Month: January 2020

The arrangement allows brands to have consistency by continually working with certain agencies without having to pay AOR retainer fees — essentially getting the best of both the AOR and project-based work assignments. Agencies, meanwhile, have some sense of stability in terms of expected work coming in but it’s murkier when it comes to financial arrangements and staffing, as agencies and brands in the serial project arrangement often haven’t scoped out the work as meticulously as they do with an AOR relationship and, as Digiday previously reported, not doing so early can become a problem later.

The arrangement is another example of the ever-changing nature of the agency-client relationship, according to agency executives and industry experts, who believe that it will become more popular this year as brands don’t want to make long-term commitments with agencies.

“The ongoing trend is to do more with less and be faster, smarter and less expensive,” said Lisa Colantuono, president of search consultancy AAR Partners, who sees serial projects as a side effect of in-house agencies needing help from outside firms. “They’re not set up to be 100 percent self-sustaining as an agency. As more clients do more work in-house they will need more help from the outside.”

Serial projects may be one aspect of the shift toward a more hybrid model between in-housing and AOR, which will likely be more popular in 2020, as Digiday previously reported. The arrangement, like anything, has its pros and cons for agencies and clients. Agencies say the arrangement makes it less likely for brands to get the best work as it’s harder to keep top-tier talent on staff for short-term assignments.

“On the plus side, it’s good for an agency because they know they’ve got a continuous stream of work,” said Kasindorf. “But it’s harder to make financial projections, staffing becomes a little more challenging and [in some cases] there’s no guarantee in terms of on-going monthly work. It’s a way for clients and agencies to establish a solid ongoing relationship but it’s not perfect.”

“It’s like the boyfriend who never commits,” said a creative director at an independent creative agency that has had serial project relationships. “We keep going on dates. You come back to my family’s house for Thanksgiving, we’re going on vacation but never locks it in and says, ‘You’re the one.’”

“Serial projects are more like dating versus marrying your clients,” said Joanne McKinney, CEO of Burns Group. “The relationship is viewed more short term, but as the projects move along, the relationship grows. With a typical AOR relationship, you get married and then get to know each other. With the serial project model, additional projects are a direct result of the strength of your prior project work and the growing trust of the client. We’ve seen a good deal of serial projects turn into great and longer-term client relationships.”

Others see it as par for the course in the changing agency-client relationship. “Ultimately, serial projects aren’t inherently better or worse than retainer projects in general,” said Ted Nelson, CEO of Mechanica. “Sometimes you miss the depth of understanding and relationships that result from a healthy retainer relationship. At the same time, complacency can creep into long-term retainers if you’re not vigilant.”

Overall, agency execs and industry experts believe that the rise of serial projects is part of a realization across the industry that one-size-fits-all models no longer apply to agency-client relationships. “You can’t have a one-and-done model anymore,” said Colantuono. “You have to talk about individual needs and different variables that can affect that outcome when developing that financial arrangement. It does take a little more time and effort.”

But for some, it’s not that simple as the changing model and new popularity of serial projects has made it more difficult to get clarity from brands about payment models or any sort of long-term planning. “It’s getting harder,” said an independent creative agency exec who has a serial project arrangement. “[Serial projects] chips away at the agency’s ability to forecast. I don’t know what I need on these projects because we haven’t committed to the scope or brief of what these projects are. The projectization of the work strips the agency’s ability to demand certain overhead, forecast and plan.”

“When a client gives us a project, we’re like, ‘I guess that’s great, we’ve won the next project,’” said the creative director. “But it’s constantly hand to mouth and there’s no guarantee, even if you knock it out of the park. We’ve had that many times where we’ve killed it on a project, assumed there would be a next project and there wasn’t. The fact that you can never count on it, that there’s this structural uncertainty to it, prevents you from being true partners, which really bums me out. I think everybody is losing as a result.”

For the most part, this is an economic issue: Small publishers, serving small communities with small advertising budgets, can no longer survive by using their current business models for producing news.

But an enormous problem is the lack of reporters and digital talent needed to cover these communities. Young people continue to gravitate toward big cities. And without enough people to create news products whose consumption can be monetized in a new way, fresh experiments are scarce. But such explorations are needed, if managers are to figure out what a reconfigured iteration of local news production could look like. Without open-minded people being willing to test new business models or product strategies, the prospects for news companies might become grimmer.

“You look at a lot of the places that are true news deserts; there’s just not a lot of journalism talent there,” says Mandy Jenkins, gm of the Compass Experiment. “They don’t have a long history of news.” Her Google-funded, McClatchy-guided project plans to launch 10 different “local news labs” in small and medium-sized cities over the next year.

The dearth of talent, Jenkins says, has played a role in her team’s decision to not launch labs in some cities.

“It’s not sensible for us to go somewhere where there’s literally nothing,” Jenkins says, explaining that where communities are experiencing a news desertification, the few qualified people available tend to either leave their area or just walk away from media jobs.

