Month: November 2019

The Players’ Tribune started with access to some of the most sought-after sports talent in the world, and quickly built a reputation for producing great content with that talent. Those ingredients yielded several hits — The Players’ Tribune produced and distributed content from Kevin Durant, Joel Embiid, Allen Iverson and Derek Jeter that controlled the sports media news cycle on the days it was released. More recently, the startup produced video series content that’s appeared on Fox Sports 1 during the MLB Playoffs, and it has licensed several short-form series to Facebook.

But the company also produced too little content to thrive in a crowded digital media landscape, which, in turn, hampered the company’s branded content business and subsequent efforts to diversify its revenues. The Players’ Tribune’s website has attracted fewer than 1 million monthly unique users in 14 of the past 15 months, according to Comscore data.

The startup also failed to keep its costs under control, paying top dollar to work with talent that did not always promote the finished product, which compelled the site to overspend to hit branded content view goals. (Full disclosure: In 2013, I worked for a company that helped develop The Players’ Tribune, and contributed to an effort to find an editor for the site.)

“[Athletes] loved working with us, but it came at a cost,” a second employee said. “The go-to-market package was flawed from the onset.”

The Players’ Tribune’s editorial department has chosen quality over quantity to a degree almost unheard-of in ad-supported digital media. On a good week, the site might publish five pieces of content, which could be anything from a podcast post to a personal essay to a new installment in a video series.

Output on social platforms was infrequent too. Through the first 10 months of 2019, The Players’ Tribune has published an average of 47 posts per month on Facebook and 18 posts per month on Instagram, according to Crowdtangle data. On YouTube, it has published an average of fewer than 10 posts per month through all of 2019.

A recent slimming of the editorial team is partly to blame. The Players’ Tribune laid off editorial staffers last year and at the start of this year, and today the 20-person editorial team is half the size it was, according to one source familiar with the matter.

But the site was also hamstrung by the low output of that staff, according to multiple staffers, some of whom said that the site’s editors rarely exhibited any urgency about what they were doing. “I understand that this is very intimate, and it can be raw [for the players],” the first former employee said. “But an editor would be working on one story for months. The turnaround just needed to be faster.”

On some level, the low level of output did not matter because The Players’ Tribune did not rely on display advertising for meaningful revenue. But it hurt in other ways. For one, the strategy made it difficult to keep marketer interest. “My gut is that they’ve had trouble sustaining top-of-mind awareness from a media go-to standpoint,” said Dan Lobring, vp of marketing communications at rEvolution, a sports marketing firm.

The low output also put pressure on the branded content that The Players’ Tribune relied on to drive most of its revenue, despite efforts to diversify into other areas, including video licensing, podcasts and, more recently, merchandise and events. The lack of raw material for Facebook and other social platforms to distribute made it harder for Facebook to determine that The Players’ Tribune’s content should be distributed to a large chunk of audience.

“Without training the algorithm, there’s not going to be any organic lift,” said Michael Wertheim, a media consultant who has advised publishers including Atlantic Media, New York Media and National Geographic. “I think they’re banking on the branded content having a celebrity component, so you won’t have to pay quite as much. But with Facebook changing its algorithm to not privilege professional content, that’s tough.”

Without that lift, The Players’ Tribune had to spend extra money distributing the content. Even on campaigns that did well, the site would often spend money to surpass campaign goals, in an attempt to drive renewals with clients. That strategy worked less than half the time, two sources said.

On the business side, there were other challenges. Many of the people that started The Players’ Tribune had come from Excel Sports, the sports management firm that represented Jeter. The Excel veterans had deep expertise working with athletes, making them feel comfortable opening up about things such as depression, or losing family members to gun violence.

They also brought a sensibility that athletes should be well-compensated for participating in branded content campaigns, often paying athletes more than the campaigns themselves were worth, according to multiple sources. That helped attract top-shelf players in the early going but led to high costs that put pressure on The Players’ Tribune’s branded content programs.

“We were overpaying,” one source familiar with the matter said, who added that the athletes were not always engaged with what they were doing, particularly when it came time to promote the campaign or series. The first source said that it was not uncommon for athletes not to promote the work at all, or to do so weeks after launch.“It really worked when the athlete came in really excited,” the second source said. “But for the athletes, this is not important to them, at all. Maybe you have an agent or a manager telling them, ‘You have to do this, you’re not going to play forever.’ But for the active guys, this is pocket change.”

