Month: March 2020

Meredith finished constructing the platform last year, but today it only powers 65% of Meredith’s editorial brands. The rest of the titles will be on it by the end of June, Levene said. That will make it easier to trace whether reading an article on one Meredith publication leads to purchasing a product from an article on another publication, Hardy said.

One example of this is a partnership with Scotts Miracle Grow for a direct-to-consumer quarterly plant subscription product called Knock Knock starting at $65 per delivery. The service originally launched in May and Levene said that by collecting data from Meredith’s consumers, her team learned that millennial consumers were showing a great interest in houseplants, so they used their product lab to create a subscription service tied to plants. Then, the team went to Meredith’s partners to find one that could take on the fulfillment side of the business.

Meredith is the second largest product licensor in the world behind Disney, according to Levene and its licensing business is 10% of the national media group’s overall revenue EBITDA. The affiliate portion of its business has also been growing at close to 100% year-over-year.

To get still more credit — and more revenue — from those transactions, last February, the company acquired a promo codes business called Promo Codes for You by purchasing Linfield Media for $16.6 million.

“What a lot consumers were doing was going off [site] to see if there was a coupon. That actually breaks the link and we were not getting credit for driving that person to that retailer. So by having our own promo codes and building and buying that business, we closed the loop,” said Hardy.

While Levene said that her team is not looking at licensing its CMS platform or data platform, as that’s not part of Meredith’s business model, the idea is to provide access to the consumer insights to partners in order to strengthen its advertising opportunities. The company has already taken a step towards doing this with a rollout of new ad units in January that target based on a variety of content viewed on Meredith sites and time and location data.

Because social platforms like Instagram have a significant amount of data about their users and brands are seeing more and more of their sales coming through those ads, Michael Priem, CEO of Modern Impact, said that it’s “putting a lot of pressure on the publishers to do a better job about understanding the customers that are interacting on their platforms.”

To do this, he said that publishers have to invest in their marketing technology and make hyper-curated ads for their direct audiences in order to hold the customer through the funnel.

“If the ad unit is the currency, the natural resource is the data, and we’re not going to make decisions without the data,” said Priem.

“Our newsletter strategy is very content-driven,” said Ben Witte, CEO of Recess, adding that the company is hopeful that its brand voice in the newsletter and on its Instagram will differentiate it in the marketplace to make consumers choose Recess over other CBD beverage brands and drive e-commerce sales. “We’re not saying, ‘Buy Recess.’ We’re creating content that people enjoy and share with their friends and then if they want to buy Recess after [reading it] that’s how [sales] happen.”

Recess is available in over 4,000 retailers currently. Witte said in late April Recess will roll out its own editorial website as well as collaborations with other content partners. At the same time, the company will add new flavors, merchandise, update its website and also put on an event. Witte declined to share more details for the forthcoming editorial launch or other additions.

A media and content strategy has become important for startup brands, both DTC and retail. Brands like Away, Dollar Shave Club and Casper have all created editorial properties of varying success. What makes Recess’ approach different is that those companies were also using paid advertising to get attention. With the current regulatory environment around marketing CBD products, where CBD brands are either restricted or banned from advertising on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Google that helped other DTC brands grow, the content becomes a much more important strategy for a brand like Recess.

The advice column has helped the company drive consumer engagement with its newsletter. Over the holidays, Recess asked subscribers to send their present wishlists in to potentially receive something from the company and got over 350 responses. Another prompt, a spot the difference game, generated more than 500 responses with the answer. The content is crafted by the company’s in-house creative team. Recess also works with a creative agency, Day Job, as well as an email and analytics shop, Seller Projects.

The content strategy makes sense to CEO of Sharma Brands, Nik Sharma, as email and editoral content created by brands that is not created specifically for conversions but to be engaging can help grow the brand. “Driving traffic to content is cheaper than driving consumers to a landing page [for sales],” said Sharma. “Content that is really good drives shares as well as generates awareness and interest without the company paying the cost of Facebook ads to do it.”

It’s unclear when Recess will begin spending on paid advertising; Witte said that when the company does so will depend on the regulatory environment around CBD advertising. That said, as the 35-person company builds its content and media properties it will likely begin putting paid advertising behind it.

Other than the email newsletter, the in-house creative team works to generate new content for the company’s Instagram feed, which has over 52,500 followers, each day. The company isn’t yet crafting content for Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat or Twitter but will eventually, per Witte.