Month: June 2019

“This is not an extension of the U.S.; this is about how to empower our writers for a U.K. audience,” said Akhil Nambiar, chief of staff at The Athletic.

The Athletic is premised on going beyond the typical sports reporting found in newspapers. Typical stories include an oral history of [Toronto Raptors basketball player] Kawhi Leonard’s college days or this on the secrets of a college football signal stealer.

According to Nambiar, there’s already a small paying U.K. cohort plus a U.S. appetite for more local football content, making the U.K. a natural next step. In the last six months, the most-read article has been this piece on Italian football club Reggiana Audace, currently in Italy’s fourth league, which was read by over a 100,000 people in a week.

Subscribers last year were 100,000, now “well over” but still in the low hundreds of thousands, according to Patterson. The Athletic said that 89% of its subscriber base interacts with its app each week. Also, its annual retention rate is an impressive 90%. 

The Athletic currently charges $9.99 (£7.86) per month or $50 (£39.35) per year and doesn’t serve ads. Rates will be similar in the U.K., and subscribers will have access to all content created in the U.S. and vice versa. This is currently around 1,200 stories a week. The U.S. has recently expanded into podcasts and video, and aims to expand these to the U.K.

Backed by over $100 million (£78.7 million) in funding, the media company is an attractive bet for investors for its avid fan base and recurring revenue from audiences, which typically attract higher values than ad-funded media businesses. Patterson added that most of its early markets in the U.S. are profitable and the business is healthy.

Funding has helped boost its growth. In the U.S. The Athletic has grown to nearly 400 full-time writers, who each have equity in the business. In the last year, it’s grown from having a presence in 20 to 50 different regions.

However, brand awareness is low in the U.K., and the media landscape is already cluttered, particularly in sports. Several media companies have also made more concerted efforts to tap into the growing interest in women’s sports — in the U.K. and the U.S. Yet there could still be space for a new entrant with the combination of a passionate fan base, differentiated content and a non-ad-funded business model, according to analysts.

“Their service is differentiated from match report-centered newspaper coverage with a focus on investigations and analysis, such as the economics of teams, drug-use and other sports news stories, said Douglas McCabe, CEO at Enders Analysis.

In the U.S. it has hired well-known sports journalists who have pulled their audiences with them, and plans to do the same in the U.K. To keep growing beyond the highly engaged sports fan, it will draw on its insights team to work out what type of content encourages people to sign up and convert.

Nambiar leads an analytics team of three people who mine popular past stories, measured by frequency of visits, regularity and time spent, and articles that lead to subscriber conversion spikes. For instance, before the National Hockey League’s trade deadline a popular piece outlined all the possible moves that a team could make. The team encouraged writers across other leagues to adapt and expand this idea to their coverage.

“We give context and guidance,” he said. “A lot of writers have come from the world of clicks, we aim to give context around what are stories people love. Editors have a great instinct, we show them what is working.”

The post The Athletic plots UK expansion with a team of 55 appeared first on Digiday.

“The benefits of having the agility, control and visibility into our creative [process], our performance and our audiences outweighed the benefit of having an agency for us at this time,” said NHL CMO Heidi Browning, of the league’s decision to take its creative and media business in-house.

The NHL is just one example of major marketers moving in-house. Others like Getty Images, Electrolux and Bayer have all taken various marketing capabilities in-house, as Digiday has previously reported. Last month, the beer behemoth Anheuser-Busch said that it had created an in-house team, draftLine, that would work with its roster of agency partners.

Taking marketing in-house exists on a spectrum, as taking programmatic in-house is a much more complicated endeavor than making banner ads or social content. Some, like Vodafone, have backpedaled on in-housing altogether after realizing how complex it can be to manage media.

Plus, even if in-house agencies are built at brands that could change, and has. Last December, Intel closed shop on its in-house agency, Agency Inside, after changing its marketing strategy, Teresa Herd, who ran Agency Inside and now serves as the vp and global creative director at Intel, previously told Digiday. “We met our ROI and all of our KPIs,” said Herd. “Intel is changing and they want to be focused on a B-to-B audience. We did a lot of great work and I built a great capability for the company. You have to give the company what they need and if that changes, you need to change with it.”

