Month: July 2019

This dynamic played out after the 2016 election when many Republican voters and Trump supporters inside agencies felt isolated. Many chose to hide their political views during that election cycle, even if they didn’t in prior years. Still, it was largely just an internal problem.

But now, the humanitarian crisis on the border has transformed staffers’ political beliefs into a business issue. First up was Ogilvy, whose CEO John Seifert refused to back down in the face of criticism after it emerged that the agency worked for the CBP, saying it’s just good business. Now, public relations giant Edelman has chosen to not go ahead with work for a client it pitched — a private prisons company that runs immigration detention centers — because it was, per reports, worried that employees would leak the news and generate a PR headache.

A PR firm dealing with its own potential PR crisis is interesting enough (and it should be noted that this was a PR and business decision, not an ideological one), but this is simply the beginning. Agencies, or really any sort of company that offers professional services, are finding themselves in similar problems. Turning down government contracts — even if it is in service of a government or administration that the majority of its employees do not agree with — isn’t necessarily an option. Some smaller companies have the luxury of polling staff to see if clients they’re choosing to work with are OK by the company. But it’s not exactly economically possible.

So are agencies responsible for the clients they choose — and in which case, I have some questions for those with tobacco clients — and can employees choose to not work for companies that do work for clients whose political, social and ideological leanings are completely in opposition to their own? It’s hard to figure out, and particularly challenging when you look at the economic reality for agencies. To me, these are the issues that make “brand purpose” such a difficult concept. It’s easy to tout it, harder to live it.  — Shareen Pathak

Netflix is on the hunt for more “soapy dramas”
Netflix may be producing more shows and movies in-house, but that doesn’t mean the company won’t continue to acquire programming from outside studios and production companies.

Netflix’s acquisition strategy revolves around filling holes in its programming, said the company’s vp of content acquisition, Amy Reinhard, on stage at the National Association of Television Programming Executives’ Streaming Plus event in Hollywood on July 30. In particular, the company looks for shows and movies that its original content and feature film divisions are light on, she said.

So what kind of programming is Netflix in the market for at the moment? “Soapy dramas,” said Reinhard.

Netflix’s interest in soapy dramas could stem from the success that the service saw with its acquisition of “You.” While the show had originally aired on Lifetime last year, the series didn’t break out until it premiered on Netflix in December. In January, Netflix said that 40 million households were on pace to have streamed the show within its first four weeks on the service.

However, there are other reasons that Netflix may be especially interested at the moment in stocking up on shows resembling “Scandal” and “Nip/Tuck.” In the past two years, Netflix has signed massive deals with two doyens of soapy dramas — “Scandal” creator Shonda Rhimes and “Nip/Tuck” creator Ryan Murphy — to produce original shows for the streaming service. So the company’s interest in acquiring soapy dramas may be as much about rounding out its programming library as it is about setting up its upcoming slate of original shows. — Tim Peterson

The post The Rundown: Political divisions bubble up inside agencies appeared first on Digiday.

Reducing marketing overhead became the standard approach for troubled brands following the 2008 recession. Procter & Gamble, Unilever and General Mills, among others, cut their marketing spend, slashed their agency rosters and gave procurement departments much more power putting cost above all else. That approach hasn’t always proved successful — look at what cost-cutting has done to Sears or Kraft-Heinz — but it hasn’t dissuaded the C-Suite from slicing and dicing marketing.

At the same time, the scope of what marketing entails has grown to include much more than traditional commercial work but overall consumer experience of the brand as well as brand purpose. That has led major brands to rethink the CMO role, with some evolving it to a chief growth officer and others scrapping it altogether in favor of multiple vp roles. Whatever may be the case, marketing leads have worked to tie the growth and health of a brand, as well as its digital transformation, to marketing in part to shift the perception of marketing as a cost to one of value. 

“Most companies think that they are a product or service company with a marketing department – without really recognizing that they are a marketing company that happens to have a product or service,” wrote Dave Latcha, CEO and Founder of Latcha+Associates, in an email. “A great brand focuses on being relevant in peoples’ lives, proving value and providing a service or product that supports that. Two-thirds of that statement is marketing related.” 

Understanding the value of marketing
“Generally speaking, marketing equals overhead,” wrote Andy Nathan, founder and CEO Fortnight Collective. “Marketing is seen as an expense, and that’s why it’s the first to go.”

