Month: August 2019

But just as the pivot to consumer revenue came with tech and talent headaches, selling software, particularly to a competitor, is tricky. It is a slow-going process that can take months, one that requires highly specialized salespeople. And as the products gain traction in the market, customer demands introduce more complexity into road maps for products that many publishers still use themselves; over time, publishers may have to consider whether their product road maps should be driven by client needs or their own.

“It’s always been about balance,” said Matt Monahan, the head of product at Arc Publishing. “We really had to think, from the get-go, about how we were building a true SaaS [software-as-a-service] platform.”

Back in the print era, large legacy publishers built big businesses selling services, such as production and fulfillment, to smaller peers. Today, even with print no longer a top priority, those infrastructures still remain useful to some of them: In July, The New York Times announced it had partnered with Meredith’s Special Interest Media group to distribute a series of special magazines.

While the Times has printed a weekly magazine for decades, Meredith was able to offer the Times distribution to 40% of the U.S. retail locations where special magazine issues are sold.

“You could get them out there, but you wouldn’t have the checkout exposure [we do],” said Scott Mortimer, the head of Meredith’s special interest media group. “It would be very, very hard to replicate [our distribution footprint].”

But in the digital era, few publishers can offer those kinds of propositions, and most of the products and services publishers have built have been for advertisers. While a creative services unit like Condé Nast’s CNX has done work for broadcasters such as Comedy Central and HGTV, most of the work they do is for brands, which are more plentiful and have deeper pockets than most publishers.

Many publishers also have an unenviable combination of legacy infrastructures and ambitious plans for change, and finding salespeople who understand those challenges and can speak to them adequately is difficult. For the growing sales team that supports Chorus, Vox Media COO Trei Brundrett said he looks for people with experience in launching brands at media companies or have extensive publisher product-side experience.

“You want to make sure you have somebody who’s not just trying to sling software,” Brundrett said. “You have to have people who, from day one, understand how that works. They are usually people who have done this before.”

Vox Media uses a team of about six to drive sales for Chorus, its CMS. Brundrett said he expects that team size to about double over the course of the next year, though the company hasn’t formalized its hiring plans for 2020.

The greater hurdle with those products, though, is balancing internal and external needs. Some publishers have gotten around this by building things that serve the broader needs of the market, rather than their own.

“We’re trying to develop products that are broadly applicable,” said Mike Donoghue, the founder of The Alpha Group, which has brought four different products to market since its launch. “My team’s mandate and the goal is to not solve existing issues. We’re trying to explore open opportunities in the marketplace, but when we do see something that seems like it would be a good fit and the rest of the organization, that’s great.”

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Cross-device tracking
Cross-device tracking, also referred to as device graphs, were hot a few years ago. It was a way to link an individual to all the devices they use, from smartphone to connected TV, to home laptop, work desktop and tablet. Instead of counting each device as the behavior of a different person, a device graph counts them as one, eliminating duplication. Nowadays the method has fallen off the radar for agencies as a direct result of GDPR. The number of cross-device vendors operating across Europe has taken a nosedive, according to some agency executives. Last year, cross-device vendor Drawbridge exited Europe entirely citing GDPR for the core reason it couldn’t scale, and since then it as all but entirely dismantled. No doubt there are some still fighting to survive, many of the smaller vendors have either quietly disappeared or been bought (like Tapad) and absorbed into wider businesses, according to ad executives.

Fingerprinting tech
Granted device fingerprinting has had a recent windfall due to the number of ad tech players deploying it as a workaround to Apple’s anti-tracking blockages. But last week, Google pretty much declared open war on the method, which it released a series of blogs calling for developers to come forward with ideas on how to ensure sustainable ad technologies that are data-privacy friendly and law compliant. Google has always made its position well known on fingerprinting, but its latest communication on the technique described it as “opaque” and a non-transparent way of using user data without their knowledge or permission — a no-no under GDPR as well as other pending data protection laws. When you add that to the fact Apple is also trying to curtail the technique with another round of tighter tracking restrictions for Safari, it will be incredibly tough for this kind of technique to survive.

