Month: October 2019

There’s “tremendous pressure from external forces,” said Jay Pattisall, principal analyst at Forrester.

At the ANA, the threats marketers discuss may change each year, but the presence of those threats may be the one constant marketers can count on. That said, it’s not all doom and gloom. Overall, the mood of marketers is one of “cautious optimism,” according to agency sources who understand that, as 4A’s president Marla Kaplowitz put it. “Everyone is under a lot of pressure – that’s the reality these days.” 

Here’s what marketers will be talking about this week. 

The return of brand building
This year, P&G’s chief brand officer Marc Pritchard will pitch fellow marketers on the need to reinvent brand building in a world where marketers have enough data to personalize messages for each consumer. Pritchard isn’t alone, marketers from Dunkin’ to Chipotle to digitally native Postmates will also tout the power of building a brand consumers actually care about. There’s a realization that having data on consumers and being able to target them with your brand message with performance marketing — a tactic DTC brands perfected and legacy brands are still trying to figure out how to master — isn’t enough to win the day if a brand doesn’t have a message that resonates with consumers.

“You’re starting to see this fundamental shift in how executives and directors of marketing look at the ‘brand’ and how they’re trying to redefine what it means for their organization,” said Faheem Siddiqi, CEO and founder of performance marketing agency SocialWithin.

Absence of DTC
That shift comes as DTC brands have challenged not only legacy brands’ market share but how they go to market. While DTC brands dominated Advertising Week, their absence may be felt at the ANAs where, at least on stage, there won’t be any major DTC brands presenting. That may be due to the lack of interest in the ANAs from DTC brands as well as legacy brands’ reluctance to hear lessons from DTC brands, according to agency sources, who added that while legacy brands are no longer dismissive of DTC there’s still a tension there, even as some like P&G recognize the need to add DTC brands to their portfolios.

“From the DTC CMO perspective, I wonder if they see as much value in events like the ANA as traditional brands and agencies do,” wrote Husani Oakley, director of technology and innovation, Deutsch NY, in an email.

Metric Digital CEO Kevin Simonson put it more bluntly: “DTC brands, frankly, couldn’t give a shit about the ANAs.”

In-housing will continue
In recent years, marketers have been focused on taking greater control of their brands by moving marketing practices like media buying or creative in-house or through finding ways to own more data about their consumers. That will continue to be a big topic of discussion at the ANA this year, especially when it comes to the looming threat of an economic downturn and the changes to come from the implementation of CCPA. “When shit hits the fan, you want to be able to say, ‘I own this,’” said Mark Wagman, managing director at Medialink, adding that in these uncertain times, marketers want to be certain they have what they need to connect with consumers. “It’s almost like a doomsday kit. This is the time to do it.”

Forrester’s Pattisall expects marketers to discuss how they’ve taken more media and programmatic capabilities in-house this year. “But CMOs and marketers should consider that the technology and talent investments for programmatic media operations are not insignificant and do not align with their current cost efficiency mindset for [in-housing],” wrote Pattisall in an email. According to Digiday Research, 53% of marketers said they were handling the majority of their marketing in-house. 

Election 2020
As with Advertising Week, the 2020 election will likely be a major topic of discussion even if there aren’t sessions focused on the election itself. Part of that focus comes from the higher cost of advertising on digital platforms with the onslaught of election advertising as well as the difficulty in standing out when consumers are inundated with messaging from political candidates.

“It can get quite expensive very quickly,” said Siddiqi of digital advertising prices during election season.

“As CMOs grapple with how to cut through the clutter of the $200 million or so in election advertising spend and concerns for how the election will continue to erode public trust in institutions — including media and brands,” wrote Pattisall. 

That potential for the election to hurt trust between brands, platforms and consumers, especially when it comes to data privacy, will certainly be a hotly debated topic, even if it’s not overtly on the agenda, according to attendees.

“We can’t focus enough on the importance of trust in the industry and with our customers,” wrote Jacki Kelley, president and chief client officer, Dentsu Aegis Network, in an email. “Consumers still want personalization, but there needs to be an absolute respect for their data and their privacy. In many ways this can also be a brand differentiator. Dentsu’s recent CMO Survey found that 73% of high-growth U.S. CMOs agree that data protection legislation represents an opportunity to build trust with our consumers versus only 22% of non-growth CMOs.”