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Still, the direction of travel is preferable to the current state of the web’s open marketplace, according to Alessandro De Zanche, founder of media consultancy ADZ Strategies.

“I think alliances are the future for media owners. It doesn’t mean [publishers will need to flatten] their different characteristics; it doesn’t mean having a monopoly, but it means [having] an environment with strict standards,” De Zanche said.

The German barometer
The German market is probably the most advanced to date when it comes to offering unified login solutions.

German broadcasters RTL Group and ProSiebenSat.1 Media SE joined forces with internet service provider United Internet to create a unified login service in 2017. The independent European NetI D Foundation was formed the following year and the login solution officially launched for consumers in November 2018.

Around 70 companies use the NetID login currently, and more than 25 companies are in the process of integrating it. A NetID spokesman declined to comment on current user numbers but said it potentially reaches 38 million users in Germany alone across the participating websites.

Elsewhere in the German market, Verimi, which launched in 2017, sees itself less as a publisher login alliance and more as a safe for an internet users’ entire digital identity, to let them open bank accounts or access government services online, for example. Shareholders include Axel Springer, Deutsche Telekom and Allianz. A Verimi spokesman also declined to comment on user numbers.

The Portuguese paradox

Portugal is not a large market. With just 6.5 million internet users, Portuguese publishers can hardly afford fragmented approaches. That led the country’s top six media companies to ally in 2017 under the banner of Project Nonio to create a single sign-on for users and a shared pool of aggregated data segments to offer advertisers. The effort has been slow going, amid protracted talks about issues such as governance and which tech provider to use.

“In the beginning, we are always looking for what will be the perfect solution, [but] perfection doesn’t exist — we have to keep moving,” said João Paulo Luz, digital director at Portuguese publisher Impresa, calling Project Nonio the “Mona Lisa trap.”

Around 1.5 million people are registered with Project Nonio today, less than a quarter of Portugal’s monthly internet market, Luz said. But from this month on Project Nonio hopes user numbers will get a shot in the arm as participating publishers will require users to register if they want to access more than a single article or the homepage.

Another big decision to make is how to structure Project Nonio’s commercial infrastructure. The ad sales team representing Project Nonio currently rotates between each publisher every quarter, but the alliance is considering more of a marketplace offer. But that too has its downsides — not all content is premium, but pooled inventory is usually considered equal.

The French connection
In France, publishers are trying out a lightweight model. Ten media companies in France across news publishing, radio and broadcast pooled resources earlier this year to create “PassMedia,” allowing French internet users to login with the same details across their online offerings. The alliance aims to begin testing PassMedia with consumers by the end of the year, said Bertrand Gié, head of Le Figaro’s news division and president of French publisher trade association Le Geste.

In contrast to some of the other alliances, PassMedia set out to be “the lightest system as possible” and will simply collect emails rather than creating a more complex shared data lake to be shared between publishers for the purposes of advertising, according to Gie.

“Regarding the media landscape in France, the best way to make our project fail was to think too big,” Gie said. “An email is not perfect, but it’s much better than a cookie because it will be the same email whatever screen you are coming from.”

Still, there are technical challenges to overcome, such as how PassMedia will work in a frictionless way with users who already have a login and subscription on certain websites, Gie said. Another step is for the publishers to use their own websites to fully explain the benefits of MediaPass to users.

The Swiss sign-on
The four largest publishers in Switzerland launched a login alliance in mid-October, and they too are approaching the project slowly.

Switzerland isn’t a member of the European Union — so GDPR and the forthcoming e-Privacy Regulation are less of a going concern — but publishers there are still hoping the alliance will help them form a more direct relationship with their audiences for advertising purposes and to improve the user experience on their sites.

Around 10,000 people per day have signed up so far, a registration rate that is above expectations, according to Thomas Gresch, CTO of participating publisher Tamedia, the largest privately held media company in Switzerland.

The next step is to build a common technology platform and make decisions about how to monetize the publishers’ combined data, such as whether to launch a collective sales house. Those decisions aren’t likely to be made until next year, which is when Swiss broadcasters are also expected to join the alliance, Gresch said. He added that not all of the participating publishers want to collaborate on the advertising element.

Finland not yet Fin
Last autumn, the four largest publishers and broadcasters in Finland — Alma Media, Sanoma Media Finland, MTV and Yle — created a single-sign-on concept under the working brand name of “Media Key.”

