Month: October 2019

This year, the ANA is focused on growth. One part of this is attribution. How much of that is a concern for you?
Everybody’s struggling with proper attribution. For us at Ally, we’re really aggressively putting in multi-touch attribution right now, particularly as we’re growing as a brand and our media mix is becoming more and more diverse. Attribution is always something that we as marketers struggle with. There’s no clear-cut answer. It’s so different for every brand.

You’re working with Neustar to implement multi-touch attribution. What will that do for the marketing budget?
Our challenge has always been, particularly with last-click methodology, that we really don’t know all the other things that impacted that customer clicking from digital ads. It made it really hard to understand where you should prioritize your level of investment. So, for instance, if I knew that TV was working to drive a much higher propensity of people to social media, I might heavy up on TV or if it’s something else, if it’s social that’s really driving the digital interaction, I might heavy up social. Today, we just kind of guess. We do a lot of media mixed modeling. We do a lot of looking at what we want to achieve in terms of frequency. We do a lot of prioritizing based on brand objectives. If you have an objective like [ours that you want to] be a famous brand, then it’s, you’re going to want heavy up in video content including TV. A lot of it was a bit of science with a little bit of art and now this allows us to get to a lot more science.

What are the focus areas for Ally right now?
We’re very focused on this idea that the best modern digital brands are really more of what we refer to as usage brands where you’re surrounded by an ecosystem of content. Think about Apple. Apple is just a device, but on the device you have your music, you have your pictures, you have your news curated. They’ve done an amazing job of creating this entire ecosystem around you. So how can we do something similar with all the financial data that we have that could be useful to consumers? Of course, it’s always around efficiency and effectiveness. How can we get the most out of the budget that we have? How can we optimize in ways that we’re becoming efficient in placing the right emphasis on the right customers and consumers, altering our KPIs to not just go for quantity but go for quality?

Are you bringing more marketing and in-house, like programmatic or creative?
Yes, we’re pretty advanced relative to what we’ve done from a programmatic standpoint. We’ve built a lot of our in-house capabilities around programmatic a couple of years ago where we’re really focused in terms of looking at things that we can do, taking better control of our data, really building out consumer data platforms so that we understand how our customers interact with us at every single touch point and then really understanding what’s the next best product that we should be talking to them about. That’s a huge emphasis for us.

How do you take control of the data? What do you actually do?
There’s a couple of things. One, it’s that our data was a little bit fragmented. It’s all over the place within the organization. So, it was centralizing it and putting it in one customer data platform where not only can we have all the data in one place, but we also have all the places that the customer interacted with us. Whether they called into the call center, whether they were on the storefront, whether they were in social, so that we know what their journey was and what they were talking about. Second, it’s really creating content that’s allowing us to aggregate more first-party data. With privacy laws coming, GDPR, privacy laws in California, being more facile in terms of creating larger-scale content programs that are going to have that reciprocity where we can get consumer information in exchange for the content that we deliver. So that’s taking more control of our data that way.

Is that creating loyalty programs or something like that? What’s that content look like?
It’s less about creating loyalty programs per se. It’s more about providing value through all of the financial literacy that we can provide and attracting people to the brand through the content that we put out there. Then, once we have people really interacting with the brand, think about it almost like a freemium model where they’re coming in and they’re consuming things that we have to talk about then you have the opportunity to start to sell them product. [Part of doing that has to do with] building out internal capabilities around content creation [which] is a huge push, no doubt, what’s the right kind of a creative organization that we would need internally? We’ve implemented dynamic creative. Now that the agencies have kind of set up the playbooks for us, how can we become more efficient by creating a lot of the assets that go against that playbook? How do we continue to evolve our thinking around, internal newsrooms, those types of things? We’ve evolved as a business and now we need to evolve as a marketing organization.

Has programmatic in-housing saved you money?
Absolutely. We saved a lot of money. I think a telltale sign of that is that our overall marketing budget for a number of years — now, this isn’t true in the last two years — but for a number of years was relatively flat, but we every year increased the number of product acquisitions that we made and we decreased the cost against that. A lot of that was because of what we were able to do through our DSP and our programmatic approach. Driving greater efficiency into digital, getting smarter about who we talked to, when we talked to them and how we talk to them. Now the big pivot is really against this dynamic creative. Building out such a huge asset of a library of assets that I can change the message and get definitely more personalized and more tailored depending on who I’m talking to, when I’m talking to them and what I’m talking to them about.

