Month: July 2019

Data keeps getting more important, but gathering and managing it remains very difficult
As publishers juggle more priorities, they need better data from inside and outside their organizations to make decisions. But good data is hard to collect and manage for a whole host of reasons. And using it properly isn’t easy either.

• Many major platforms do not share data in ways that are compatible with publishers’ needs or workflows; creating hacks is often necessary.
• Building habits and reshaping the mindset of editorial teams, which are crucial to both creating and using data, can be a major challenge.
• Demonstrating the need for better data gathering and tracking is a necessary step that not every media company has taken.

There are several publishers who now regard their first-party data as their most important asset. But even for them, there is a long way to go before it is treated that way within their organizations.

The era of hunches is over
As imperfect as data collection might be, most publishers are gathering enough of it to change how they think. Instead of trying things out simply because a senior executive wants to, stakeholders are expected to make cases for why even a small change to a publisher’s site or app makes sense, and how that change will affect other facets of the company’s revenue or strategy.

• Everybody is allowed to have theories. In organizations where data is easily accessible, ideas are starting to come in from a wider range of corners.
• It can be difficult to have the courage of one’s convictions. Several event attendees shared stories of ad or design tests that were abandoned early, amid queasiness over falling revenues.

Most publishers are open to trying new things. But there are burdens of proof that must be met before any kind of change is implemented.

Balancing big and small is a major challenge
It is difficult to think about the future of media and design and product when your team is busy putting out small fires. For many attendees, centralized product and development teams typically had to make big projects, such as site redesigns, happen on the side, rather than the other way around.

• Some attendees found that holding regular meetings with different stakeholders about their needs helped cut down on asks, or helped them merge different groups’ asks together into a single project, rather than three or four different ones.
• Carving out time to think about the big picture, or just non-core product ideas, is essential, just for the mental reset they provide.

Resources at most media organizations will remain scarce, so finding ways to work on both big and small projects could be a persistent challenge.

The coming privacy regulations could wreak havoc on advertising and subscriptions
Many publishers are growing nervous about what privacy regulations including the General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act will do to their ability to gather data on their audiences and give them an experience that is personalized.

• Many attendees feel that the specter of regulation has spurred previously indifferent legal teams to study the issue more closely, though several are worried about being able to respond in time.
• Some publishers see site registration as a potential way around this problem, but very few sites have managed to get a substantial percentage of their readers to register and sign in.

The so-called “post-cookie” future could change the way publishers think about the advertising opportunities their sites offer to marketers. It will also force them to quickly find ways to create direct relationships with their readers.

Speaker Highlights
Justin Law, chief product and technology officer, Meredith
By this time next year, Meredith’s 40-odd sites will look and feel very similar, thanks to a design template on the front end and newly built user and content graphs on the back end. The graphs are designed to help Meredith increase audience engagement by providing content tailored to each visitor’s interests.

• The front-end designs and plans for increased automation initially did not sit well with editorial. To get everybody on the same page, Meredith launched a version of this on one title’s site, Better Homes and Gardens.
• Over time, the goal is to build an artificial intelligence engine that will pick personalized content for site visitors across the Meredith portfolio.

Nina Gould, vp of product, Forbes
For its first site redesign in six years, Forbes had accumulated a long list of needs. But the site’s product team decided to set time and scope parameters to avoid getting mired in a project that could take more than a year. The business news publisher’s product team took six months to execute the first phase of the redesign.

• Gould’s team decided to focus on fixing article pages on the homepage, while building a design library that would enable the group to more quickly evolve the rest of the site.
• The team kept large chunks of the organization in the loop, holding regular meetings that often included dozens of people.

Overheard
“If a senior exec comes to you and says, ‘You must do x by y,’ that’s usually a sign that it’s going to fail.”

“Our product team feels like all they do is accept requests from the brands. They’re never allowed to get ahead and try to imagine the future of publishing. They just have a catcher’s mitt out, saying, ‘What do you need what do you need what do you need?’”

“How do you teach people to only rely on official, approved company data instead of going out and using whatever they find?“

“The marketing team is the team who puts the wow factor on our slide decks, the first few slides. But now when you want to get into the meat of the information, you go to the product team. We’ve finally won that battle.”

“Getting the executive team to empower the product team as the controller and owner of company data is critical.”

“A single source of truth ensures that you can get your team’s correct data. So when somebody makes a poor decision off the data, at least we’ve eliminated the variable of making a bad decision off wrong data. The data is at least correct.”