The consumer launch is set for next year, according to Johanna Vartiainen, director of digital ad operations and development at Alma Media.

The project’s biggest challenges were twofold: data-protection and defining the needs and solutions suitable for all to be able to select the best customer identity management provider, Vartiainen said in an email. “Of course, implementing this will require investments too,” she added.

International collaborations
It’s unclear whether publisher login alliances will work across international territories, taking into account different languages, country-specific regulations and how difficult it has already been for such unions to form in more concentrated, single-language markets.

Germany’s NetID is looking to expand internationally in 2020.

“The topics we address are relevant throughout all of Europe,” said Sven Bornemann, CEO of the European NetID foundation. “In order to stand up to [Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon] and to present a real, credible alternative, it’s necessary to find a common European approach.”

Starting next year, NetID plans to introduce new products to let its partners collect legally compliant GDPR consent from users through the login solution rather than having a separate cookie banner pop-up. That data can then be used to serve user-specific content or ads, Bornemann said.

While rival publishers and broadcasters in the U.K. and the U.S. — a market preparing for the forthcoming California Consumer Privacy Act — have come together before to form ad sales and data alliances, consumer-facing login solutions might not be feasible.

There are more and bigger publishers in the U.S. and the U.K. who will have less incentive to cooperate, especially those who see investments in their own data management platforms and tech stacks as sources of competitive advantage, said independent media analyst Alex DeGroote.

The ad buyer view
It’s still too early for any of the login alliances to be pulling significant ad budgets away from the likes of Google and Facebook. Still, some ad buyers are closely tracking how they progress as they prepare for an environment where third-party cookie access is throttled.

McIntyre, vp of programmatic for EMEA at WPP digital agency Essence, said while such partnerships seem like the obvious way for publishers to defend themselves against the big platforms, at the moment “we aren’t seeing a huge amount of pressure that makes the alliances more appealing to us than working with the publishers directly.”

“I think that as the market for legitimate access to audience targeting data and inventory becomes more squeezed, the publishing alliances will really start to prove out the value for these companies teaming up,” McIntyre added.

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On Nov. 2 and 3, Complex hosted its annual streetwear culture convention, ComplexCon. Thousands of people visited booths from fashion companies like Atmos, Chinatown Market and Puma. Among the attendees was Pharrell Williams who attracted a horde of passersby snapping selfies as he was escorted through the Long Beach Convention Center. Several booths away, a smaller but similar scene played out as roughly half a dozen people pulled out their phones to catch Sean Evans, the host of Complex’s twisted talk show “Hot Ones,” browsing a rack of clothes.

Evans may not be a household name like Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert. But that depends on the household. The show he hosts garners 6.5 million views, on average, within four days of a new episode premiering, according to Complex Networks chief revenue officer Edgar Hernandez. “Hot Ones” has amassed a large enough audience to become a brand in its own right, spawning a growing number of alternative revenue streams and a model that Complex is now adapting with its other franchises.

Complex’s forthcoming Sole Collector app — “Kayak for sneakers,” as described by Complex editor-in-chief Damien Scott at the company’s NextFront event on Nov. 2 — may not be directly associated with its sneaker-centric shows “Full Size Run” or “Sneaker Shopping,” but it’s hard to imagine the company opting to create the app if it hadn’t cultivated an audience of footwear aficionados who tune in to watch “Sneaker Shopping” host and the company’s svp of content strategy Joe La Puma peruse the latest Pumas with celebrities like rapper DaBaby and soccer star Megan Rapinoe. Complex is directly capitalizing on the popularity of its sneaker shows with its debut podcast slate that includes “The Complex Sneakers Podcast,” which will be hosted by La Puma and “Full Size Run” co-hosts and Complex editors Matt Welty and Brendan Dunne.

Complex’s franchise template combines two growing trends among media companies in recent years: the centrality of talent for episodic shows and the conversion of those shows into intellectual property. Barstool Sports, Bleacher Report and Bon Appétit produce programs starring in-house talent. Vox Media and Gimlet Media have adapted its respective YouTube and podcast series into streaming shows. And BuzzFeed’s Tasty has pulled a reverse-Complex. The food property began by producing videos starring anonymous hands in pans, went on to sell its own pans and is now producing episodic shows featuring some of the faces attached to those hands.

The Walt Disney Company built its empire around a cartoon mouse. Little wonder then that Complex kicked off its NextFront event with a video of Walt Disney intercut with its own clips.