When did you bring the programmatic in-house and how much has it saved?
I want to say three years ago. A lot of the data since it Mediacom today. But we have a lot of internal capability relative to the programmatic. I think percentage-wise, we’ve been able certainly to get anywhere in excess of 25% more efficient every year, which is great because it’s this money that we can reinvest into doing other things.

Will you eventually take everything in-house?
I believe in bringing in-house the things that make sense to get you the most efficient. But I certainly don’t see in my tenure as the CMO ever saying we’re going to build out full creative capabilities in-house and we won’t use agencies. For us, like I said, if our objective is to become a tip of tongue brand and a punch above our weight and become a famous brand. There’s great creative minds that we want to tap into that are going to help us do that. There will always be a role for really good creative agencies that are rooted in smart business savvy. There’s pluses and minuses to it and for some brands it works, but for a lot of brands that hasn’t, and you’ve seen them reverse that model.

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Discovery’s move to populate Food Network Kitchen with old programming marks the latest example of media companies finding opportunities to generate new revenue from old programming. However, Discovery is putting a twist on the trend by deriving three types of revenue — advertising, subscription and affiliate commerce — from the shows it is adding to Food Network Kitchen, which will be available on Amazon’s Fire TV platform, Echo Show device and apps for iOS and Android

People will be able to watch a selection of these shows on Food Network Kitchen’s free, ad-supported tier, and Discovery will be able to sell ads against those impressions. Then if people sign up for Food Network Kitchen’s ad-free subscription tier that will cost $6.99 a month or $59.99 a year for access to the live interactive cooking shows, the library of old shows could provide subscribers with enough programming between the weekly and daily cooking classes to mitigate churn.

However, people will not only be able to watch past seasons of shows such as “Giada at Home” on Food Network Kitchen. They will also be able to pull up the recipes featured in episodes and purchase the corresponding ingredients through Food Network Kitchen’s integration with grocery delivery services Amazon Fresh, Instacart and Peapod, said Peter Faricy, CEO of direct-to-consumer at Discovery.

“To be able to combine this entertainment aspect but also this utility aspect, we think, is going to help us create a product that people really love,” he said.

People will also be able to purchase ingredients through Food Network Kitchen for recipes featured in the cooking classes as well as the 80,000 recipes that will be available on the service’s free and subscription tiers. When people purchase ingredients through Food Network Kitchen, Discovery will receive a cut of the transaction.

“I think it’s really smart and, in a way, super obvious. Those shows are basically 30-minute infomercials. It’s basically ‘make this food, buy this stuff,’” said Alan Wolk, co-founder and lead analyst at consulting firm TVRev.

In distributing past seasons of its TV shows on Food Network Kitchen, Discovery is capitalizing on its ownership of all of the shows that air on its TV networks. That Discovery owns its shows is “unusual” compared to other TV networks, said Wolk. By owning its shows, Discovery is able to redistribute these shows however it sees fit and whenever an opportunity arises. The TV conglomerate has already taken advantage of its show ownership by making its entire TV library available through its portfolio of Go apps that allow people to stream current and past seasons of shows when registering with their pay-TV accounts. Now, it is doing the same with Food Network Kitchen, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale.

For now, Discovery will only be making its cooking shows available on the cooking-centric streaming service, Faricy said.

As a further example of Discovery’s predilection for ownership, the company also owns the underlying technology that will be powering Food Network Kitchen. The company developed that technology this year, and Food Network Kitchen will be its first product to launch with it — but not the last. Discovery is in the process of migrating one of its other subscription-based streaming services, Eurosport Player, from Disney-owned BAMTech to Discovery’s technology, according to Faricy.

Making past seasons of some of its TV shows available through Food Network Kitchen would appear to be a way for Discovery to win over audiences who don’t pay to watch its linear channels. That would be similar to how TV networks such as CBS and AMC have rolled out subscription-based streaming services that allow people to watch their TV shows without pay-TV subscriptions. However, Faricy said he doesn’t see Food Network Kitchen as being specifically aimed at people who don’t subscribe to TV and that the service is meant to be a complementary product to its TV networks and Go apps.

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The regulation, which won’t be enforced to any real degree until July 2020, is intended for any company that collects any kind of digital data. That, of course, includes retailers first and foremost, but also any business that stores and uses customer data.

CCPA isn’t a main topic of discussion on stage at what is perhaps the biggest brand marketer gathering in the U.S. of its kind — only Google’s president of global client and agency solutions Kirk Perry spoke of the conundrum marketers face in trying to create more personalized advertising as consumers and regulators focus on privacy briefly during his lunchtime presentation on Thursday. Nor is it the hottest subject over drinks or dinner, but there are rumblings of marketers worried about what it will mean for their advertising. 