“(A good data strategy) is a very big, hard thing. You can vouch for it and talk about it, but you can’t make it happen by yourself. It’s easier to do that when you have massive buy-in from leadership to organize around solutions.”

“GDPR and CCPA are highlighting to legal and executive teams how much of a problem a fragmented or non-existent data strategy is. It’s like, ‘Wait, why is Johnny building a database? And he’s collecting what!?”

The post Event Briefing: The Digiday Publishing Product Leaders Retreat appeared first on Digiday.

“In Q2, the average price per ad decreased 4%, and the number of ad impressions served across our services increased 33%. Similar to last quarter, impression growth was primarily driven by ads on Instagram Stories, Instagram Feed and Facebook News Feed. The year-over-year decline in average price per ad reflects an ongoing mix shift toward Stories ads and geographies that monetize at [a] lower rate,” Wehner said.

Advertisers told Digiday they are spending more on Stories in 2019. Brandon Doyle, founder of Wallaroo Media, said about 40% of his digital agency’s budgets are going toward Stories ads, though Instagram feed still is the biggest placement for usage, followed by Instagram Stories, Facebook feed, Facebook Stories and Messenger. Andrew and Gracie Foxwell, co-founders of Foxwell Digital who manage an 800-member association, the Facebook & Instagram Pro Ad Buyers Industry Group, said they estimate about 80% of collective ad spend going to Facebook and Instagram feeds and 20% going elsewhere, mainly to Instagram Stories. At their agency, where they manage $10 million in monthly ad spend on Facebook and Instagram, the Foxwell said they lean 70% to 30% with more ad dollars going to Instagram Stories.

Facebook executives have been pitching the importance of Stories to advertisers over the last year. Looking at its calls with investors, the word “stories” was said 72 times on Facebook’s third-quarter-of-2018 earnings call, 63 times in the fourth-quarter call and then 52 times in the first-quarter-of-2019 call. While it was said only 23 times on the second-quarter call on July 24, advertisers have already adopted it more as they see worthwhile ROI. The Foxwells said Instagram Stories ads can be 20% cheaper than feed ads, depending on targeting.

Kieley Taylor, global head of social at GroupM, said she’s anticipating the release of ads within WhatsApp Status, that app’s version of Stories.

“Largely the opportunity has been with Instagram Stories, but we do see some more reach available with Facebook Stories as well. Ultimately, we are most optimistic for when ads in Status become available in WhatsApp,” Taylor said.

The new dynamic ads feature in Instagram Stories have helped drive adoption, as Sandberg said on the July 24 earnings call. The Foxwells said they saw Instagram Stories only become “viable from a direct response standpoint beginning in Q2 of this year. They began to show promise in Q1 but showed consistent delivery and results beginning in April 2019.” That is yet to be the case of Facebook Stories, leading to slower adoption from agencies like Wallaroo Media and Foxwell Digital.

The addition of more interactive elements on Instagram Stories ads also has inspired more use. Earlier this year, Instagram added polling to Stories ads. The Foxwells said the best performing ads on Instagram Stories for direct responses are five-second boomerang videos with a poll. That’s followed by a 10-second user-generated review of a product.

Taylor of GroupM said she would like to see more interactive features and call-to-action elements such as lead ads.

But while advertisers have enjoyed the transition to Stories ads over the year last, they remain frustrated by the increased inconsistencies Facebook’s ads manager in the same time frame. Doyle said his agency has seen reporting issues, uploading issue and just general loading issues on Facebook ads manager. These same issues don’t just affect small digital agencies but also large holding companies, an executive at a holding company said.

In back channels, private Facebook groups or Twitter direct messages, Facebook engineers have told vocal buyers that these are known bugs and the work to fix them is ongoing, the Foxwells said.

As Sandberg said on the July 24 earnings call, the adoption of Stories relies on making it easy for advertisers to deliver these ads.

“We know that it’s not enough to make these new formats available. We also need to make it easy for advertisers to create effective ads. We do this by launching new ad products and by improving our existing ones to deliver more value for people and advertisers,” Sandberg said.

The post Facebook advertisers continue to shift ad spending to Instagram Stories appeared first on Digiday.

“Our digital sales have grown significantly — we’re up 99% versus last year — and they now represent about 18% of our sales,” said Purdue. “Half of our customer base is Gen-Z and millennial, so it’s important for us to show up where they are. We really like being in unexpected and uncluttered spaces, and we felt like TikTok was one of them.” 