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Over the coming months, American Express plans to use fewer third-party cookies to identify users across browsers. Instead it will use alternative ID solutions, from publishers and ad tech vendors, to do the heavy lifting when it comes to reaching a specific audience online.

Deciding which ID solutions American Express opts for will come down to how easily they fit into its own ad tech stack, said Phil Wilson, svp of enterprise digital demand generation at the financial firm. “In fact, how we assess targeted ID ad businesses will be on how portable their tech is as well as how easily it can with ours.”

American Express will make changes to its own ad tech stack, which consists of an ad server, a demand-side platform and a data management platform to handle multiple ID solutions.

“How we move forward involves working with identity providers like LiveRamp and Neustar a lot more, while we also have a keen eye on how publishers are going to sync their own IDs into this ID ecosystem,” said Wilson.

Companies like LiveRamp stand out to advertisers like American Express because of their ID graph. Even if parts of that ID graph were to fade as a result of the crackdown on third-party cookies, the fact that LiveRamp uses points like an email address and a telephone number means those graphs can be rebuilt with alternative signals like an IP address, for example.

LiveRamp’s proprietary ID is not a common currency for anonymous cookie IDs, which is why the ad tech vendor is part of the Advertising ID Consortium. This group, along with The Trade Desk’s Unified ID, The IAB Tech Lab & DigiTrust ID and ID5, is attempting to become the most widely adopted common ID outside of the walled gardens. While it’s still too early to pick a definite winner, advertisers like American Express will ultimately decide which of those IDs the industry consolidates around.

“There’s no doubt that everyone is trying to push their own ID-based solution, but I think we’ll work with the providers that can integrate with our tech stack,” said Wilson.

Beyond ID vendors, American Express is also looking to those identifiers publishers are starting to use as replacements for third-party cookies. The more a publisher knows about a visitor off the back of a digital identifier other than a third party cookie, the more money it will receive from advertisers.

“I fully expect a world in the future where first-party data graphs will become much more important and the winners in this will be the advertisers and publishers who are able to connect those graphs in a privacy-compliant way,” said Wilson.

The risk around cookies isn’t a new one. Ever since cookies were created 25 years ago, it’s been widely accepted that the way they are matched between different businesses isn’t an accurate way to identify users across the internet. Cookie match rates between different ad tech platforms are inconsistent. But up until recently, the industry has been content to “keep calm and carry on” when it comes to unraveling the ID problem caused by cookies. It’s harder to do that when cookies appear to be a less viable option for targeting in the eyes of regulators as some of the most popular browsers purge third-party cookies from their systems. The speed at which those changes have come has rattled some marketers. Others like Wilson view any short-term disruption to media plans as worthwhile if it means they can target ads and then attribute that spend more accurately than they’ve been able to do,

“One of the challenges we see with many advertisers today, particularly the performance-focused ones, is their advertising is cookie-driven,” said Wilson. “That means someone who has been retargeted, for example, could be getting hit with many different ads or whether the ad that’s served is meant for that person. As you get further into ID-based worlds, you’re able to control that in a much more consumer-friendly way.”

Should American Express’ search for better targeting beyond the cookie prove fruitful, then it could see the advertiser move more money back into programmatic. Over the last five years, the advertiser’s spend on programmatic “started to diminish significantly,” said Wilson, who said the business felt there were other, more profitable, ways to buy ads. Since then, the financial firm has worked with Infectious Media to put in place a hybrid model that’s given Wilson’s team the control needed to make more educated bets on how best to buy programmatic ads.

The post How American Express is preparing for a world without cookies appeared first on Digiday.

The opening TV spots, available in 15- and 30-second versions, will run on linear and OTT TV across various networks including CNN, NBC and MSNBC in the U.S. and on the BBC in Canada, Europe, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region. Digital ads will run on Display, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Out-of-home ads will run in the New York, Los Angeles, Denver and Philadelphia areas across 1,275 placements with more than 140 million impressions. The only print ad for the campaign will appear in the Asia-Pacific edition of Fortune this December. The campaign is set to run over the course of 12 to 18 months.

“What you choose to read and how you choose to spend your time, rather than the platform you choose to consume it on — that’s what this campaign is talking about,” said Suzi Watford, chief marketing officer for The Wall Street Journal.

“The deeper theme here is media literacy and having people be able to sort out for themselves what’s good quality information and what’s a distraction,” said Paul Plumeri Jr., vp of global marketing for The Wall Street Journal. “That’s not a platform problem. It starts at the individual level.”

