Month: February 2020

Below three current in-house agency employees and one former such employee share what it’s like to work inside a company and how it differs from regular agency work.

Global creative director at an in-house agency for a consumer product goods company
“I spent eight years at a traditional agency. Most of the time, you only work on one particular brand or project. The thinking that [working at an in-house agency is the only time] you work on one brand is a bunch of bullshit. Apart from the occasional pingpong table or Friday drinks [at an external agency], [work life at an in-house agency is] much the same. We have the same processes as any agency. It just happens to be faster and cheaper. We don’t have to wait weeks for feedback. Every day is a feedback session. You get to know the client’s business inside and out.”

Working “in-house will always [lead to having] a better understanding [of the brand]. Being inside we end up drinking and absorbing a lot of the client’s culture. It gives you a POV on a brand that you wouldn’t have agency side. Recruitment isn’t hard, but it’s different. I always look for a type of mindset that has to do with entrepreneurship. You have to be able to foster relationships with clients, [the] same as an account person in a traditional agency. Some traditional creative teams can’t do it. You can’t be the type of person who waits for the brief. Every day is an opportunity. If you heard a new product is coming, you should have an idea in your mind [for marketing]; water cooler moments are potential” times for brainstorming about the creative work. 

A creative professional at an in-house agency for a software company
“The biggest struggle people have going from external to in-house is that in-house [agencies] really have the brand in mind, so it’s not about how creative you can be. There’s not as much acceptance of your bold ideas. The bigger a brand is, the less likely they are to really dive into an unknown deep end. A lot of people who are in-house still do projects outside of the organization to fuel that creative fire.

“Work-life balance is not necessarily better. We get projects and deadlines that are insane and are still expected to meet them. Also, people in the organization with a budget will come to you and tell you what they’d like to do. Even if it’s the worst idea you’ve ever heard and you know it’s terrible, you still have to figure out how to execute it. They aren’t interested in your feedback. They just want their ideas to come to fruition.”

A creative director at an in-house agency for a tech company
When it comes to comparing “work-life balance between the two [setups], it has been pretty much the same. There have been some months working in-house that have been busier than anything I ever experienced agency side, though. [Some of the pros of being in-house are] being able to build relationships with key stakeholders; having direct and unfettered access to information, product updates and changes in strategy; the additive benefits of seeing how consumers interact and respond to various tactics; the perks; a much more open path to shipping work.”

Some of the cons are the fact that the “frequent reorganizations and sudden changes of power that happen in big companies can be exhausting and demotivating. These days, it seems like the marketing department is always the first under the microscope whenever times are tough. I think a lot of people assume that working in-house will afford you the opportunity to think and plan for the longer term.

“But in my experience, the in-house experience has been so consistently busy and reactive that there’s never really time to think about the future. When everything is a fire drill, strategy and planning are the first to go. I do think there’s something about the creative temperament that needs variety and new types of challenges in order to thrive. Some brands can offer that, but most can’t. I’m increasingly talking to more creatives who are bouncing back to [the] agency world because of the potential for a more interesting work mix.”

Jon Banack, a current marketing consultant and a former in-house agency employee of The Globe and Mail as well as toy company Spin Master
“Being in-house, there’s a feeling of a shared sense of purpose. That’s the big difference. You really feel the ups and down, successes and failures of the company much more tangibly. Agencies feel close to clients, but at the end of the day they have very different visions. Being in-house … when the company does well, you have that pride. There’s a lot more ownership of that brand and success than when you are external. There’s also a lot more trust in the relationship because you can just walk down the hall. You can build much more of a rapport. You can move much more quickly. There’s a lot less formality. You can cut through all of that and get right down to work. The biggest benefit: moving a lot more quickly, feeling like you are part of the success.

“There’s certainly a risk in being myopic when in-house. But that could happen in a lot of different kinds of relationships. People point to that Pepsi thing all the time, and it was clearly a misstep. Still, agencies are at such a risk these days and that means their ability to push back against a strong client isn’t what it used to be. If you’re in-house, you’re in a better position to say it’s a terrible idea, we shouldn’t do that versus if you’re at an agency and the account is up for review in 15 months. Bad work can be done by people in lots of different kinds of relationships. 

“I do fear though that [the support of in-house agencies] will drop off quickly because people will realize that [it’s odd to have] a team of 30 people working on creative when their research and development team is 10. If there is a turn in the business, the in-house team will be one of the first to go.”

As advertising has become a bigger piece of Roku’s business and its app, The Roku Channel, has become a bigger part of its sales pitch, media executives are growing concerned that Roku might be starting to prioritize its own interests at their expense. For example, Roku has asked some media companies to buy ads on its platform to promote the programming they distribute on The Roku Channel instead of promoting the media companies’ apps on the Roku platform, according to media executives.