Part of the problem, according to We Are Rosie founder Stephanie Nadi Olson, is that generally marketers aren’t given a seat on the board of directors where many decisions about what stays and what goes when companies are in trouble are made. “It makes it really easy when someone is literally not in the room for their division or their area of responsibility to be disproportionately impacted by a big layoff,” said Olson. “Without representation at the board level, it hinders everyone’s understanding of the value of marketing.”

“There’s a lot of questions about what good marketing is at the board level,” said Andrew Essex, CEO and co-founder of Plan A and former Droga5 CEO. “That’s really regrettable and often short-term thinking. It’s always been hard to quantify, and despite all this innovation in technology, it’s still fairly hard to quantify. Boards historically undervalue the power of brand.” 

In those board rooms and throughout troubled companies, marketing departments have trouble attributing their work and showing how it impacts a company’s bottom line. 

“In this day and age of obsession over quarterly results, marketing often becomes the easiest target for change,” wrote Erik Herskind, CEO, Dallas-based creative collective GoDo Discovery Co., in an email. “While marketing has made tremendous strides to demonstrate measurable value to a company, there remains the belief that companies can turn marketing on and off when faced with financial challenges.” 

That doesn’t mean every marketing job is on the chopping block. Marketing analysts, ABM specialists, content writers and strategists who can show the connection between their work and incremental profit for the company are generally safer than others, per 3Q Digital CEO David Rodnitzky. “Other marketers — typically in areas like branding, PR, and marketing communications — are cost centers because their work has a directional, but not direct impact on profit,” wrote Rodnitzky in an email. “In no way does this diminish the value of these marketers, but when companies need to cut cost, cost-center marketers are the first to go.”

Rethinking the size of a marketing team
Still, even if marketers are able to prove the value of marketing to the C-Suite, analysts believe brands will have a hard time keeping a big team in-house. Some jobs, especially those charged with handling menial tasks that have lots of repetition, like data aggregation, will see those jobs handled by AI or bots as advancements in technology will allow brands to cut those roles, said Essex.

“In a world where agility is king, it’s hard to get an army of 1,200 people to be agile,” said Allen Adamson, brand consultant and co-founder of Metaforce. “Size and effectiveness have rarely gone hand-in-hand. Just because you’ve got a big marketing department, that doesn’t mean your marketing is good.”

Christian Barnard, CCO of Austin-based innovation agency T3, believes over the next six to nine months as CFOs worry about an impending recession, major marketers will continue to re-calibrate their marketing teams. “[Uber and McDonald’s], those are some of the several announcements like them that we’ll see in the next six to nine months as organizations prepare for what may be an economic downturn and get more lean on the marketing side,” said Barnard. “They will also using that as a time to recalibrate marketing capabilities to be much more [focused on the] user-experience, technology-centric and data-centric to get much more out of their spend.”

“A lot of companies are struggling with how to organize and how to determine the right internal marketing structure to drive growth in a market that’s incredibly hard to navigate,” said Adamson. “The old days of Don Draper sitting down and saying, ‘Here’s our commercial’ are gone.”

The post ‘Marketing equals overhead’: Why marketing is still seen as a cost-center appeared first on Digiday.

According to the media company, it’s reaping the benefits of this content sharing between platforms. In one month, Pluto TV content on My5 now accounts for 5% of viewing on the platform. The addition of the three channels from Pluto TV means My5 now has 10 third-party content channels, which accounts for 42% of the broadcaster’s total viewing.

To more broadly drive viewers, My5 has been bolstering its content beyond a catch-up service by partnering with different channels and acquiring shows that aren’t on its linear service. Now, 12% of viewing on My5 is from its non-linear programming, either from channel partners, including Pluto channels, PBS America, Real Stories and Blaze, and acquiring drama shows. Between April and June, viewing on My5 has increased by 15%, compared with the period between January and March. Two out of six acquired dramas, “The Oath” and “Bellevue,” have been in the top five shows over the last few months, according to the company.

“This is incremental viewing, rather than viewing four or five streams people are viewing five or six,” said Oli Thomas, vp, digital, Viacom International Media Networks, U.K., Northern and Eastern Europe. Over the next six months, My5 will add more partners and beef up analytics and data capabilities on product and marketing performance. “The shift is for us to become the top advertising video-on-demand product of choice for U.K. audiences,” he added.

Pluto TV features online video plus a library of on-demand programming and globally has 16 million unique viewers per month, up from 12 million when it was acquired by Viacom in January 2019. Ampere Analysis estimates that My5 is in 4 million households. By content sharing, both should extend their reach and awareness.

