Month: March 2020

The debut episode of “COVID-19” featured ABC News’s chief medical correspondent Jennifer Ashton answering audiences’ questions about coronavirus after having attended an off-record meeting with Vice President Mike Pence, who is overseeing the federal government’s response to the outbreak. Ashton fielded questions including whether it is safe to fly, whether hand sanitizer can combat coronavirus and whether or not the disease affects children.

Those questions underscore the urgency for news outlets to provide audiences with up-to-date information regarding coronavirus has accelerated as the number of cases internationally and domestically have swelled in recent weeks. Not only is there a regular outpouring of information, but people have struggled to ascertain what information is accurate. And that is why news media companies’ streaming services have become vital outlets.

“This story is the perfect example of why it makes sense for us to serve our viewers with always available local coverage as well as always available national and international coverage,” said Christy Tanner, evp and gm of CBS News Digital.

As the coronavirus has spread in the United States, CBS News Digital has begun to distribute on its CBSN streaming service’s national feed its local owned-and-operated and affiliate stations’ streams, such as CBSN Los Angeles, “to provide more in-depth coverage to our national viewers,” Tanner said. It has also used the service to cover multiple events simultaneously. For example, on March 3, CBSN provided two live national streams, one to cover a World Health Organization press conference on the disease and the other to have its White House correspondents discuss how the the federal government is responding to the outbreak.

“What we have seen people want is the most up to date information about whether the virus is impacting their community and what they can do to protect themselves and prevent transmission,” Tanner said.

While news media companies’ streaming services may be best equipped to provide news as it breaks, news outlets have also needed to ensure their on-demand programming reflects current information. E.W. Scripps Company’s Newsy produces short news headline roundups several times a day that it airs on its 24/7 streaming channels and inserts in its connected TV apps’ autoplaying video playlist. As coronavirus news breaks, the company has adjusted the timing of the roundups’ distribution so that if information breaks at 8:30 a.m. ET, a roundup that had been scheduled for 9 a.m. ET could be moved up to go out as soon as the roundup could be updated, said Ahmed Al-Kalby, director of OTT programming at Newsy.

In addition to covering coronavirus news as it breaks, news publishers are using their digital properties to identify the issues related to the disease that are of most interest to audiences and to delve deeper into covering those issues than their TV networks’ time constraints may allow.

After seeing people leave comments on its Facebook page mentioning how organized South Korea has been in handling the outbreak, CNN produced a 10-minute episode for its daily Facebook Watch show “Go There” documenting South Korea’s drive-through testing procedure, said Cullen Daly, executive producer of digital productions at CNN. As of press time, that video has received more than 4 million views since being uploaded on March 3.

Through digital platforms like Facebook, “we can tell what is trending, what people are interested in hearing more about, and it isn’t necessarily what people are interested in domestically or on television,” Daly said.

Reporters’ first-person video diaries seem to be especially resonant among digital audiences, as CNN found soon after the first coronavirus case in the U.S. was detected in January. One of the network’s international correspondents was already in Wuhan, China, and shot a first-person video for “Go There” documenting what life was like on the ground in the Chinese epicenter of the outbreak. Within 24 hours of being posted on Jan. 24, that episode had received more than 30 million views and since then has received more than 207 million views.

While NBC’s “Nightly News with Lester Holt” only affords 22 minutes for NBC News to recap the day’s news, its 24/7 streaming service NBC News Now enables the news division to “take some of the same reporters who may be producing [a news roundup-style segment] for ‘Nightly’ and do something to go far deeper,” said Janelle Rodriguez, svp of editorial at NBC News. NBC News has asked its Beijing correspondent Janis Mackey Freyer to shoot personal video diaries, such as the scene inside a local Starbucks and interviews with armed security guards stationed outside apartment buildings, while reporting her stories for the nightly TV broadcast.

“Literally I just said, ‘Just take your iPhone every day and let’s see what we get,’” Rodriguez said. “That’s the kind of thing that’s both really interesting and informative and textural and great reporting, but on streaming you have the time and the space to do something like that.”