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“Historically, some companies in esports have tended to report vanity viewership metrics that tend to be larger like views and hours watched,” said Kasra Jafroodi, strategy and analytics lead at Activision Blizzard. “Unfortunately, metrics like these tend to lead to incorrect comparisons, setting false expectation and ultimately inflating the value of their audiences.”

The hours-watched metric, for example, is often used in esports to compare its viewership against traditional sports. According to Newzoo’s analysis of data from the streaming platforms, the qualifying stage of Fortnite World Cup this summer brought in over 700,000 hours of viewership per week on official Twitch and YouTube channels, with Twitch bringing in 65% of that viewership. Used on its own, the hours-watched metric doesn’t represent much beyond a big number.

“Whether it’s total hours watched or unique views, there’s a lot of attention paid to vanity metrics that can be easily manipulated to obscure the value of audiences,” said an esports exec on condition of anonymity. “If you look at something like views, which is often used to claim big viewership numbers by esports businesses, that metric can easily be inflated by people who are on sites where an embedded video player plays automatically.”

Ad deals are often brokered off the back of those sorts of metrics.

“The hype around esports has been there for some time, but there’s been a lag when it comes to investment from advertisers,” said Misha Sher, worldwide vp of sport & entertainment at MediaCom. “If the esports industry really wants to challenge for the advertising budgets of mainstream brands, then it needs to do more to make them feel more confident in the reach they’re buying. There’s no excuse for it to be a wild west industry anymore.”

More mainstream advertisers, however, have kept their distance due to how unreliable viewership numbers have been. A recent report from gaming business title Kotaku found some esports have used the lack of clarity around viewership to peddle unverifiable and potentially inflated numbers to advertisers.

As the most popular streaming platform for esports, Twitch has been one of the key beneficiaries of how fragmented audience measurement in esports has become. Twitch streamers are paid on a CPM model — for every 1,000 views. Consequently, the concurrent view metric, which Twitch uses to show how many viewers are watching a stream per second, is key for advertisers weighing up which streamers to pay. But every platform counts concurrent viewers differently, so when media buyers attempt to combine those figures to get an overall view of reach, it becomes harder to use.

Nevertheless, Twitch’s ad business has grown to the point where it wants more money from larger advertisers outside of gaming. The site’s relaunch last week was designed to lay the groundwork for those larger budgets by positioning it more as a livestreaming platform, not just a place to watch other people play games. As Twitch’s search for larger ad budgets has evolved, so too has its approach to viewership measurement. The site is in the early stages of using the average-minute audience as a standardized media metric that is more directly comparable to stick-and-ball sports.

Several esports players — from Activision-Blizzard to esports team Fnatic, to gaming network ESL and organizer Riot Games — are all now using Nielsen as a reporting partner. Many of them are adopting the average-minute audience metric. Nielsen wants to establish its AMA metric as the equivalent to its audience ratings on TV. The metric takes the total minutes watched of an event and divides that by the length of the live broadcast to show the average number of viewers at each minute.

“As marketing evolves, we need to be looking at measurements of engagement, content consumption, establishing a brand presence in the cultural conversation,” said Bart Vickers, group director of connections at VLY&R. “What will be really exciting — and valuable for brands — will be deeper, richer forms of measurement,” Vickers said.

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For Channel 4, Snapchat has worked well as a marketing vehicle, driving audiences to its shows on linear and video-on-demand platform All 4, said James Smart, social media manager at Channel 4, speaking at the Snapchat IAB Upfronts event in London, Oct. 1.

“Increasingly, the more exposure we get with social audiences, the more viewing is happening on our longer-form linear and video-on-demand content,” said Smart. “It’s a marketing opportunity for Channel 4. With linear viewership shrinking due to more competition, we need to put out content where the audience is.”

More investment in programming specifically for platforms marks a change in view for Channel 4. The broadcaster will produce series specifically for Snapchat (and other social platforms) as part of its Digital Content Unit, announced earlier this year. Out of this, it plans to make a seven-figure investment in original commissions specifically aimed at 13- to 16-year-olds.