“Before it was all just neutral, but now Roku is trying to direct anyone on Roku to The Roku Channel and that’s part of the icy relations,” said a second media executive.

Roku may be pushing media companies to prop up The Roku Channel in order to help its own advertising business and, by extension, the revenue that media companies receive from the platform. Some advertisers have been turned off by the lack of transparency that Roku provides into where exactly their ads ran across its platform. By contrast, since Roku curates the programming on The Roku Channel, advertisers tend to be more comfortable buying The Roku Channel’s inventory from Roku.

“Roku helps content providers reach a large and valuable audience, through both our channels business and The Roku Channel. Our goal with these providers is a fair value exchange. We think the results in terms of consumer engagement and content provider growth speak for themselves,” said a Roku spokesperson in an emailed statement.

The growing tension between Roku and these media companies resembles the rocky relations that have frequently developed between content providers and the platform companies they rely on for distribution. As the audiences grow on various platforms, so does the power of their respective companies. Now a shift in the power balance is emerging in the still-developing connected TV market: Amazon has become more aggressive in the distribution deals it is striking with media companies on its connected TV platform, and within the past two months Roku has had distribution standoffs with AT&T and Fox.

As The Roku Channel becomes a bigger focus for Roku, media companies have begun to see the company less as the impartial host of a platform that can distribute their content and more as a potential rival for audience attention. “Roku is competition now because of the success of The Roku Channel,” said a third media executive.

Media companies do benefit from the success of The Roku Channel. In exchange for media companies’ providing programming for the channel, Roku gives them a share of the money it makes from selling ads against that programming. In other cases, Roku pays companies to license their programming for the channel. But multiple media executives said they receive significantly more viewers for their programming carried on their own Roku apps than their shows on The Roku Channel. These executives worry that as Roku directs more attention to The Roku Channel, it will divert attention from the media companies’ own apps.

“They may be taking a viewer from me that would have watched a significant amount of my programming in my app to watch only a sliver of my programming [in The Roku Channel], and that person might say they’d rather just watch The Roku Channel and don’t need to watch my app again,” said the second media executive.

Furthermore, in asking media companies to buy ads to promote their programming on Roku, media executives see a potential scenario emerging in which the platform company becomes a pay-to-play outfit, reminiscent of another platform company that has been a sore spot for media companies. “Roku is becoming the Facebook of TV,” said a fourth media executive.

“I’ve had clients come to me asking whether using mobile IDs is the basis for good workarounds to cookies’ going away,” said the data strategy director for one advertising agency who did not wish to be named. Since the browser companies are unanimously opposed to  granular audience tracking, workarounds like mobile IDs (which track users for as long as they are carrying their device) are not viable alternatives, said the data strategy director. Third-party cookies generally track only a single session on a site.

Now advertising agencies are receiving fervent pitches from research companies that interview users through in-person or online surveys. These research-based “data companies are selling to our team hard since Google announced it was killing off third-party cookies,” said the data strategy director.

Through the insights offered by the research studies, advertisers can glean data about sales and foot traffic and how their ads are boosting brand perceptions or their reach across various screens. But these methods require advertisers and their agencies to pay close attention to detail. While certain advertising executives shudder at the thought of reverting to this antiquated measurement method, some agencies are considering using these techniques out of necessity.

Also on the comeback: programmatic guaranteed deals, according to three media agency executives interviewed for this article. These private agreements between an advertiser and a publisher settle on a price for pre-negotiated inventory, with first-party targeting over specific period of time. Several years ago such deals offered a safe haven for advertisers that wanted to avoid the fraud, hidden fees and lower-quality impressions found on the open programmatic advertising marketplace. But as the open marketplace’s performance and safety has improved, advertisers have opted for regular programmatic advertising deals to avoid the steep costs in guaranteed programmatic deals. The impending departure of third-party cookies, however, could tip advertisers back to favoring guaranteed programmatic deals if they can broker a way to gain more data from publishers.

“The great thing about third-party data is that you get tons of scale, and you can literally buy anything, but you never know how accurate it is; you have to test it,” said Isabelle Baas, Starcom London’s managing partner for digital, data and technology strategy. “Whereas if you have more direct relationships with publishers, you can get more out of them because there’s a mutual interest.”

Since in the future with the absence of third-party cookies, publishers will have more power as the gatekeepers of audiences, advertisers will aim to increase their direct relationships with publisher’s commercial teams.