The choice to go in-house, stick with agencies or to use external and internal agencies obviously depends on the brand and its marketing needs. Doing so can be complicated and have various issues, per Digiday insights.

Here are the pros and cons.

For: Greater speed and efficiency
Work is done more efficiently and quickly with an in-house team. It’s not a surprising answer, having someone in the same building will certainly make it easier to execute an idea on the fly.

For brands looking to create marketing that reacts to something on the fly, having someone your office who is someone able to create a piece of work and get it out while consumers are still talking about it is key. “If you think about social and the speed of social, there really is no time to escalate and go back and forth with handoffs to and from an agency,” said Matt Weiss, managing director of growth at digital agency Huge. “Particularly when you’re doing things like community management where you need to react in real time.”

That’s been the case for Anheuser-Busch with draftLine, according to a representative for the company, who noted that the volume of work put out into the world has increased.

“From both a speed and a control standpoint, large brands need to have in-house capabilities,” said Scott Harkey, co-founder and managing partner of full-service agency OH Partners.

Against: Talent won’t want to work on one brand forever
For agency creatives, the diversity of work from client to client is appealing and part of the thrill of being at an agency. Being in-house and creating work for the same client day in and day out can be a slog, according to agency sources — a common rebuttal to why in-house agencies won’t last.

“Creatives live for variety,” said Weiss. “Having a steady diet of one brand limits creativity.”

It’s not just a matter of keeping creatives happy but if creatives are leaving out of boredom it can cost brands money. “Attracting the right talent and keeping up with the changes in the industry are cost drivers in their own right,” said David Eisenman, Co-Founder and CEO, Madwell.

For: It can reduce costs
Instead of paying agency fees, marketers who move those capabilities in-house are able to put those dollars right back into the marketing for the brand, said Browning. While budgets and fees will vary for every agency and brand, marketers say they are able to get more bang for their buck, so to speak, when asked about cost.

“We get more for our money,” said Browning.

Gene Foca, Getty Images CMO, echoed that sentiment in an email when asked about why the company moved its marketing in-house: “We simply found that the quality and volume of work that we were getting did not match what we could do for the money, internally.”

Though for others, the choice can come from a tightening of the belt. “Budgets are being constrained,” Intel’s Herd previously told Digiday.

Agency sources are skeptical of the reduced cost pitch and note that marketers can lose out on agency expertise.

“At its core, the move to bring media agencies in-house comes from a desire to cut costs,” said Eisenman. “But the reality is that the companies doing this each have their own specialty and area of expertise — and it is not media.” 

Against: Media buying is very time consuming
For Browning and the NHL, there has been a recognition that the complexities involved are more time-consuming. Agencies often staff more people on a media account than when an in-house team handles it and they have more insight when it comes to pricing models and ad sets.

Even with more time spent on media some marketers, like Bayer, have been able to save significant marketing dollars — Bayer saved $10 million after taking programmatic in-house — by moving media buying in-house

For: Control and a deep understanding of the brand voice
One argument you’ll hear repeated again and again is that marketers are moving work in-house for greater control over their creative. In doing so, they are able to not only create more marketing more quickly but run tests on what’s working and what’s not. It can also help avoid issues, according to Browning, who said that if a player is part of a specific ad campaign and they are injured during a game the NHL is able to get that ad out of circulation much faster than if they had to go through an agency to do so.

“It’s crucial to have people that understand the brand to its core,” said Eisenman, who pointed to in-house’s deep knowledge of the brand. “In-house does this, and also provides brands with more consistency in both voice and tone.” 

Against: Agencies have more analytical insights
But even with greater control, marketers can lose out on the insights that agencies bring in from other brands. With a brand only able to look at what has worked for it through its in-house team it is unable to take advantage of the insights that a marketer has with an agency.

“Agencies have broader performance insight because they manage all different types of campaigns,” said Browning. “They worked on a lot of different ads, advertising categories and we don’t benefit from the knowledge that they glean from other categories, performance and strategies.”