Is the coronavirus changing how consumers interact with the brand?
Definitely. We’ve seen a big, drop in demand, really in the last week. As the news has picked up, it’s gotten a little bit worse. It’s more on the conversion side. People still engage with the ads, those rates have held up pretty well, but they’re less ready to get things delivered to their homes and to take action [to buy our product]. It’s been like a 15% drop and there’s no other real explanation other than coronavirus wariness. Maybe the elections didn’t help but there’s definitely some hesitancy from consumers to go buy something new right now.

Explain the 15% drop.
That’s of the people we get to our site, [there’s now a 15% drop in] how many of them convert. It’s been about a week or so.

So now that you’ve seen the drop, are you reevaluating how you are spending media dollars right now? What does it look like? Fewer digital ads?
We’re cutting back a bit. We had really aggressive goals for March so I think it’ll definitely put a kink in those plans. We’re pulling back on our top spending campaigns by about 10% right now to ease the pain. If it were to get much more severe we would consider pausing out some of our lower intent, top-of-funnel brand awareness and prospecting campaigns first and focus on retargeting campaigns for efficiency for the time being. We’re not quite there but that would be the order of operations. The awareness campaigns get cut first because it’s obviously not going to have the same kind of return in the short-term and I don’t know that you want to be exposing people to a new brand right now if they’re not in a buying mindset.

Are you planning to put that money on hold entirely? Are you going to reallocate it to spend it later in the year?
We’re not there yet — nobody really knows where the virus is going or how much it’s actually going to affect people’s day-to-day lives — but if we were to stretch this out another week or two weeks we would likely reallocate towards the fourth quarter, which is really strong for us. We would not give up but there’s sometimes there’s nothing you can do, there are things that happen like a recession or a viral outbreak, that you have to just reposition and it’s better to reserve the dollars for a time you hope the conditions will be better.

Do you feel like they’re not in a buying mindset right now?
To us, that’s what the drop in purchases indicates. They have other concerns. Maybe they’ve spent money stocking up on supplies. Or they’re just generally wary. The uncertainty in the short-term makes people more likely to conserve cash. That’s our assumption. You can never know for sure. But [out drop] does seem to coincide pretty tightly with when the American media and American public took notice of this virus and started to make early preparations with the stories of lines in Costco and CVS.

Are you talking to other buyers about contingency plans?
There are different Slack and Facebook groups where everybody is talking at different levels about it. The truth is, there’s not a lot anybody can do. You can try to pull back and reposition money but everyone is of the mindset that it’s too early to say. You kind of just have to survive it and preserve the media dollars for when they could be used more efficiently later. There’s always a threshold. Presumably, if you pull back 20% to 30% you had some fat on the bone that you could cut off and not lose a ton of volume and pick up some efficiencies. That said, nobody knows how bad this could get if we reach true pandemic status. I don’t think anyone is ready for this to go full outbreak-style panic in America.

Where are you actually pulling back? I know you said brand awareness but does that include pulling back on TV?
We haven’t changed our TV schedule. TV and other offline channels are booked so far out in advance that they don’t lend themselves to quick cuts. We feel better about pausing down certain Facebook stuff more than anything else. A 15% jump in cost is not good but it’s not going to cripple us either so we can afford to weather the storm better than less well-funded brands can. That’s a huge benefit to having raised a lot of money. If you get into a situation where we’re seeing 30% drops then we would change our planning side on the longer-tail channels.

Are there other ways that this has impacted the marketing other than this drop and slowing down a bit?
Not yet. Everything we do is pretty evergreen. It’s not like there’s some major campaign that we’ve cut or anything like that.

You’re a venture-backed DTC company. Are you planning ways to talk to backers at all about if you’re not able to meet short-term goals due to this situation?
There’s clearly just some level of discomfort among the American public in terms of buying things right now. That’s fine for one month. All of our backers would be fine to say, “What a weird month with coronavirus.”

Once you stretch that into a bad quarter or a bad five or six months, then it becomes a much bigger problem. But for the time being, no one is really panicking because there’s nothing you can do. If it goes on long enough it will be the exact same strategy as weathering a recession: You start reserving capital, you bring down acquisition targets and you make sure the business can stay afloat even if it can’t grow as quickly and then you live to fight another day.

