Less BS, More Facts, Some Opinions
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Jay Friedman, president and partner at Goodway Group. During this unprecedented time, it’s important to keep an eye on the future. Where will we be in a few weeks and months, following… Continue reading »
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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Lightening The Load NBC said it will reduce its ad load in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Ad sales chairman Linda Yaccarino wrote a blog post detailing a plan to reduce ads across categories, including news and late-night talk shows, to free more time… Continue reading »
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Experiential agencies are figuring out the art of the pivot.
As the coronavirus pandemic has all but ground in-person gatherings to a halt, experiential agencies have been hit hard, unable to showcase their work at in-person events. Those experiential agencies say they are now starting to reckon with the reality that it’s unlikely for in-person events to pick up again in the next year and now they are working on ways to diversify their businesses to adapt to the new normal. That’s why they are aiming to not only adapt planned events to be digital but working on technology to make them more immersive or working to bring personalization to consumers’ front doors with a direct-to-consumer approach to experiential.
Doing so is necessary for survival for experiential agencies, especially the agencies that had focused solely on in-person events. While agencies say they are being paid for their ideas and working to transition events, the fees aren’t nearly what they would be for a full immersive event as those that are retooling events are doing so with significantly reduced budgets, working with half or a quarter of the budget they had been. Experiential agencies have to “innovate or die,” said Christian Gani, managing director of experiential agency Match Marketing Group.
“There’s no way in six months that we see people wanting to go to a concert venue with 80,000 people,” said Rose Odeh, CMO at experiential agency Optimist when asked how the shop is thinking about the state of experiential in the coming months. “So we’re trying to figure out experiences that still have the energy and impact [of in-person experiences].”
So far, for Optimist, the shop has set in motion a plan for one of its Asia-Pacific clients to pivot what had been a digital experience to a digital platform by gathering people around food for an app client. Odeh declined to share further specifics as the retooled event has not gone to market yet.
Optimist was one of seven experiential agencies interviewed for this piece by Digiday; all said they’re now scrambling to pitch clients on pivoting their events. None of those retooled events have gone live digitally yet so the agencies declined to share specifics on the events.
Even as experiential agencies wait for approvals for adapted events, they say they can’t charge the same fees to set up a livestream on Zoom or any of the other platforms that they may use. The clients that do agree to transitioned events will likely ask agencies to work with reduced budgets to do so. With that being the case the likely revenue hit will be difficult for agencies to manage in the coming months.
“If you’re a brand marketer, four weeks ago your plans were all set,” said Gani. “Now you’re at scramble and survival mode. Clients haven’t been able to opt into at-home experiences yet [but we’re pitching them on that.] … You need a maverick or two on the client side who are willing to take the risk [to adapt an event.] Without that? Forget it.”
Agencies are planning to use platforms like Zoom, Facebook and Instagram Live, Twitch, Google Hangouts and more to get consumers to tune into live events. Beyond simply tuning in, some agencies are working on using digital technology to make the experiences more immersive via augmented reality, virtual reality or potentially having consumers opt into their smart home devices being used as part of an experience.
Rather than having some passively watch a livestream, experiential agency Fake Love is working on technology and pitching clients on ways to engage other “parts of the body to deliver experiences,” said Vida Cornelious, CCO of Fake Love, adding that the shop has been watching consumer behavior and how that’s adapted — like Zoom birthday parties and car parades — to figure out what’s sticking and what the shop should do more of. “One thing we’re working on is the use of facial detection in order to trigger an audio experience.” While the agency was already working on a prototype in the office prior to the coronavirus pandemic, the work to figure out how to use facial recognition to trigger an audio experience has been accelerated.
Figuring out how to do more than a typical webinar or livestream is key, explained Yadira Harrison, co-founder, Verb, adding that the agency has seen 40% of its clients flat-out postpone the experiential marketing they had planned, 20% postponed and exploring digital/virtual event options, 20% pivoted to digital/virtual events and 20% cancel the experiential marketing completely. To do that, the shop is pitching clients on doing live streamed events with brand ambassadors and influencers for a curated series of programming. “If virtual makes sense for your event, remember it’s not just about going ‘Live’ and talking — the event still needs to be creative and have great structure to optimize for a great attendee experience,” said Harrison.
