Month: March 2020

McCall confirmed on the broadcaster’s earnings call last week that campaigns are now being booked on ITV’s Planet V platform, adding they will “ramp up in March.”

While Planet V is up and running there are still some kinks ITV needs to iron out before it becomes a proper programmatic platform, according to the four media buyers interviewed for this article.

As it stands, ITV’s commercial execs are actually booking the campaigns through the platform, not media buyers from agencies, said an ad buyer.

Another TV ad buyer at media agency expanded on the point: “Before Planet V can evolve as a platform ITV need to move from manual insertion order buys for the impressions on its streaming service to a process that’s more automated.”

In other words, ITV’s programmatic platform is more an automated way for the commercial broadcaster’s execs to book campaigns on ITV Hub right now than an automated way for agencies to buy those ads themselves.

ITV has told agencies their buyers should be able to use the platform themselves from the second quarter of the year onwards, albeit on a test-and-learn basis, said the TV buyer. During this period, ITV will continue to run workshops and demo days for agencies to learn more about how the platform works, the TV buyer added. From the second half of the year onwards, ITV has said that Planet V will be fully operational, per the TV buyer. At this point, buyers will be able to bring in data from different sources including client first-party data, Barb audience data and viewing data from ITV Hub to plan and buy campaigns, said the TV buyer.

When the commercial broadcaster struck a deal almost a year ago to license Amobee’s ad tech it told agencies that it would get an automated way to buy ads on ITV Hub similar to how they buy display ads.

Unlike those ads, however, ITV isn’t putting its own up for sale in online auctions. Instead, ITV’s commercial team set the price of the impressions on ITV Hub, which then rises depending on what audience data the agency overlays on top, said the TV buyer. This way, ITV gets to have more control over the price its impressions are sold for.

“ITV has always said they sell out their impressions on ITV Hub every month so they don’t need to generate demand through real-time bidding services, said the TV buyer.

Impressions on ITV Hub aren’t cheap at around £35 ($45.55). Were ITV to sell those impressions in an online auction there’s a risk that the market, rather than its commercial team, would dictate the price, which ITV can’t afford to do. Planet V’s pitch to advertisers is predicated on how successful it is at proving that it’s a premium buy. McCall alluded to this on the earnings call last week when explaining the differences between Planet V and rival programmatic offers.

“Sky’s Adsmart offer is quite different to what Planet V offers,”McCall told analysts on the call. “An advertiser could use Adsmart as well as Planet V because what we will offer is premium video-on-demand inventory that agencies could choose to access through our platform.”

ITV has hired Rhys McLachlan as director of advanced advertising to spearhead Planet V’s pitch to agencies. McLachlan was previously head of global TV strategy at Amobee where he helped bed in the ad tech vendor’s technology into ITV’s addressable TV business.

“We do not want to convey a sense of ‘Oh God, here comes another brand on TikTok,’” said Ebbeler. “Brands these days are challenged by trying to connect with people in ways that feel meaningful and authentic. For the past three or four years, we’ve started to embrace that we can have relationships with people and the more we turn [our brand] over to our fans to let them interpret the brand, the more we learn about ourselves.”

The decision to join TikTok followed a realization that the chain was already being mentioned on the platform; the chain has been part of over 7,000 organic videos and mentioned over 10 million times on the platform already. The restaurant chain is also using TikTok creators — including 25 Chili’s employees who were selected out of thousands who were already on TikTok and applied with the company to be part of the program — to help boost awareness of the campaign.

Chili’s CMO Ellie Doty declined to share how much the company is spending on its TikTok strategy. “We’re experimenting with paid social in a number of ways and TikTok is one of those ways,” she said. “It’s not a major portion of our budget right now but it’s enough that we’ll learn from it.”