Snapchat’s strong retention rate particularly is appealing for Channel 4. According to Smart, across its current Shows, it’s getting on average between 40% and 50% completion rate, roughly 50% longer on Snapchat than on other platforms.

One U.K. Show publisher, who made the switch to unskippable ads over the last year, saw revenue lifts driving three times the amount of monthly revenue. But broadcasters, with ample video content and stable and buoyant revenues from linear businesses, have been warier of putting full or exclusive content on social media platforms to avoid cannibalizing their TV ratings.

Snapchat is pulling more budget from Facebook and YouTube, and while YouTube still causes anxiety, the curation of Snapchat is a comfort. Snapchat particularly offers more of a safe harbor for broadcasters who are more used to brand-safe and highly regulated broadcast environments.

Snapchat is heavily expanding its slate of Shows in the U.K., as well as commissioning its first U.K. Snapchat Original, “Mind yourself,” a 10-episode documentary series exploring mental health, early in 2020. The platform is keen to open up more inventory in Shows to sell more six-second unskippable commercials and three-minute commercials, whose first six seconds remain unskippable, to make more of a play for video and social marketing budgets.

But it will need to remain choosy and thorough with what appears on the platform as it opens up to more content. Currently, all Shows go through editorial curation by Snapchat’s team, then commissioned Shows to get notes on how content will resonate and how appropriate it is within the platform’s editorial guidelines.

“We by no means approve everything,” said Tom Conway, Europe, the Middle East and Africa content lead at Snap.

The post How Channel 4 is recutting TV shows for Snapchat appeared first on Digiday.

The Central Valley Community Foundation will be watching the kinds of outcomes that the Education Lab’s reporting is able to drive. But the larger strategic goal for McClatchy is to drive digital subscriptions. In its most recent quarterly earnings, McClatchy reported having over 185,000 digital-only subscribers, up more than 51% year over year. The news publisher reported a net loss of $17.5 million over that same period, against revenues of $178.7 million.

“By delivering focused reporting and community engagement, we feel like the value we’re bringing will lead to an increase in digital subscription support,” said Lauren Gustus, the regional editor of McClatchy’s California, Idaho and Washington news operations. While some of the Lab’s reporting will be behind the Bee’s paywall, not all of it will; much of it will be shared with community and news organizations, who do not operate paywalls. “We think more people are going to want to support The Bee because the Education Lab reporting will matter to them,” Gustus said.

While the Education Lab is still coming together — its reporting team is still being hired — McClatchy believes the model, originally pioneered by The Seattle Times in 2013, is replicable. The news publisher is engaged in conversations with local community groups and organizations in more than eight different markets around the country, with an eye toward launching more labs by year’s end and more next year.

“It’s no secret that most legacy news organizations have been challenged,” Gustus said. “If fact-based journalism is in peril, which I believe it is, we have to think pretty radically about how we serve our communities.”

“We know digital-only subscription growth is key, and we know if we do more of the work local communities want, in theory we should find more of that support in the digital subscription space,” Gustus said. “This is meant to be a bridge to sustainability and not necessarily the establishment of a nonprofit news operation.”

As declining print advertising has battered local news publishers, there has been a substantial increase in institutional support for local journalism over the past decade; Gustus said that institutional giving to local news has quadrupled over the past 10 years.

At the other end of the spectrum, a number of news publishers have found success getting their readers to pay for specific reporting projects. The Guardian, for example, discovered that its American audience was willing to pay for investigative series focused on topics such as the environment.

As that money’s pooled in, there has been some scholarship around the effects that nonprofit donations or involvement have had on reporting. Though many see the opportunities for conflict as not too different from the challenges that publishers face with advertisers.

“It’s very rare that you’d see a philanthropist come in and fund something like what McClatchy is doing and say, ‘Here are the stories you need to write,’” said Matt Skibinski, a reader revenue analyst at the Lenfest Institute. “With philanthropies, you have the same kind of implicit concerns [as advertising]. But as long as the independence is maintained, publishers remain interested.”

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