Intel has a new CMO. The technology company signed industry vet Karen Walker away from Cisco, where she served as CMO since 2015. At Intel, Walker will serve as senior vice president and CMO, effective Oct. 23, and will oversee the brand’s global marketing and growth strategies. Walker previously held positions at Hewlett-Packard before joining…
Elizabeth Warren’s Campaign Is The New Data-Driven Model
Initially, it seemed fair to wonder whether Elizabeth Warren’s campaign could survive a long, grueling primary. The Warren campaign raised $6 million in the first quarter of the year, fifth most in the field, according to campaign disclosures released earlier this year. But it spent almost as much building up the operation, with 160 people… Continue reading »
The post Elizabeth Warren’s Campaign Is The New Data-Driven Model appeared first on AdExchanger.
Essential Second-Quarter Stats for Agencies and Media Companies
Editor’s note: Adweek worked with Matthew Scott Goldstein, a consultant with a deep knowledge of the media industry, to craft his quarterly newsletter into an Adweek article. Through his findings on various industry earnings calls, we’re bringing you insights about how your favorite brands, agencies, media companies, publishers and tech companies are performing on a…
FCB Shakes Up Leadership in Chicago and North America
Changes abound at FCB as it undergoes a leadership restructuring in North America, but the new leaders are all familiar faces for the network. Tyler Turnbull, promoted to CEO of FCB New York and FCB Canada back in May, will now serve as North America CEO for FCB, overseeing all offices in the region, including…
Tide’s 4-Week ‘Laundry Night’ Campaign Wraps Up With a Bud Knight Tie-in
What if the real laundry night was the friends we made along the way? Tide has officially wrapped up its four-week, fourth-wall-busting “Laundry Night” campaign that spilled across multiple ads, NBC programs and supposed NFL announcements. Helmed by Peyton Manning, the campaign from Saatchi & Saatchi New York kicked off with pro football’s season kickoff…
Netflix Greenlights a Fourth Season of Stranger Things
Netflix plans to send Stranger Things fans back to the Upside Down. The streaming service has renewed its smash hit for a fourth season, the company announced Monday. Additionally, it has signed on series creators and showrunners The Duffer Brothers to a multiyear film and series deal. The terms of the deal with the Duffer…
Apple News+ launches in the UK with The Times and Hearst on board
Apple has rolled out its publisher subscription service, Apple News+, to the U.K. some six months after announcing it in the U.S.
For access to over 150 magazines and newspapers, readers have to pay just £9.99 ($12.29) a month. In the U.K., News Corp’s The Times and Sunday Times and Hearst UK titles — like Cosmopolitan, Elle and Esquire — will now sit alongside The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone and Vox, titles that were announced for the U.S. launch in March.
News UK’s The Times and Sunday Times has a well-developed subscriptions business. In July it hit 500,000 subscribers with digital subscribers overtaking print for the first time, plus a pool of 3.75 million registered users who can read a number of articles a week in exchange for their email address. The move is noteworthy for the prickly relations between News Corp and tech platforms. News Corp CEO Robert Thomson went out of his way to differentiated Apple’s approach.
“Apple has acted positively, honorably and decisively to change the digital landscape, while other gatekeepers, such as Google, prefer hype and hypocrisy,” Thomson said in a statement.
The appeal for publishers being part of the platform depends on how mature their reader-revenue businesses are. Apple News+ and other bundles can work best for mid-tier publishers, especially as more cases of subscription fatigue set in. Those who have more fledgling subscription businesses, or none at all, are also happy to use the platform as a testbed for finding out what content works with cohorts of readers.
Mostly, as was seen in during the U.S. launch, those with longer-running subscriptions businesses aren’t as interested in trading-off the relationship with their audience — while cannibalizing their own product — for access to a wider audience pool. Marquee-name publishers who are on the platform, like The Wall Street Journal and The Times (both under the News Corp umbrella), offer different content to their full product. Publishers speculated there are different financial terms with Apple that include a revenue share. The New Yorker, for example, has the ability to exit the Apple product early because of its own highly developed digital subscriptions business, according to a report from Business Insider.
Chatter around Apple News+ in the U.S. has been relatively quiet compared with the concerns felt at launch. The Wall Street Journal has seen some evidence of cannibalization, which it expected, but more recently that has been below expectations, according to a person familiar with the matter. The platform is fulfilling its role in that the Wall Street Journal is also reaching new audiences who skew female, though it wouldn’t share how many.
“It seems that it hasn’t hurt publishers as much as expected, but not for the right reasons,” said Rob Ristagno CEO at consultancy The Sterling Woods Group. “Mainly it has been a relative failure with consumers so the cannibalization hasn’t been as great as expected.”
Apple wouldn’t disclose how many people have signed up for its product. Subscribers get a one-month free trial before it auto-renews. In the first two days of launch, it said it had 200,000 subscribers, but it’s not clear how many of these have made the switch to full-time payers.
Aside from pulling in a few big-name brands, Apple hasn’t rushed to include U.K. publishers, even those who had good relationships with Apple News, according to one publisher.
“I’ve had zero communication on it,” said the U.K. publishing exec. “To date, Apple has been a breath of fresh air, but this seems to have been led form the U.S. without enough thought about the nuances of the U.K. market. This damages trust.”
As with all publisher relationships with platforms, there are trade-offs to be made, depending on how far advanced publishers’ subscription businesses are. Other features that publishers fretted about during the platform’s U.S. launch were payment terms: Apple will keep 50% of subscription revenue and divide the remaining half among publishers based on readers’ dwell time. Publishers’ gripe is that dwell time doesn’t take into account the cost of creating content and can lead publishers to create content that favors this commercial model.
But the opportunity of being on hundreds of millions of iPhones is tempting. And while publishers have grumbled about the money coming in from Apple News, they have been happy with the traffic it drives, making a lot of sense for building awareness.
The post Apple News+ launches in the UK with The Times and Hearst on board appeared first on Digiday.
Dissecting the Vaping Illness Mystery | WSJ
Podcasts Can Now Be Added to Spotify Playlists
Spotify marked International Podcast Day Monday by introducing the ability for its users to add podcasts to their playlists. The music-streaming service said in a blog post that over 3 billion user-generated playlists have been generated on its platform, and those playlists had been exclusively made up of music until this new feature was revealed….
Kantar: Trump Campaign Spending Heavily On Social Media
President Trump is already spending much more than other candidates on social media advertising, Kantar Media says — with campaign efforts totaling $16.9 million for the first half of this year —
well above his nearest competitor, Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, at $6.2 million.
well above his nearest competitor, Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, at $6.2 million.