“My5 and Pluto are very different services; they reach very different audiences,” said Thomas. “Pluto is more a lean-back experience while My5 is more lean-forward, catch-up experience. There’s sufficient growth in the industry to not cannibalize; it’s a net win for both.”

According to Thomas, the audiences complement each other too: Pluto viewers are generally male and skew older, while My5 viewers are female and on the younger side.

While other U.K. public service broadcasters like ITV Hub and All 4 are building out their own video-on-demand and subscription platforms, Viacom is going after a slice of the AVOD market.

In 2018, the estimate for the U.K. online video ad space, including pre-roll, social video, publisher ads and VOD, was £2 billion ($2.4 billion), according to Ampere Analysis; roughly half of that is expected to have gone to Facebook and Google. The subscription over-the-top marketing is estimated at £1.3 billion ($1.6 billion). There’s a potential hole in the market that Pluto could fill if it gets the content proposition right.

As much as Viacom’s ad-funded streaming platforms are positioned to appeal to digitally curious TV advertisers, the platforms also target digital advertisers that may not want to concentrate their ad spending on Google and Facebook.

To bolster its offer, My5 has grown its registered user base by 19% over the year through increasing investment in product, content and marketing. The company wouldn’t share actual numbers. Ad revenue has grown too, said Thomas.

Building up the number of registrations is key over the six months to grow the data pool of willingly given first-party information, like name, email, date of birth and location, a much more attractive sell for advertisers. Not only this, more content on the platform means making it more discoverable by targeting it to viewers. As such, it plans to add features so people can pick up on content where they left off on different devices.

While My5 is smaller than the other PSB in terms of viewers and revenue — All 4 has 18 million registered users — it outperforms with audiences of young families because of its pre-school kids channel “Milkshake,” according to a report by Ampere Analysis and U.K. regulator The Office of Communications.

“Keeping kids as they transition through the Viacom portfolio as they age seems a sensible long-term strategy,” said Richard Broughton, research director at Ampere Analysis.

Viacom’s strategy is an extension of how it’s sharing content and growing ad revenue in the U.S. where it debuted 15 of its channels on Pluto TV. Amazon and Roku are the two dominant services and will likely push their own ad-funded series to build out hefty businesses, but Pluto TV has proven to be a bright spot for revenue and viewers for content makers.

The post Viacom is making a play for ad-supported streaming video appeared first on Digiday.

“We wanted to redefine what athlete sponsorships look like,” said Athleta CMO Sheila Shekar Pollak. “We believe we can give her a greater platform to extend her voice.”

Athleta, owned by Gap, Inc., is up against competition from mainstream sports brands, like Nike, that are targeting women customers, as well as other women-focused athletic brands including Lululemon and Outdoor Voices. In signing Felix, Athleta is taking a direct shot at Nike, which failed to renegotiate a more flexible contract with her once she had given birth to her daughter. According to CNBC, Athleta is on its way to hitting $1 billion in revenue next year (Gap doesn’t typically break out Athleta sales).

That growth requires a relentless marketing strategy, and Shekar Pollak said that Athleta has seen the most success in investing in both traditional marketing methods, particularly catalogs, as well as paid social media marketing, where the company has considerably increased its spending this year, particularly on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

“We’re accelerating aggressively,” said Shekar Pollak, on Athleta’s marketing spend. Part of that increase in effort stems from the deployment of the brand’s first signed athlete, as well as a growing understanding of who Athleta’s core customer is, which the brand uses to target new customers on digital platforms. The company targets a psychographic, not a demographic, Shekar Pollak said, by appealing to everyday women for whom fitness is just one aspect of their lives.

Over the last year, Athleta also brought its advertising creative in-house, a move that Shekar Pollak said on Digiday’s Making Marketing podcast was designed to empower its internal creative teams, better reflect the brand’s mission in its marketing and work faster. As part of its push to control the narrative around its marketing strategy, Athleta is featuring more product information, particularly around its sustainable and technical fabrics, in its messaging. In its product development process, Athleta uses its own team to serve as wear testers, and Felix will also be wear-testing the products to give feedback in design development. Once products go live, Shekar Pollak said that customer feedback is incorporated into the design process to improve on products, as well as in its marketing strategy as testimonials.

With full control of its marketing strategy, Shekar Pollak wants to bring Athleta’s mission-minded approach to athletic apparel to the forefront, both as a brand that is B-Corp certified for its sustainability practices, as well as one that empowers mothers and working women.

“Our marketing starts with our mission. It’s important that our customer has technical product that’s also sustainable. We want to tell stories while bringing our product to life,” she said.

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