Does it make you nervous at all?
Sure, it makes us nervous. If a recession were to come on this fast it would be not a 2008-style shock but a real shock to the whole system from top to bottom. It’s buyers, consumers, everyone in between. But everyone should’ve been planning for this for the last 18 months. Everyone has been saying a recession is coming and to be ready for it. You should have enough cash in the bank and a plan to deal with if demand drops 50%. We’re ready with those contingencies. It would be drastic. It would slow growth and be bad for the company in the short-term but we would survive. Markets always rebound. If the coronavirus shock is just getting people to think about what they would do during a recession, it’s probably already too late.

Here’s what we learned:

What comes after the cookie crumbles
Google in January set the two-year timeline for the end of third-party cookies on the web. While Google has invited publishers and other members of the ad community to check its Privacy Sandbox proposals for what might replace third-party cookies, what comes next is unclear. “There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for everybody,” said Jessica Barrett, director of programmatic and commercial innovation at the Financial Times. “It’s going be tough times for the industry.”

It can often pay to be creative in a crisis. Casper Andersen, programmatic and ad tech specialist at Berlingske Media and George Bouras, programmatic platforms and data manager at IDG, suggested that publishers should use this pivotal moment to reassert their points of differentiation in the eyes of advertisers and readers.

“I see this as an opportunity … for publishers, at least, to maybe move the market in another direction that’s not purely based on audience or demographic data, because it’s not the whole picture anyway,” said Andersen.

Perhaps that results in publishers making more of a play around context and creative formats. The opportunity could be around cranking up the first-party data strategy — attendees spoke about growing their newsletter businesses and making a land-grab for email addresses as the core identifier in the process, for example. Brand uplift studies could also prove useful — showing the effectiveness on advertising on a publisher’s site versus elsewhere on the web — but the economics need to be right. At the moment, the cost of such studies is largely swallowed by the publisher, one attendee pointed out.

The balancing act between subscriptions and ads
Sometimes revenue diversification strategies — particularly those focused on growing reader revenue — can leave traditional ad sales teams feeling hard-done by.

“The more successful we are with signups, the less successful we are with our traditional business,” said one publishing executive in Tuesday’s town hall session. “I feel very strongly that the paid experience should be the same.”

Execs speaking in the town hall session on Tuesday said that often people in publishing wrongly just assume consumers who pay more for content expect not to see many ads — received wisdom usually based on no empirical evidence. You buy a newspaper, you still see ads; you subscribe to cable, you see tons of commercials. Testing is key. Subscribers only tend to complain about the ads when they’re breaking the site or your app anyway, noted one attendee.

Still, as many publishers switch to subscription-first models, that can mean a lack of product resource for the advertising side of the business, said one publishing exec. And advertisers need to feel as though the publisher recognizes advertising is important too, though they may need to be re-educated on the difference between traffic and a valuable audience. Overall it’s about working towards the same goal and the lifetime value of a user can be a very useful metric here, attendees said.

GDP…R we doing the right thing?
Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation has been enforceable since 2018, yet still not everyone is on the same page about how to comply. Global publishers must also contend with California Consumer Privacy Act compliance and a raft of other privacy legislation set to roll out in other countries.

As discussed in the town hall sessions, some publishers who attempted to follow the most strict interpretations of GDPR and CCPA lost out on revenue versus competitors who took more of a “wait and see” approach.

Publishers shouldn’t see dicey short-term revenue grabs as an excuse to play fast and loose. Some attendees discussed how the ICO, the U.K.’s data protection authority, has been stepping up warnings that it is intending to “utilize its wider powers” against non-compliant ad tech. Nobody wants to be the first publisher to get the knock on the door from the enforcement team.

“I think their message to everybody was, ‘If you’ve just been ignoring this and haven’t taken any steps, we’re coming after you,” said the FT’s Barrett.

New product development
Product executives are fast becoming the new rockstars at publishing companies. Three years ago, The Economist had two product managers. Now it has a team of 30 in that department, said Remy Becher, vp of product at The Economist, which has been busily building products ranging from a commuter podcast, English/Chinese article audio translations and a forthcoming coronavirus newsletter.