DoubleClick IDs
Attribution modeling has taken a massive hit thanks to the pivot to privacy. The biggest blow was when Google pulled its DoubleClick IDs product which agencies relied on for cross-device attribution across the web. Google cited its obligations to meet GDPR compliance as its reason for dropping the product and is still working on a beta version of Data Ads Hub, which is designed to fill in some of those holes left by the removal of IDs but without the user-privacy red flags. But agencies have said there is no like-for-like replacement to DoubleClick IDs, and that, in fact, they have had to totally redefine attribution strategies, scrapping a lot of previous models used in order to figure out how to still get high performance and track which channels are most effective in order to inform media allocation.

Location data-targeting
There has been a lot of talk about location data and how to ensure it is GDPR compliant. The Internet Advertising Bureau and IAB Tech Lab recently added a layer into their attempt to standardize GDPR compliance — the Transparency and Consent framework. In the reworked version, location data targeting has been assigned a specific “feature,” meaning that advertisers and publishers must ensure location vendors are disclosed if being used on certain campaigns. Further, the user must understand for what reason their location is being tracked and agree to it for the purposes of ad targeting. Their consent must be explicit and informed. In the run-up to the arrival of GDPR, location-targeting suppliers were already starting to wane in numbers because the way many location companies build profiles is to pluck data from the bid requests. That’s now being clamped down on harder by U.K. data protection authority the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Real-time bidding
Using personal data within bid requests will be tough without explicit consent. In reality, the likelihood of people agreeing to have sensitive data such as their sexual orientation or political beliefs intentionally used for the purposes of targeted ads, are slim. If advertisers want to use that kind of information for targeting programmatic ads on the open exchange, they’ll have to get explicit and informed consent from users to do so. So the type of data within RTB is going to change. The ICO has been clear that it expects to see changes on how this kind of data is currently being exploited within bid requests, along with other information like device IDs, cookie IDs, and location data. So using personally identifiable data like that via RTB will likely die out, presuming the ICO can effectively police it.

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“We had this amazing stratospheric rise in growth, which continued on for several years,” said Kang, of Eos’ early years in the market. “Then, the last few years have been a little bit more of a mature growth phase for us. … We’re still a top brand in the category that we dominate, which is in lip balm. We’ve entered into other categories and really disrupted them as well, most notably in the shave cream area. But we really thought 10 years in was a great time to grow [and retell our story].”

In 2018, Eos spent $387,000 in media, down from $4.7 million in 2017, according to Kantar, which doesn’t measure spending on social platforms. 

“The fact that we’re rebooting the brand this year, obviously means it’s going to come with a heavier investment,” said Kang, adding that Eos is looking to communicate to consumers the company’s roots in using natural ingredients and the benefits of that for the product, something the brand hadn’t always pushed in its marketing. “Our messaging was not telling that story. We needed to tell that story to grow.”  

In recent years, Eos has spent 95% of its media budget on digital channels, as that’s where its target audience — Gen Z and millennials — spend much of their time. “Even if our products are actually primarily being sold offline and in brick and mortar, which still continues to be the majority of our business, we want to be able to speak to our consumer where they are,” said Kang.

This year, Eos will spend 53% of its media budget on digital channels including a variety of video distribution platforms like YouTube and other channels, custom content partnerships and hyper-targeted display ads aimed at Gen-Z and millennial women. Another 13% of the budget will go to OTT channels, like Roku and Hulu. The company will also show up on linear TV with a small market run in Atlanta. 

Overhauling the brand and reintroducing it to consumers with a big campaign makes sense to Ben Weiss, director of client strategy for SocialCode. In recent years, the company faced consumer backlash and lawsuits that upended its position in the marketplace and its heavy reliance on influencers like Miley Cyrus and Kim Kardashian didn’t help it weather that storm. Now, by touting product benefits rather than influencer partnerships, Weiss believes Eos will be able to better connect with consumers.

Roughly 27% of the budget will be used for digital shopper marketing initiatives while 7% is reserved for experimental formats like TikTok.

Next month, Eos will also roll out a campaign on TikTok that will include a hashtag challenge that will incorporate its new tagline, “Make It Awesome,” from its creative and media agency Mekanism. 

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