. However, the circumstances surrounding the latest round differ in important ways. The mega-mergers of AT&T-Time Warner, Comcast-NBCUniversal, Disney-Fox, Discovery-Scripps have made a deal more urgent for either company to keep pace with the accelerating competition. Additionally, Viacom’s business is in a much different position than it had been earlier because of Bakish, who was appointed Viacom’s CEO in December 2016.

“I think they’re both in strong positions,” Alan Wolk, co-founder and lead analyst at consulting firm TVRev, said of CBS and Viacom. “If anything, Viacom is in a slightly stronger position.”

When merger talks surfaced in 2016, CBS’s business was considered strong enough — with a strong leader in then-CEO Leslie Moonves — that it could carry the albatross of Viacom, whose TV networks’ ratings had sagged and whose studio business was struggling, but Moonves reportedly resisted the merger because of Viacom’s position. When talks resurfaced in 2018, a resurgent Viacom under Bakish led to questions of the combined company’s management structure between Bakish and Moonves that ultimately scuttled any deal. But with Moonves gone following a sexual harassment scandal and with Viacom’s revival likely strengthening its hand in negotiations, the path appears to be clearer to CBS and Viacom merging with Bakish taking the reins.

The stability that Bakish has brought to Viacom — which had gone through two other CEOs the year it named Bakish to the post — could help to alleviate concerns about upsetting CBS’s and Viacom’s corporate cultures by attempting to combine the companies. “It seems inevitable that [Bakish] would be the CEO given the overall instability at CBS in the last year with Moonves leaving. Bakish, on the other hand, has turned things around with his team and that leads to stability,” said Peter Csathy, founder of media advisory firm Creatv Media.

Moonves’ ouster is far from the biggest reason that a CBS-Viacom merger is more likely this time. In the era of mega-mergers, CBS and Viacom would seem to need each other, if only because every other major media company appears to be trying to assemble their own version of Voltron.

“Size does matter in the media and entertainment world right now. When you have Comcast buying Sky, Disney buying Fox, AT&T buying Time Warner, you need to look at the remaining dance partners and pair up,” Csathy said.

With a combined market cap of roughly $30 billion, a combined CBS-Viacom would still be relatively small boat in an ocean of aircraft carriers like AT&T, Comcast and Disney that are each worth hundreds of billions of dollars. However, in his time at the helm of Viacom, Bakish has shown he can not only keep a struggling company afloat but build a fleet to buoy it.

A ‘rudderless’ company
What Bakish has accomplished at Viacom in recent years may be as much a catalyst for a merger as the market. When the longtime Viacom exec was named Viacom’s CEO in December 2016, the company was in rough shape. “Rudderless is a good word. They hadn’t really thought of what came next or, more importantly, what their strengths were,” said Wolk.

At the time of Bakish’s appointment, MTV’s ratings were in a five-year-long freefall, the company’s U.S. ad sales were declining and Paramount Pictures had lost $445 million in fiscal 2016. In addition to a struggling traditional film-and-TV business, Viacom had yet to fully embrace digital despite its core audience of 18- to 34-year-olds being early adopters of the medium. Even the company’s 2016 deal to sell Snapchat’s U.S. inventory was met with cold water by analysts at the time. “The new business of serving kids/teens with on-demand, digitally delivered entertainment is unlikely to be won by Viacom,” wrote Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Todd Juenger in a research note following the company’s February 2016 earnings report.

Back from the brink
Then came Bakish. Since taking the reins of Viacom, he has shored up the weaknesses within the company’s existing businesses. In October 2016, when Bakish was serving as Viacom’s acting CEO, the company tapped VH1 and Logo exec Chris McCarthy to oversee MTV as well, and a year later, the network had reversed its ratings decline and grown its ad revenue for the first time in four years.

The revival of Viacom’s TV networks has helped to boost its standing among producers as a potential buyer for their shows. “Pre-Bakish, a lot of the Viacom brands were kind of frozen. There were major execs missing from big roles, and people were just confused as to whether it was open for business or not. With the new leadership, the brands have really started to come alive again,” said one entertainment exec.

Meanwhile, Paramount Pictures’ adjusted operating income has grown for each quarter since early 2017, and Bakish said in September 2018 that he expects Viacom’s studio business to become a billion-dollar business “in a few years.”

Additionally, while Viacom’s sagging TV ratings had led to questions of whether pay-TV providers would continue to carry its channels, the company has not only renewed its carriage agreements with providers, including Altice, Charter, Comcast and AT&T’s DirecTV, but it has used those renewals to fuel its advanced advertising business. In its renewals, Viacom made arrangements with the pay-TV providers to enable more audience-based targeting for ads running on Viacom’s networks. That has helped Viacom’s advanced advertising business, Advanced Marketing Solutions, grow to rake in $343 million in revenue in 2018. Bakish said earlier this month that AMS will account for roughly 20% of Viacom’s ad business by the end of the company’s current fiscal year.