On the audio front, The Economist is working with a car manufacturer to get access to satnav data in order to determine the correct length of audio content to serve to the driver — news snippets for a short trip to the shops, or a longer feature for a bigger commute. Further down the line, the Economist is also looking at potentially using Amazon’s Alexa assistant and other connected speakers as a customer service channel for subscribers, Becher said.

Later in the week, Boris Trupcevic, CEO of Croatian media company 24 Sata, spoke candidly about his company’s attempts to build out new products that ultimately failed — from a news-TV station and an “internet supershop” called Mondo, to a prepaid mobile network 24Mobi and even branded food and drinks products. 24 Sata turned things around by changing “everything,” including bringing on a new raft of recruits into roles that previously didn’t exist and reinventing its portfolio of brands.

European radio company Global has also been rethinking how its brands can reach audiences online. Charles Ubaghs, Global audience development director, ran through the company’s “newsfeed first” strategy, where it aims to compete not just against other media brands but “someone’s entire life” in order to reach them on social channels. It’s why Global launched as a Popbuzz, an internet culture brand, not connected to the names of any of its radio stations, as a stealth product in 2014. Popbuzz now reaches 120 million social media users, including 2 million on Snapchat and 200,000 on TikTok, Ubaghs said.

More registered users will let Reach tailor content, products and ads to people based on behavior and demographics like location to increase display advertising yields.

“The old trope that free content is not valuable or in demand, we just don’t believe in that,” said Reach CEO Jim Mullen. “We’re seeing huge demand, so much so that we’re asking people for one piece of information and we will send them what they are interested in.”

Reach publishes a lot of content — around 3,000 articles a day — registering an email address means it will send people tailored content in topics like football, parenting, travel, pets or the environment. Reach’s local news aggregator In Your Area has 2.5 million users sharing their address for local content, although it doesn’t share how many people have registered an email address for that service.

When a reader signs up to a newsletter, uses In Your Area and the app, Reach will gather data like reader interests, address, salary and house value estimates, commuting preference, device and details like intent or hobbies.

This additional information opens up a number of revenue avenues. Reach is banking on more relevant content increasing readers’ time on the page. More personal data will improve audience segmentation, particularly in a post-cookie world. Both of these will help grow display advertising yields. New content verticals will lead to more sponsored content opportunities. Outside of advertising, the publisher forecasts that registrations will grow revenue through premium app purchases, affiliate revenue and business-to-business ventures. Mullen was unable to detail exactly what the revenue diversification split will be by 2022.

“Their argument is that 2% of their audience is registered compared to 90% of tech companies, so their 7 million aim — roughly 15% of their total audience — is ambitious for a tight timescale,” said Alice Pickthall, senior media analyst at Enders Analysis.

Having a patchwork readership across over 25 brands is less valuable than on one title, writes media analyst Colin Morrison. Like all publishers, Reach would struggle to offer the same granular audience targeting as the platform walled gardens do.

“Yields are small,” said media analyst and senior adviser at Trillium Partners Alex DeGroote, “local display doesn’t bring with it the big budgets that nationwide funnels like Facebook will.”

Mullen is bullish on the prospect of local news, saying “another trope we want to bust is that regional news is dead. It’s not.”

Reach has been accused of previously “sleepy” digital strategies, leaving the company more reliant on increasing cover prices of its print product while the circulation has fallen, according to Morrison. Popular national title the Mirror has increased its price by 75% and lost 50% of sales over the last five years. And years of chasing digital advertising revenues has created a chasm between the publisher and its readers, the same ones it now needs to ask for registration details.

Mullen, appointed in August 2019 and former CEO of gambling firm Ladbrokes, brings digital marketing expertise. The early signs of success emerged in its earnings report last week. Revenue for 2019 was £702.5 million ($908.5 million), 5% down year-on-year. Although the £153.4 million ($198.4 million) operating profit was up, advertising was 19% down. And the majority of revenue still comes from print with only £107 million ($138.4 million) from digital, but the growth from last year is more encouraging.

“Fifteen percent digital revenue intuitively feels low,” said DeGroote. “But they are starting from an immense heritage in print products, 17% year-on-year digital growth rate is a healthy performance.”