Thus, the lack of local talent creates a chicken-or-the-egg problem for those communities. Local news operations might need to experiment with new business models, ones focused less on print advertising and more on producing different kinds of information and services for readers, according to Karen Rundlet, a director of the Knight Foundation’s journalism program.

“The economics have to be there,” she says. “The higher-paying jobs — the jobs, period — are concentrated in big cities.”

But examples of new, local successes are few and far between. For every VT Digger, whose one-person newsroom evolved into the largest independent journalism source in Vermont, old newspapers are collapsing, consolidating or rotting into irrelevance for their readers.

That, in turn, discourages some reporters or entrepreneurs from trying to even envision new sustainable ways to fill the local news vacuum.

“I don’t think we’ve proved it out, especially at the local and regional level,” says Chris Krewson, the executive director of LION Pubs, a nonprofit that guides several local, independent news publishers.

Yet some of the very people who are trying out new things say that producing local digital news is doable. Don Day, the sole proprietor of BoiseDev, says he sees a lot of reasons for optimism. His bootstrapped one-person digital operation grew over 18 months into the largest source of business news in Boise, Idaho.

“If the content is right and the approach is correct, you can do it,” says Day, an Edward R. Murrow Award winner and John S. Knight Fellow who previously produced digital news for KTVB. “I’ve had to unlearn a lot of old, bad legacy-media habits, to have more conversations with people who aren’t just story sources.”

Day has a busy schedule. Monday through Thursday, he reports three original stories daily. On Friday, he syndicates one story licensed from a local print publication, in exchange for providing that outlet with a curated selection of BoiseDev content. Day also uses Friday to catch up on ad sales and customer service issues that arise with his paid membership program.

“That was a big, scary thing,” Day says, recalling his creation of the paid membership program a year ago. Memberships cost $100 per year. “Sometimes I step back and I go, ‘Holy crap, 500 people are paying for this content!’”

As digital outlets like BoiseDev grow stronger, observers hope that his financial success will prompt more people to try what he’s doing.

“What we can do is create the conditions for news as a good small business,” Krewson says. “If we do, more people will start more things.”

During a visit in October to GroupM media agency Essence, Pinterest’s pitch centered on how to apply search keyword targeting strategies, like those used for planning Google search campaigns. Typically, excluding specific keywords or including generic brands would be part of a three-month-long media plan, compared with a shorter product-based display campaign that could sit on other social platforms.

“For the last two years, Pinterest has been popular with fashion, retail and tech brands but it’s never been an always-on or staple,” said Deborah King, vp, media activation paid social, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, at Essence. “Over the last six months, with us, it’s been more clear and aggressive with the narrative of search rather than social. They have been a lot more focussed on where they sit in the funnel, they see themselves as a consideration platform.”

Essence is running keyword search strategies over multiple months on several of its clients, rather than one-off campaigns. It has recently started working with beauty brand L’Oréal and retailer Argos.

A shift in its pitch also reflects where it eyes growth after several years of trying to capture social budgets, King speculates, when it can’t compete on the CPM price and audience scale of Facebook and Google.

“If positioned correctly it can create opportunities for product discovery and capturing intent, a full-funnel marketing channel,” said Paul Kasamias, managing partner at Publicis Media agency Starcom. “Product ‘pinners’ demonstrate and display clear intent or interest and are perfect to target with e-commerce messaging.”

Pinterest’s attribution window is much longer than most clients would measure. Users planning weddings would need longer than a seven-day attribution cycle.

“We’ve seen that when linking out of the Pinterest ecosystem onto advertiser sites there is a drop-off in performance, which presents an attribution challenge with regards to e-commerce in particular,” added Kasamias.) In the U.S., the platform is testing new conversion tools.)

Starcom has seen strong performance for ads for primarily retail and food clients. One video ad product, which Pinterest calls max width, where a promoted video expands, performs particularly well, said Kasamias.

“The biggest barrier to investment is the perception that assets need to be wildly different, that assets need to be lists or visual blogs,” he said. “Advertiser content is an area that Pinterest should focus on to continue to see media spend grow, this is an area that Facebook, Twitter and Snap have all invested creative resource into.”

In the U.K., Pinterest is still in growth mode. On LinkedIn, there are 30 Pinterest employees based in the U.K., with another seven job openings for roles including a country manager, agency relationships and measurement.

Ad spending is growing but at a slower pace as the U.S. market hits saturation. Globally, the platform is forecast to reach nearly $1.5 billion in ad revenue in 2020, with $1.3 billion of this is from the U.S. where it has 86 million users, according to eMarketer. Partly to blame for lower U.K. investment is a lack of non-U.S. case studies, which buyers struggle to apply to the U.K. market with such different brand cases and user behavior.

“You almost go big or go home with Pinterest,” said King. “Major clients will always use it but trying to run tests makes it really hard to get live quickly. And if the results aren’t always spectacular it’s hard to justify the ROI.”