Catching up in digital
Beyond addressing the weaknesses in Viacom’s traditional businesses, Bakish has pushed the company to build up its digital business. “He’s certainly accelerated digital investment because Viacom was far behind all the other studios in having a digital strategy,” said Csathy. Since Bakish became CEO, Viacom has acquired influencer marketing firm WhoSay, the Comic-Con for the online video industry VidCon, digital studio AwesomenessTV and streaming video service Pluto TV. Also under Bakish, the company has invested in Jeffrey Katzenberg’s short-form video service Quibi and esports company Super League Gaming.

The Pluto TV acquisition, in particular, is important to the future of Viacom. In addition to offering Viacom more targeted ad inventory to sell, Pluto TV offers Viacom a direct-to-consumer platform that, at the least, can serve as an insurance policy for programming distribution as linear TV viewership continues to decline and streaming services like Netflix and Hulu prioritize original programming produced by their in-house teams. Pluto TV has about 16 million users.

International expansion
When it comes to CBS-Viacom, Pluto TV would offer an opportunity to expand the combined company’s business around the world, a move that other media mega-powers are making to keep pace with Netflix, such as Comcast’s acquisition of Sky to complement NBCUniversal. Pluto TV is already available in the U.K., Germany and Austria, and Viacom plans to extend to it Latin America this year. Because of streaming, “international is now a major growth opportunity beyond just movies,” said Csathy.

Of course, CBS doesn’t need Pluto TV to expand its business internationally. The company already has its own streaming service in CBS All Access, which it has expanded to Canada and Australia in the past year. However, Bakish could help CBS to continue to grow its international business given that he had run Viacom’s international business before becoming CEO. During that time, he oversaw Viacom’s acquisitions of two international broadcast networks, Channel 5 in the U.K. and Telefe in Argentina. “The international X-factor is a significant one. He has deep international experience, so he clearly understands the global marketplace,” Csathy said.

Bakish’s success in overseeing a combined CBS-Viacom would be far from guaranteed. Getting the two companies to play nice with one another would be challenging enough.  “He’s got a really strong ecosystem that he put in place [at Viacom] and proved to be far more visionary than people thought. Turning around Viacom is a big deal,” said Wolk.

The post ‘Visionary’: Why Bob Bakish, who revived Viacom, is the frontrunner to run CBS-Viacom appeared first on Digiday.

Cosmopolitan was paid a flat fee to produce the show. While the publisher declined to comment on price, the going rate for a branded podcast typically begins in the high six-figure range, with more sophisticated productions costing over $1 million.

Moving forward, Cosmopolitan hopes “Single, Swipe, Repeat,” along with the strong digital reach it’s built — the title claims to reach 78 million millennials across platforms — puts them in position to make more of them, in-house; Cosmo hired an outside production company to make this one.

“This is the first time we’ve ever done this, so we’re more interested in the learnings, but if we hit 50k listeners we’ll consider that a success,” Cosmopolitan publisher Nancy Berger said. “It’s too early to draw any conclusions, but we are seeing strong performance in our first 24 hours.”

Tinder was already a believer in branded podcasts. Back in 2016, the dating app hooked up with Gimlet’s brand studio, Gimlet Creative, to produce a similar show called “DTR,” which ran for two seasons.

But those shows had to rely on Tinder’s own limited distribution, plus the occasional shout-out in Apple’s podcast app. Though Tinder got creative to market “DTR” — it built fake Tinder profiles that users could swipe with to drive downloads — its overall footprint was much smaller than Cosmopolitan’s. And while Cosmopolitan has limited experience in the podcast space, it has a big audience in the demographic Tinder is hoping to reach. The women’s lifestyle publisher reaches 40% of U.S. female podcast listeners, Berger said, citing user research it conducted this year.

Both parties expect that strong overlap will remove the need to spend money promoting the show. “We have the audience in-house already,” Berger said. “We don’t have to go out and search for it.”

Historically, branded podcasts have been a pricey purchase with real distribution challenges. While there have been success stories, such as GE’s “The Message,” or, more recently, a companion podcast to the HBO miniseries “Chernobyl,” which averaged 1 million downloads per episode, branded podcasts are typically not used to reach a large audience.

But as the podcast audience continues to grow, and as more legacy media companies get involved in the space, some may hope to leverage their reach to drive more scale than previously possible. “It’s a good option for certain companies,” said Steve Pratt, the founder of Pacific Content, a podcast agency that was acquired in May by the Canadian broadcaster Rogers Media. “For [brands] that want big reach or a mass audience, partnering with a media company makes sense.”

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