In 2018, Chipotle spent $45.8 million in media compared to $43.7 in media in 2017, per Kantar, though the company doesn’t track social spending. While Chipotle’s overall media budget is flat year over year, according to Purdue, the company is “doubling down” on its digital spending. The company declined to share specifics into how much its digital budget has grown.

With the greater emphasis on digital, the company has seen a 300% lift in digital impressions and a 400% lift in social impressions. It’s unclear what those impressions have increased from and what they’ve increased to as the company declined to share year-over-year figures to track that increase. 

Upping digital is part of an overall strategy change for the company’s marketing, moving dollars from local to national, taking marketing dollars from local restaurants and putting them toward a national approach. 

“As we broaden all these digital capabilities, it’s really driving the investment from the restaurant level to the digital space,” said Purdue. “We’re able to do that because we have a strong digital business.” 

This past March, the company partnered with and spent media dollars on Venmo to debut its rewards program, Chipotle Rewards, by giving away $250,000 to 25,000 fans. After signing up for the rewards program, consumers were asked to submit a phone number associated with their Venmo account for the possibility of getting anywhere from $1 to $500 from Chipotle. Winners were alerted with a notification as well as a note from Chipotle and a pepper emoji. As of June 30, the rewards program had 5 million members.

“We were already one of the top brands on Venmo being used for payment,” said Purdue. “What better way to drive awareness of our new rewards program than rewarding our customers with free money through the digital wallet they already use?”  

In partnering with Venmo and TikTok, as well as increasing its digital budget, Chipotle believes it will be seen as a more convenient brand that allows for more personalization, per Purdue. 

“Generally speaking, fast-casual consumer food brands are very on the pulse of what’s emerging in culture for that generation they’re going after,” said Christophe Jammet, managing director at innovation consultancy DDG. “To attract millennial, younger audiences, they really need to be dialed into what’s being used, so upping the digital spend makes a lot of sense.” 

While the company is increasing its digital focus, it is also working with more influencers (the company declined to share how much its influencer budget has increased) and considering spending on podcasts. “[You can] tell a richer story about sustainability or ingredients and that lends itself to it,” said Purdue. “As a brand, we want to be more transparent.”

The post Inside Chipotle’s TikTok strategy appeared first on Digiday.

“We’re not just a digital newsstand; we create a service by surfacing content readers value most,” said CEO Ari Assuied, pointing out that of its 80 global staff, around 40% work the product development and features like searching across different titles and regular newsletters sharing the top content.

Le Kiosk’s growth has been spurred by bundle partnerships with four of the five French telecommunications companies and media company Canal+ — a similar route to how Spotify gained more reach and a model it plans to replicate in the U.K. The company wouldn’t share the split of those who pay for the service directly.

Le Kiosk has hired 10 data scientists in the last 18 months to package up the raw data into more regular and digestible insights. As part of quarterly meetings, it already shares knowledge like how many customers accessed content and for how long, popular articles and what impact a front cover has on sales.

“Those who are on the platform have been a little late to digital transition,” said François Godard, European media and telecoms analyst at Enders Analysis, adding that two leading French news publishers, Le Monde and Le Figaro, are not on Le Kiosk. “They are building a business on the back of wholesale contacts with telecoms providers, and it’s too early to tell if [they] will use bundles as a marketing ploy in the long term.”

The entrance of Apple News+ into the U.K. market in the fall will naturally lure some publishers to distribute on that platform too (Le Kiosk doesn’t have exclusivity).

“The only reason [to be on an aggregator] would be if someone like Apple could bring huge new audiences to their subscription business,” said Nic Newman, editor of the Reuters Institute Digital News Report. “But even then most have looked at the numbers and decided it is not worth it.”

Instead, premium publishers like The Financial Times and The Guardian have experimented with giving subsets of their content via aggregators like Curio and the recently launched Mogul News. But, counters Newman, this isn’t the proposition consumers would be prepared to pay for; they want full access.

Le Kiosk is confident it has enough favorable terms to attract and retain publishers. According to Assuied, 99% of the publishers have stayed with the Le Kiosk because of its well-balanced terms, which differ depending on the publisher, although he couldn’t share details.

“Having Apple News+ validates our position in the market,” he said. “We expect some publishers to go to Apple, we know the relationship [with Apple] is not always easy, but to give all your digital distribution to one player could be risky.”

The post French player Le Kiosk is the newest subscription aggregator to hit the UK market appeared first on Digiday.