Only working on one brand and only using those insights can also lead to the potential to become myopic when it comes to marketing. Making sure that doesn’t happen can be dependent on who is at the helm, noted Huge’s Weiss, as that person will need to keep a healthy debate going about what’s best for insights as well as the in-house team.

“If it’s just about getting the agency to do exactly what you want that’s not good,” said Herd. “You need a little bit of critical distance. Maybe all the reasons for [in-housing] aren’t right but the pendulum is definitely swinging to that end. If companies don’t get what they want from agencies, they will figure out how to build it, whether it’s good or bad.”

The post Moving marketing in-house: More control and speed or not worth the hassle? appeared first on Digiday.

That has opened up the volume of impressions Stylist can offer advertisers to between 6 million and 9 million monthly impressions, depending on peak traffic periods, according to David Hayter, programmatic, data and technology director at The Stylist Group.

Programmatic display ad CPMs — which include open marketplace bidding, private marketplace deals and programmatic guaranteed deals — have doubled from £2.20 ($2.80) to £4.43 ($5.64), added Hayter. Open marketplace header bidding revenue has increased 30% year-on-year as a direct result, after a period of flat growth, he added.

“This has totally transformed how we can use data and the speed at which we can do things,” said Hayter. “The goal was to boost our display ad revenue. Previously we just weren’t comfortable with the amount of data we had on audiences and our sales teams weren’t confident with the scale of our audience segments.”

Now, the publisher can go into the weeds with its audience insights looking at data such as whether people’s site behavior changes depending on which browser they use, what types of article they read and whether their scroll depth correlates to how they interact with the site.

Insights like this have also helped boost rebookings of branded content deals because of the more sophisticated reporting data the company can provide as well as better targeting. One specific advertiser increased its campaign investment by 50%, though Hayter wouldn’t reveal specifics for the average increase of deal value. “It’s from a decent base,” he added.

Integrating the Permutive DMP into Stylist’s Facebook pages and other social platforms has also helped boost referral traffic for branded content links, said Hayter. The publisher doesn’t measure the users on Facebook itself, but can target lookalike audiences on the platform, as well as others including Pinterest, Twitter and Instagram. Tests have shown an average 44% uplift in click-through rates on social media posts from people clicking on links to branded content on social platforms and arriving at the site, said Hayter.

With third-party cookies on the decline, most publishers are actively exploring how to better use their first-party data. Permutive’s tech is built on the use of first-party, rather than third-party cookies, which has provided an additional incentive for publishers desperate to improve the targeting capabilities and measurement of mobile inventory. “The fact it’s all based on first-party cookies was a huge factor. Before we had a major issue in that we had no idea who they [our audience] were on mobile,” added Hayter.

To combat print advertising decline, and reduce reliance on display digital advertising which is dominated by Google and Facebook, publishers have diversified revenue streams in earnest. The Stylist Group is no exception. The publisher now has a live events revenue stream, and in April launched its own gym. The downside is that different technologies have been used to execute each product offering, whether it’s advertising, affiliate, e-commerce, or other revenue streams. That’s why most publishers are gunning for ways to unify their data across different products and technologies to create what they refer to as a single customer view.

All DMP audience data is now fed into a warehouse, which ingests and unifies it to give a more clear view of how users behave across the publisher’s different devices and technologies that it uses for ad serving, e-commerce, and other revenue streams.

“Advertising was the number one revenue channel for a while, then publishers decided to diversify and so had point solutions and they never connected the dots between those technologies,” said Amit Kotecha, marketing director for Permutive. “Now many publishers are talking about unifying their data and then using it for insights and decisions. That’s when you can understand the average revenue per user, so they can know which levers they can pull to make revenue.”

By isolating how an individual interacts with its content, ads and multiple products across devices The Stylist Group plans to estimate the average revenue generated per user and identify potential patterns.

“That will help us understand for example whether a person isn’t worth targeting an ad to, but would be more interested in a gym class or an event, so we can target them with a message,” added Hayter.

The post How female-focused publisher The Stylist Group doubled programmatic ad yields appeared first on Digiday.

Surveys run on Craft Factory’s audience, which has 8.6 million followers on Facebook, found they actively craft between four and six times a week.