For one vendor pitching brands on data in a booth, it’s not that marketers are asking explicitly about CCPA but that they are more curious about how that vendor sources its data and if it is compliant. That 10,000-foot view of data and data privacy seems to be the overall tenor of conversation in regards to the impending regulations at ANA this week. 

“No one feels like an expert,” said one marketer for a CPG giant who also asked for anonymity. “Our IT team is working on it, but we don’t have guidance yet. The path is unclear at this point; we’re in a wait-and-see mode.” 

The sense of uncertainty was palpable in all marketers asked about the impending regulation and how their brands are getting prepared for it. Unlike Advertising Week attendees, marketers at the ANA were hesitant to talk openly about what their brands are doing to prepare for CCPA. (For what it’s worth, publishers are also unprepared for CCPA; according to Digiday Research from this past March, 52% of publishers hadn’t yet started preparing for CCPA.) 

One reason could be that marketers have already dealt with GDPR and potentially aren’t as worried. “Since GDPR was out there first, they’re seeing it as the California-ization of GDPR,” said a marketing veteran who has worked for a major fast-food chain. “That’s not accurate, actually, when you get down to it, but when people are only dealing with it in headlines, they classify it that way.”

That could also be out of fear. “It scares the shit out of them,” said Greg Stuart, CEO of the Mobile Marketing Association, adding that while talk of CCPA hasn’t dominated conversations on the ground at ANA it has come up more recently in MMA conversations with marketers. “The issue is that CCPA feels closer [than GDPR]; it’s America, and there are big unknowns.” 

“The administrative burden and implementation is so complex; there are still gray areas to iron out,” said Dave Currie, CEO of the database Winmo. “Marketers are talking about it but not doing anything. There’s no unified voice yet [on what to do,] and it’s October.” 

ANA attendees asked about CCPA did express a desire for a unified voice and more collaboration between industry groups to have more of a hand in shaping the regulation participation in putting the regulation. That desire comes from a worry about fragmentation of privacy regulations across the U.S., especially as other states consider their own regulations, which could make the market much more difficult to navigate for marketers and agencies. 

“Increased regulation is necessary, but we are concerned that if we don’t organize and align ourselves — I’m talking about the 4A’s, the ANA, the IAB, all of the industry organizations — to bring together in a more aligned point of view,” said Dentsu Aegis CEO Nick Brien, adding that the industry needs to convey “that we are using data for good.” 

While CCPA is not being overtly discussed on stage, it is likely why marketers at the ANA are much more interested in creating marketing programs that could bolster their first-party data. 

“With increasing uncertainty around regulations, rules and other restrictions, more brands are talking about, thinking about and potentially [taking action to] reclaim greater ownership of their content, data and their relationships with consumers,” said Matt Wurst, managing director of North America for Revelation. “This will just create greater impetus for brands to create more of their owned content.”

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By ad-supported digital media standards, The Points Guy attracts a small audience — it drew 8 million monthly unique users in September 2019. But it has also invested in content aimed less at obsessives and more at points and rewards novices, a move that Kelly credits with a 28% increase in traffic this year.

Writing service content for a newbie audience helps turn those visitors into hardcore enthusiasts. “The more you read about a currency,” Kelly said, referring to airline miles or rewards points, “the more valuable it becomes.”

Up to this point, TPG has thrived on the hefty fees credit card companies pay for signups. While a site visit might generate a few cents worth of ad revenue, the affiliate commission generated when a visitor signs up for a credit can run into the hundreds of dollars. TPG negotiates exclusives and higher-than-usual commissions with credit cards as well, further boosting margins.

But TPG has bigger ambitions — “exclusively focusing on credit cards is not a smart strategy,” founder and CEO Brian Kelly said — and is branching into events, communities and tools to power its next phase of growth.

In 2020, the site will relaunch its mobile app, recasting it as a tool that will advise users on which credit card they should use to make a purchase, or how to hit certain points and rewards milestones. It will also invest more money in building out communities of people hungry for tips on how to travel more efficiently: The Points Guy will start hosting in-person meetups for readers in various U.S. cities, as well as a Points Con event.

“We are doing more events and meetups because it is what we have heard from our readers and our partners,” Kelly said. “Travelers are extremely interested in hearing from the top voices in the loyalty world, and we think this supplements our core business nicely. There will be challenges as we scale up to larger and larger events, but the demand is there.”