“For a while, we went down an interesting route of decoupling second-party data from inventory, so that the data can be used within a publisher group or by using it within a [demand-side platform] across other media,” said James Coulson, Infectious Media’s managing partner for strategy. “While the death of the cookie will kill that process of decoupling data from inventory, there are going to be people trying to leverage second-party data [from publishers] through programmatic guaranteed or through some private marketplace.”

If these solutions don’t work, then advertisers could be prompted to advertise within walled gardens like Google’s and Facebook’s platforms where audience data abounds; yet the platform companies won’t necessarily share all the data. In recent years the platform companies have erected “data-clean rooms” — or safe spaces for advertisers to access aggregated rather than customer-level data in a privacy-compliant way. But until now advertisers’ appetite for this has been muted as they have found the platform companies intensely control their access to the data. “Google wants to work with more technically advanced advertisers and agencies that are can interrogate the reach and frequency of ads as well as integrate the technology company’s data with advertisers’’’ own first-party data, said one media buyer who is currently using the data clean rooms of Google, Facebook and Amazon.

“The walled gardens control what data gets put into their clean rooms, and they have been known to change it on occasion,” said the media buyer. “Sometimes it’s for good reason because the metric isn’t right, whereas sometimes they change it because the data clean room isn’t a stable environment that lets data parse through it the right way.”

Today, IBD offers eight different products, each designed with a different investor persona in mind and priced accordingly: Leaderboard costs $69.99 per month, which MarketSmith costs upwards of 1,400 per year.

And while Investor’s plans to continue building out products designed to appeal to different kinds of customers, it has also begun focusing on how it can cross-sell the products and generate even more revenue per subscriber. IBD’s core product, IBD Digital, a digital subscription to market analysis, lists of promising stocks, and instructional content, costs $35 per month. But IBD’s average revenue per subscriber is over $500, thanks to the company’s ability to sell different products to the same customer.

Today, subscription revenue accounts for 80% of IBD’s revenues, up from 70% in 2018. Four years ago, the split between subscriptions and advertising was closer to 50-50, IBD president Jerry Ferrara said.

This past year, IBD grew its earnings before interest, taxes, debt and amortization over 80%, Ferrara said. Though some of that growth can be attributed to a fast start for some newer products – IBD Live, a subscription video service launched in October, is on track to generate $2 million in revenue, Ferrara said – much more of it was driven by a focus on cross-selling its customers on multiple paid products.

IBD’s offerings range from visual products such as IBD Live, which costs IBD subscribers $50 per month (a la carte subscriptions to IBD Live are available too, for $99 per month), to research-focused products such as MarketSmith, a stock market research and trading tool that costs $1,400 per year. In total, IBD offers eight different products, and Ferrara said there are plans to launch at least two more in 2020.

To encourage customers to use more of their products, IBD changed its approach to retention and upselling this year. “The first 60 days of anyone’s experience with us is all about coaching them up making sure they understand exactly what they’ve subscribed to,” Ferrara said.

Ferrara said IBD now tries to connect more subscribers to specialists who can talk more about other products in the portfolio. “Once we get someone into one of those, the retention rate [for that customer] basically doubles,” Ferrara said.

After 90 days, different automated marketing campaigns designed to upsell customers begin, depending on which kinds of content or services a customer is using the most.

Cross-selling helps because it’s cheaper to upsell an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one. Julian Thorne, founder of The Big Wheel Consultancy, said that on average, upsell or cross-sell revenue can be five to 15 times cheaper to generate than new subscriber revenue.

Cross-selling also helps with retention, Thorne added, because it typically means that customers are spending more time with a company’s products. “You get double bang for your buck,” Thorne said.

Selling a customer more services also helps because it tends to help with retention, Ferrara said. For that reason, IBD will sometimes offer customers of a high-priced product like MarketSmith a discount on a more affordable product, such as IBD Digital, because it improves retention.

“Those [customers] that have both IBD Digital and Marketsmith are retaining twice as well,” Ferrara said. “For us, it’s worth practically giving something away to keep the high lifetime value product.”

The conversion rate from trials varies, Ferrara said, ranging from 40% to 60%.

 

 

 

A few years back a slew of publishers created standalone millennial-focused financial titles; they have since been folded into other publications or ceased to exist. In October 2016 Vice launched its Vice Money title, which was later condensed into a vertical on Vice.com. In March 2017 Dow Jones launched Moneyish, which has since been merged with MarketWatch. And in February 2017, Time Inc. created a video-first brand Coinage that seems to have disappeared.

Personal finance will be major focus area for Verizon Media’s content growth in 2020, said Joanna Lambert’s Verizon Media’s consumer head. At the start of last year, Yahoo Finance began covering this topic, but her team realized that Yahoo Finance users skewed older and were focused more on investment portfolios than the Gen Zers and millennials that Verizon Media hoped to reach with this content, she added. So in the summer, the idea for a new standalone site came to the fore.