Over the last year, TikTok has grown rapidly; the app has been downloaded over 1.5 billion times. Ad offerings include the hashtag challenges, in-feed video, brand takeover and branded effect, according to a TikTok pitch deck Digiday previously reported on. The Bytedance-owned app rolled out beta tests of its self-serve ad platform last fall that marketers gave positive remarks to. Still, it’s early days and it’s not as easy as marketers would like it to be to buy ads as they would like it to be. Marketers and agency execs have also said that TikTok needs to expand its team to keep up with demand.

In recent years, Chili’s has shifted its marketing strategy to be more focused on digital channels than it had been. In 2017, the company allocated 94% of its media budget to television. Since then, the chain has been shifting more of that budget to digital and now in fiscal 2020 50% of the budget is allocated for television. The other 50% goes mostly to digital media (between 30-40%) and the rest is spent on out-of-home and radio placements. The company is also developing its own database through a rewards program and dedicating marketing resources to that.

During the first 10 months of 2019, Chili’s spent $51.3 million on media down slightly from the $51.7 million it spent during the same time period in 2018, per Kantar, which doesn’t track social spending and no longer has 2017 budget numbers available.

The approach makes sense to Jessica Bedussi, associate social strategy director at Muhtayzik Hoffer, adding that it helps that the chain was already being talked about on the platform. In using TikTok, Chili’s could reach a new audience, build brand awareness and help sales, said Bedussi, adding that after Chipotle’s hashtag challenge the company saw a boost in sales. “Younger audiences can convince parents to go to the restaurant,” she said. “The strategy makes the brand relevant where maybe they hadn’t been for the audience before.”

At its peak, Brit + Co had more than 100 employees, including a video team of up to 20.

Morin started reducing its staff following what she called a strategic shift, driven by platforms’ algorithm changes, in 2017. Brit + Co laid about a dozen people off in 2018, let several more leave through attrition, then laid off most of its remaining staff in the spring of 2019. Morin said that today, around 30 people work on the site, but would not say how many are full-time employees.

After reducing and restructuring the remaining staff, SEO became the focus, because the site’s evergreen content, which aims to solve “how to” search queries, was already suited for search.

“‘How to’ search queries have always been the most popular on Google,” said Morin, adding that this knowledge influenced her editorial strategy when she was creating her site.

In the first quarter of 2017, Facebook referrals accounted for 40% of all traffic to the site, according to the company’s Google analytics. Now, Facebook and Pinterest together account for approximately 15% to 20% of site traffic depending on the month, while Google referrals have increased from 22% to approximately 75% over the same period. From 2018 to 2019, Brit.Co’s average unique monthly visitors decreased by 16% from 4.8 million to 4 million, according to Comscore.

Outside of direct sales, the company paired evergreen content with programmatic advertising, which has taken the company’s revenue per 1,000 pageviews (RPM) from what was essentially zero to $10, according to Brit + Co president Jill Braff. Advertising still accounts for the majority of its overall revenue — approximately two-thirds, with programmatic accounting for one-quarter to one-third of the advertising business, she said. The rest of the advertising revenue comes from direct-sold display ads, event sponsorships and some branded content.

In an interview on the Digiday podcast in 2018, Morin said she hoped that by this year, there would be a 50-50 split between advertising and consumer revenue. One of the ways that Morin said they’re hoping to increase consumer revenues is by launching a new membership model at some point during the year, though she declined to share a timeline on that.

In order to offset the Facebook drop off and strengthen its search ranking, Brit + Co also leaned into optimizing Pinterest.

Both Morin’s and Brit + Co’s Pinterest pages draw over 10 million monthly viewers, according to their Pinterest profiles, meaning that they had a strong audience, but just needed to optimize the click-throughs to the site. To do this, Morin said her team added more keywords to pins as well as placed more content within the copy of the pins themselves, such as placing more of the recipe in the description box. She said this enabled better engagement performance on the pins, which also yielded better performance on search due to Google sourcing the pins within search results.

“Unlike Facebook, Pinterest is open to Google search. They reinforce one another,” said Braff.