When Kelly launched The Points Guy in 2010, few publishers paid much attention to affiliate commissions as a revenue source. But over the past several years, as publishers have warmed to the concept of commerce content, many have gotten interested in credit cards: Wirecutter, Dotdash and The Inventory, G/O Media’s dedicated commerce brand, now cover them.

“Brian and now his company were not the first to talk about travel cards and points hacking,” said Rafat Ali, the founder and CEO of Skift, which covers the travel industry. “But I think all the things that the larger media world looks for now — content plus commerce, loyal readers — he brought together in a way that works very well in this world.”

The Points Guy has responded, in part, by buying up smaller competitors, including Mommy Points, Travel is Free, and Million Mile Secrets, and by hiring new writers. But it has also made significant investments, Kelly said, in tech and SEO; 44% of the site’s traffic comes from organic search. The Points Guy now has a 15-person technology group based in Austin, Texas, and a separate 15-person team operating out of Charlotte focused on SEO.

That kind of intent-driven traffic can be lucrative when paired with related offers. Consider a search for “best credit cards for travel.” TPG’s post from this month on the topic ranks on the first page of Google results. The post is filled with affiliate links and a detailed analysis of the pros and cons of 18 different credit cards. People searching on the topic are among the most valuable visitors possible.

Because revenue is powered by affiliate commissions rather than advertising, TPG evaluates its audience and content differently from most media companies. For example, the site’s analytics team tracks which stories compelled visitors to take actions such as signing up for a newsletter or sharing the piece with friends, rather than which ones get the most traffic. Last month, 55% of the 8 million monthly unique users who visited The Points Guy were repeat visitors, Kelly said.

“No one’s going to watch a post about a runaway catering truck and then get a [Chase] Sapphire credit card,” Kelly said. “Our whole goal is just to get you [the reader] to your goal.”

The post How The Points Guy built a 100-person media company off affiliate fees appeared first on Digiday.

The broadcaster’s first livestream launched this week and covered the Conservative party conference, where U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson set out policy plans for the year ahead. It’s early days for Sky News, so currently, its Twitch channel has a humble 127 followers and nearly 19,000 views. At the time of publication, the broadcaster was unwilling to share how many concurrent viewers it had for the stream.

A team of three people moderated the comments while streaming. The comment filter was set to its highest to weed out the chatter that broke Sky News’ community guidelines, which the broadcaster also published on its Twitch channel. Aside from conversation around democracy and the contents of the Prime Minister’s speech, viewers said they wouldn’t have watched Sky News if it hadn’t been on Twitch, said Strange. The team responded to some of the comments and featured a poll. Strange couldn’t share the number of comments, which need to be measured manually.

“We want to own spaces in live news,” he added. “We turn the taps on in the big, live moments.”

On Twitch, Sky News also links out to YouTube, where it hosts shows like “Sky News Explains” (like a three-minute video charting the rise of Greta Thunberg), “Brexisplainer” (questions answered by Sky News experts) and “Divided” (a talk show also distributed on Snapchat Shows).

Sky News has been monitoring Twitch for a while because of its untapped, younger-skewing video audience. The Amazon-owned platform claims 1.3 million people tune in to Twitch at any given moment on average. The audience is young: 55% are between 18 and 34 years old. And according to a pitch deck obtained by Digiday, the audience is still skewing over 80% male, but its female audience is growing.

For publishers, Twitch represents several opportunities. As a user-generated content platform, it’s still relatively uncharted territory for professionally produced content, but it’s growing. Publishers like The Washington Post, BuzzFeed and Cheddar have been publishing on the platform and have touted the platforms’ interactivity as appealing. The Twitch team is also very collaborative with its publishing partners. BuzzFeed’s team, for instance, spoke with Twitch weekly, prior to and during its streams.

Publishers haven’t had the best luck with monetizing on platforms historically. But on Twitch, the route to monetization seems more clear cut: Twitch serves in-stream ads and takes a cut. BuzzFeed is also selling subscriptions and merchandise through the platform.

While the perception around Twitch is slowing changing, it’s still known most widely for gaming content. That’s shifting as gaming itself becomes more mainstream and the platform introduces more fitness, creative and music content.

First-movers have the advantage in standing out on a platform relatively uncluttered with other publishers, but there are hurdles. Nearly 500,000 streamers broadcast live on Twitch every day, according to the platform, so discoverability of publisher channels is ad hoc. The most popular channels — which therefore surface more regularly — for now, are mostly from gamers, whereas people need to actively seek out broadcasters like Sky News. Featuring on Twitch front page results in “thousands of concurrent” viewers, according to Cheddar.