The way to make this new site resonate with younger readers and provide personal finance guidance as a unique value proposition is by breaking down content for readers according to major life events, Lambert said.

Content from Cashay will be shared across Verizon Media’s properties, and video features with Cashay’s editor, Janna Heron, will appear on Yahoo Finance Live.

Web searches, especially on mobile devices, will provide most of the traffic to the site, Lambert said, citing the smartphone as a key tool for readers in this age group. Therefore, the site’s construction has been optimized for search and emphasizes a mobile-friendly design.

“We wanted to make sure that a specific article answered their needs and that there would be other [attractive] content that would surround” that initial search inquiry,” Lambert said. “Success will definitely come from strategizing for SEO.”

The site’s design features a collection of original illustrations, created by the editorial design team after testing three other possible aesthetic styles with members of the targeted demographic.

The more than 400 articles provided by Financial Fitness Group had been previously posted on its website behind a paywall. Cashay’s editorial team will repackage that content to be in the proper editorial style, by reformatting it and providing summaries and new headlines.

While Cashay does not currently have a monetization plan, its managers will eventually focus on bringing in advertising revenue through branded content as well as transactional revenue through lead generation. Yahoo Finance has tested lead generation with its articles, Lambert noted. Cashay readers might be researching various types of credit cards and eventually might want to apply for one, she explained. A lead generation partnership would enable Cashay to earn a commission each time a reader clicks on a link to apply for certain card. “As someone is looking for different tips or education materials, there is an intent to open a bank account or refinance their student loans,” said Lambert.

Advertising is currently the top driver of revenue for Verizon Media, bringing in billions of dollars every quarter), Lambert said. Verizon Media’s subscription business represents the second largest source of revenue, and transactions (the company’s newest business line that includes e-commerce and lead generation) furnish the smallest portion, Lambert said. The goal for the company in the next five years is to make each of these businesses equal contributors.

During Ntwrk’s seven-minute drop, Diageo auctioned off a limited-edition Johnnie Walker whisky decanter with 88rising branding and 88rising sold its own line of clothing. Hosted by Korean American rapper Dumbfoundead, the drop also featured clips of a joint Lunar New Year music festival in Los Angeles, hosted by Johnnie Walker and 88rising on Jan. 24. More than 1,000 attendees attended the live event in Los Angeles.

Johnnie Walker had previously sponsored 88rising’s Head in the Clouds festival in August. When Diageo found out 88rising was collaborating with Ntwrk on a Lunar New Year merchandise drop, Diageo decided to give Ntwrk a try.

“The fact that we were sort of organically working with 88rising and bringing together this rich content story, coupled with exclusive product in a limited-time window, along with the experiential piece — I think it made for a robust communications and engagement strategy,” said Ntwrk president Moksha Fitzgibbons.

Backed by investors that include Foot Locker, Live Nation and Drake, Ntwrk is led by former Complex Media and ComplexCon veterans. Since its October 2018 debut, Ntwrk has run exclusive merchandise drops for companies such as Nike and Adidas.

To date, the Ntwrk app has been downloaded more than 560,000 times around the world, according to Sensor Tower. Every day during its daily drop at 9 p.m. ET, Ntwrk users can buy the showcased products, ranging from art pieces to apparel and sneakers.

“They helped us reach an [Asian-American millennial] audience at a culturally relevant moment in time, Lunar New Year,” said Devin Nagy, Diageo’s director of technology and emerging platforms.

“It’s not often you find a brand that is committed to celebrating culture and … genuine in how they show up,” 88rising’s CEO, Sean Miyashiro, said of Johnnie Walker.

The video content that Ntwrk created with Johnnie Walker for the drop had an 80% completion rate among the viewers who watched it, Fitzgibbons said. (Most viewers watched the drop from beginning to end.) And the conversion rate (or the percentage of the live auction viewers who signed up to win the decanter) was 10%. That rate is much higher than most e-commerce conversion rates, which hover at just 1%. Most auction episodes on Ntwrk draw more than 8 million viewers on social media networks and over 100,000 live viewers; 5% to 10% of Ntwrk viewers make a purchase, he said.

The number of impressions received for the Jan. 28 drop was in the multimillions, and Diageo, Ntwrk and 88rising all promoted it on their respective social media channels, Nagy said.

This particular partnership was “different from a traditional media buy” and represented a “calculated effort to reach a specific consumer in culture,” Nagy observed. It was a “cost-effective way to get into culture at the height of momentum in that time,” he said, adding that Diageo is considering partnering with Ntwrk on future events and drops.

Photos: Diageo