Brit + Co will work to enhance the site’s SEO standing even further by publishing content focused on one topic per week across all of its platforms.

That topic will be determined by its new podcast, “Teach Me Something New with Brit Morin,” where each 60-minute-long episode will feature a person at the top of their field who can talk about a related skill or subject. All of the digital content across its subject verticals will tie into the subject and the company’s e-learning and e-commerce businesses will also highlight online classes and products that fit within the topic.

The goal will be to take a cross platform approach to selling advertising now, said Braff, with an emphasis on the new platforms that the brand is launching, including the podcast. “It’s not about buying our website as much as it is about buying touch points across our networks,” she said.

Because Brit + Co will be switching topics from week to week, it will be important for the publisher’s sales team to focus on the host and Morin’s values when pitching to potential advertisers, said Sean King, evp at Veritone One.

However, if Brit + Co is able to maintain its weekly audience and framework the topic doesn’t so much matter. It’s more about the brand safety of having the loyal and returning audience, King said.

The research shows that six out of 10 senior marketers experienced a higher level of creativity after their business moved traditional agency functions in-house — suggesting creativity is now a useful by-product of a successful in-house marketing set-up.

Analysing the link between creativity and ROI
ROI is often cited as a key reason for brands moving to an in-house model and, for businesses, it’s easy to see why — 58 percent of brands have seen a positive ROI since moving their digital marketing in-house — with just three percent seeing no improvement. In-housing is driving down costs and increasing accountability.

It’s important to note that the drive for better ROI is not just connected to the in-housing trend — it is a constant demand from businesses and in-housing is part of a wider worldwide trend to reduce costs and improve returns.

Yet, how does this link to creativity? Moving creative production in-house has enabled brands to take back control and gain more accountability over creative functions. They have become more confident and trusting of their creative processes.

Calculating what “creativity” means to brands 
Confidence increases when marketers have control, and having control over creative production is enabling brands to set informed and focused creative KPIs. We found that 45 percent of senior in-house marketers are now applying KPIs to measure creativity, and a further 48 percent are experimenting to find the right methodology to do this accurately.

The value of increased creativity from in-housing has not gone unnoticed either. A fifth of senior marketers said that increased levels of creativity — via in-housing — has given them a competitive advantage. Considering that creativity is also cited as a key commodity for ensuring future business growth, this makes for an appealing combination.

Digital transformation is happening 
The lesson for brands? Address transparency issues and reap the rewards. It’s no surprise that, for 39 percent of respondents, it remains the key reason for moving in-house. When combined with the 35 percent who say moving in-house is all about greater control over creativity, it seems to imply that the future of the traditional agency model is under fresh consideration.

However, just moving in-house is not that simple. It’s clear that there are areas where developing an in-house marketing model is more difficult than others. For example, in-house talent is still a big issue, with 27 percent of senior marketers saying that – ironically – in-house teams lack “creative thinking” as a skill.

Complexities surrounding which in-house structures to adopt and how to select the best enabling technologies are also areas where brands struggle. For example, should brands create a separate in-house agency, or develop full in-house digital competencies within marketing teams? Should they start to use a creative management platform, or continue to work with a production agency for display campaigns?

What we found is that marketers are actively seeking assistance. Brands are turning to digital transformation agencies and specialist consultancy firms to guide them in the move to in-house marketing. In fact, 34 percent of those surveyed admit to retaining the services of digital transformation agencies on a monthly basis.

The future of in-house marketing 
Undoubtedly, in-house marketing is evolving and the value it can provide brands is clear. Indeed, the implications of a spike in creativity combined with greater ROI is almost too good to be true. Expect more in-housing in the coming years, alongside higher expectations.

The challenge for brands working in-house will be to prove that the parallel between creativity and ROI is a long-term, sustainable trend — and not a one-off.

If you are interested in learning more about how in-housing affects creativity and ROI you can listen to this webinar discussion from February 2020.