Watford noted, however, that even though its number of digital subscriptions outweighs those for print, the publisher wanted to reference its 130-year history as a newspaper: The spot opens with a young infant cradling a tablet, but it ends with a shot of a young woman crossing the road with a paper version of The Journal tucked underneath her arm.

The Journal worked with longtime collaborator The&Partnership, the same ad agency that executed its “Read Ambitiously” campaign from 2017.

“This is just the first campaign under this idea, and the execution of this campaign is very much of the moment,” said Agnes Fischer, president of The&Partnership. “The visual style is meant to portray the overwhelming amount of content we all consume every day — from brain candy to misinformation to content that keeps us in our bubble — and it inserts The Wall Street Journal as the solution, the opportunity to read factual journalism, to challenge what we think we know and to go deeper than the endless scrolling.”

The timing of the campaign’s launch — during one of the busiest news periods of the year and a year before the 2020 U.S. Presidential election — was especially important for The Journal to leverage.

“The news has never been more important and where you get your facts has never been more important,” Watford said. It’s a message that’s also been echoed by the paper’s peers, including The New York Times’ “Truth” campaign and The Washington Post’s “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

Photo Credit: The Wall Street Journal/The&Partnership

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“We have the reach and scale for this to be very meaningful,” said Mohammed Ali Salha, Tastemade’s managing director for Europe. “View time is the metric we’ll be looking at the most, people are watching for an hour or two hours, it’s not for seconds like on platform news feeds. Previously, we haven’t had a true place for this content to sit and for the audience to keep coming back.”

Fewer than half of the shows will be created by teams in the London headquarters, with the rest coming from Tastemade’s global teams. U.K. franchises include “West is Best,” a series looking at hidden gems from London’s most-coveted neighborhoods, “Struggle Meals” featuring recipes that don’t break the bank, and “Broken Bread” which explores social-justice issues facing the broken food system.

Tastemade UK has built its video views off of Facebook but is looking at over-the-top platforms to diversify away. According to Tubular Labs, the publisher had 73 million video views on Facebook in September and 20 million views on Instagram. There has been a significant increase in the length of shows to over five minutes in the last 12 months, per Tubular. The publisher also made a 90-minute documentary about making pasta.

Some publishers are expanding content on ad-supported platforms as a way to drive incremental revenue from profitable video businesses by stitching content together to make longer-form series. Tastemade is trying to create longer-form content — around the 20-minute mark — rather than stitching together shorter-form shows that were created for social platforms.

Platforms like Samsung offer a number of revenue opportunities for Tastemade, including a mix of programmatically sold ad inventory, which Samsung will take a revenue share of, plus branded sponsored content and branded series, where brands badge an editorial show.

Tastemade UK has doubled revenue year-on-year. Around 75% of its revenue comes from branded content for clients like Tesco, Heinz and Unilever — with the rest coming from platform revenue-share deals.  Salha expects this to shift to 60% weighted towards branded content over the next year.

There are around 4.8 million Samsung Smart TVs in the UK, making up half the smart TV market, said Mihir Haria-Shah, head of broadcast at media agency Total Media, and while Samsung hasn’t released U.K. viewers for Plus, the audience size is likely limited. The TV manufacturer estimates 40% of its customers view up to four hours a month, which is way below the national average.

“There is a huge opportunity to reach light TV viewers and [it] could work well as a complementary strand on a linear TV plan for one of our clients,” he said. Advertisers can target audiences based on viewing behavior, provided they have opted-in. Part of the appeal of TV manufacturers like Samsung owning the services is that it has insight into the audience’s linear TV habits through automatic content recognition.

“From an advertiser’s perspective, the different types of ad formats are exciting,” said Haria-Shah. “Pre-rolls and mid-rolls are great, but opportunities such as having display statics when users may pause the content they’re watching, as Hulu does, gives consumers a different kind of experience.”

Agencies say that in a landscape where a few digital publishers have made the lead into linear TV, like Vice and Jukin Media, Tastemade has some legitimacy. The digital publisher’s financial backers include Comcast Ventures, Scripps Networks Interactive, Goldman Sachs and Amazon.

Ultimately, the audience for ad-supported connected TV screens is still small, as such, so is advertiser investment, but by 2023 global over-the-top revenues will have more than doubled, driven by ad-supported VOD. The growth depends on the quality of the content on services compared to others like Netflix.

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