A core behavior on Twitch is users sending micropayments to their favorite gamers, which brands and publishers are hungry to capitalize on, said Dan Wood, a managing partner at Mediacom.

“Twitch has got great attention, great engagement and it naturally has a commerce-based relationship with users,” said Wood. “Newspaper brands would kill for that endemic behavior. Twitch’s revenue is naturally diversified — it’s not just reliant on advertising — so it’s not under the same pressure as other platforms to mold the experience to the detriment of users.”

Sky News didn’t monetize its first stream, but it will continue to experiment with Twitch for events, breaking news and potentially add in more regular streams to get people to return.

“We’re not prepared to give all our premium content away for free,” said Strange. “The caution [with platforms] is, are we giving it away and not getting anything in return? We recognize not everyone will be a Sky News user on our owned and operated platforms. That’s when we make a case to go to where the audience is. Twitch is a great example of that.”

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The 13-part series continues the theme of the previous two, in which all 800 UEFA Champions League players and their managers live in a chateau together. Each 13-minute episode is a parody that follows real narratives around the players and managers and their real-life match performances. So if a player is injured one week for instance, following episodes will be updated to reflect that.

Sports coverage is such a saturated area that digital media publishers like B/R must constantly hunt for new ways to drive new audiences, while sustaining existing ones. Making original animated series that take a satirical spin on the sports they cover and their players has proved an important way for B/R to differentiate.

Launched in 2014, “Game of Zones” is dedicated to basketball and features famous NBA players depicted as characters from the TV show “Game of Thrones,” while “Gridiron Heights” is focused on U.S. football league the NFL. Both shows were instant hits, but so far “The Champions” is outflanking them due to its appeal to a worldwide audience and people viewing it from 50 different countries, according to the publisher.

“There is absolutely nothing like it. It’s incredibly funny, and it differentiates in quite a powerful way,” said Richard Barker, joint managing director of M&C Saatchi Sport and Entertainment.

Premier League and Champions League rights are shared between BT Sport, Sky Sports and Amazon, all of which are subscriptions based. They’ve tried to extend those audiences on social media, with the result that highlights and goal clips have become highly commoditized on social media platforms. “Young people don’t care where they’re getting them from. They can just find them on social media. It’s hard for anyone to own that, ” added Barker.

But B/R’s “The Champions” caters very much to that younger audience, which is attractive for the right advertisers, he added. The third series is the first to be commercially supported by a dedicated partner and is presented by Playstation.

Another bonus of the series being a parody is the publisher can avoid having to pay any expensive rights for coverage of players. “It’s [The Champions] smart because obviously it allows them to include world-famous names without rights issues,” said Dan Ayers, partner at digital sports consultancy Seven League. “Getting all these players together in a single video would never happen for real, so creating an animated version definitely enables BR to differentiate.”

Since the show’s debut in September 2018, “The Champions” has generated an average 29,000 subscribers per episode on B/R Football’s YouTube channel, taking the total to 910,000, according to the publisher. The series also runs on the B/R Football app and is shown in full on IGTV and Facebook.

“The intersection of sports and comedy is something we don’t see a lot of elsewhere,” said Sarah Lowen creative executive Sarah Lowen. “There was something about mapping it to reality TV, with all that wealth and egos. But we don’t want to be dragging anyone through the coals. We want the players to feel they are in on the joke.”

The pre-scripted shows serve as effective evergreen content and take 10 weeks from concept stage to production. If any new story breaks around a player, the team tweaks the episode to ensure the content is timely.

The first episode of the third series has clocked up just under 1.4 million views within two days on YouTube. The second season had 5.3 million views per episode, and 464,000 people per episode engaged with it via comments, the highest view rates recorded for any B/R show, according to the publisher.

A large chunk of these views came from the U.S., where football, aka soccer, is less developed but growing fast. Appealing to the U.S. soccer audience is a priority for BR, but it has to hit on the right balance of making it accessible for people newer to the sport, without diluting the impact of the series’s depth of knowledge on the sport in order to keep European fans engaged.

That’s a challenging balance to strike, but it seems to have paid off. The second series of The Champions attracted a large U.S. audience, and a surprisingly high one in Germany due to an episode dedicated to the Bundesliga, according to the publisher though it wouldn’t break out figures.

The series is created out of Bleacher Report’s U.S. office by a team of 25 dedicated producers and writers, 12 of whom are animators. They work very closely with the London office, to ensure the script has enough in-depth knowledge of, and cultural references to the sport, and will appeal to football supporters worldwide.

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