Craft Factory, which publishes craft videos, like how to make watermelon soap or make your own jewelry, is one of Jungle’s newer brands. It launched 12 months ago after the publisher saw the success of original content on its food channel, Twisted, post-Facebook’s algorithm change.

According to Tubular Labs, Craft Factory’s Instagram audience doubled in the last six months to nearly 900,000 followers. During that same time-frame, Craft Factory has grown YouTube subscribers three-fold to nearly 430,000. On YouTube, 30% of its audience comes from the U.S.

Each month the publisher will decide which crafts to turn into videos, box and ship, based on a combination of themes it already knows have appealed to audiences — tie-dye for instance — and crafts it knows that people have made. The publisher will weigh up the more practical concerns like what materials fit through a letterbox and are affordable, to ensure margins are strong. The publisher’s insights team will comb social comments for suggestions and feedback. Another bonus with monthly subscription boxes compared to a wider e-commerce marketplace is being able to more easily forecast stock, she added.

Each month Craft Factory will publish a new video promoting that month’s craft, where audiences can click through to subscribe, as well as more general marketing videos. The publisher is working with an existing partner for processing and fulfillment.

The success of Craft Factory’s subscription boxes will test the strength of media brands built on social channels, which have typically been downplayed as environments where brand identity struggles to gain traction.

Backed by £3 million ($3.8 million) in funding, Jungle Creations has diversified from depending solely on Facebook for traffic and revenue. Subscription products add more value: Media companies with recurring direct-to-consumer revenue lines can fetch a value eight to 12 times their earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or EBITDA. By comparison, solely ad-funded media companies, which can command between four and seven times EBITDA.

Many publishers have entered the commerce market as a way to drive incremental revenue and prop up a volatile ad market. Last year, Jungle Creations made £16 million ($20.30 million) in revenue, $1 million came from selling socks on Facebook and Instagram, after it created a new brand, Lovimals, to sell the socks through paid social ads.

“There’s a big difference in launching a commerce product from an existing brand because the customer base is already there, they’re already engaged with you,” said Chapman. “Craft Factory has a tongue-in-cheek tone that the audience responds to, we’ve built up that audience trust over the last year.”

Making sure that the audience isn’t bombarded with ads for its new subscription box will be front of mind. Here it has some experience too. The publisher began rolling out delivery-only restaurants two years ago, most recently announcing it now has six sites in the U.K.

Jungle has a team of six people working in commerce, four creating commerce-related content and two on operations and customer service. These commerce ambitions are extending elsewhere: This August it will launch Twisted Store, selling a range of Twisted branded kitchenware, from enamel bowls to tea towels to its first recipe book. The items will feature in Twisted’s three daily recipe videos. Prices start at $7.99. Selling products rather than advertising is a route taken by other digital media companies like BuzzFeed’s Tasty and Tastemade.

“Ultimately, this is about bringing our audience what we know they want,” said Chapman. “We’re not just a media company anymore, but starting as one has given us the tools, data and insights to hone in on the commerce ventures that make sense and that are going to add the most value.”

The post Social publisher Jungle Creations branches into subscription craft boxes appeared first on Digiday.

When asked what specific channels the company would use, Lake said that the company has been experimenting with in-person and out-of-home in addition to TV, but that “I think it’s still a little bit early to tell in terms of any specific channel learnings or what that will look like in future quarters.”

Lake said that the company isn’t looking to measure the success of these brand marketing campaigns by how many new clients they add, but rather around squishier metrics like how these ads do in raising “understanding of the brand, awareness of the brand, and affinity to the brand.”

Stitch Fix staked its reputation on being a data-centric company, but this increased investment will require the company to build a new creative muscle, as there’s no one way to measure the effectiveness of a brand marketing campaign. As Stitch Fix’s former vp of brand and creative Cristina Angeli previously told Digiday, at Stitch Fix “it took us a little while to get everyone thinking of brand and the importance of it, and that it’s not this direct payoff. It’s this thing you invest in, and you may see the fruits of those labors four months, six months, a year down the road — but it’s something you have to consistently hit and do.”

The post Stitch Fix is spending more on marketing appeared first on Digiday.