Some agencies are looking to go beyond a digital experience to bring something to consumers’ homes. Match Marketing Group’s Gani said that the shop has been leaning on a case study of a direct-to-consumer inspired experiential campaign it recently ran for a power sports brand. The company delivered the brand’s products to potential customers’ homes for a 24-hour test run rather than having them seek them out in-store. By bringing them to people’s homes, the agency said that sales conversion was 10% overall, which is “10X higher than typical automotive programs that are typically around 1%.”
The agency is pitching clients on doing a DTC experiential campaign like the one it ran for that brand now to help them stand out amid the digital experiential market.
However agencies are pitching clients on retooling experiences, there’s a sense that this move away from relying on in-person events is a necessary diversification of their businesses, especially as going back to normal may not happen any time soon.
“The experiential world has a great opportunity to learn from this and be mindful of what keeps human interaction at the core of what we do but modify to deal with people’s fears,” said Cornelious. “In the future, maybe we’re more personal, more one-to-one with our experiences. Maybe they’re in smaller groups or we have more outdoor activations. Experiences don’t to have in confined spaces [with large groups].”
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The current crisis doesn’t look like anything that’s happened before.
But there are still lessons to be learned from the past. While “time has dulled the pain,” Bryan Wiener, former CEO of 360i and Comscore remembers the 2008 financial crisis well. It was an “incredibly scary time,” Wiener said on the first edition of the Digiday+ Talks series, where industry leaders share how businesses can adapt to the new reality.
During the wide-ranging talk, held virtually exclusively for Digiday+ members, Wiener explained which skills –decisiveness, focus and communication — will make any leader, regardless of how experienced, ready to adapt their companies and come out of the coronavirus pandemic stronger than ever.
With the negatives come some positives. Following the last economic crisis, Wiener said that digital agency 360i was transformed and grew its value eight times from the previous three years. “The opportunity we created out of that crisis was the best change to the company,” he said.
Three key qualities successful leaders need while facing a crisis.
Using different frame working tools and waterfall analyses, determine whether the cuts you make are temporary or will cause structural changes.
When making structural changes, agencies are better positioned to make those changes than media or technology companies.
From a structural standpoint, the changes an agency has to make to its staff during a time of economic crisis are more isolated impacts to production, versus media and tech companies, whose layoffs and furloughs impact the entire output.
Cutting marketing budgets is the easiest thing to do, but could be the most detrimental.
The marketing budget is often the first thing a CFO will cut to zero, as it is not crucial to immediate survival and it does not impact many jobs. Reducing all of that spend, however, is a significant mistake.
Digiday+ members can access full video of the Talk and Bryan Wiener’s slides below:
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As the coronavirus-related lockdowns and social distancing rules continue around the globe, in-person commercial shoots have come to a standstill.
Now advertisers are increasingly turning to production companies with computer-generated imagery, visual-effects and animation capabilities to add the finishing touches to campaigns already in progress and — in some cases — start discussions about creating entirely new ones from scratch.
Production companies told Digiday they have received an increase in inquiries from advertisers and agencies about how they can switch from live action shoots to CGI and animation.
“About half a dozen CMOs” have asked Richard Robinson, managing director of marketing consultancy Xeim Advise, about companies with such capabilities as the coronavirus criss took hold. Robinson said two CGI production companies had also been in touch to remind him of their services in the past two weeks.
Facing a sales vortex and a looming recession, many advertisers have aborted current productions and hit pause on marketing outlay. Like many other businesses, CGI production companies have had to quickly adapt to remote working, ensuring staff have the correct, secure tech at home — and the broadband bandwidth and to withstand the constant back-and-forth sharing of large graphics files.
“Sometimes when you’re stripped of all your normal tools it makes you rethink how you do things,” said Matt Miller, chief executive of the Association of Independent Commercial Producers. “I’m hearing interesting discussions about … remote shooting, directing an actor remotely with just an iPhone in front of them and various ways of setting up a shot and collaborating with others … [that] could have long lasting effects.”
For the most part, the current inbound inquiries are to get a sense of what might be possible in the coming months if live shoots and large gatherings are still out of the question, production companies said. Most of these clients are reluctant about spending in the short-term.
“The biggest role we are playing to [advertising clients] is consultancy, informing them of what’s possible and the ability to think of a different approach to solve a problem,” Mike McGee, chief creative officer at Framestore, a visual effects studio that works on movies, TV and commercials. “We are getting more calls from new clients than ever before.”
CGI production studios are offering a range of options. There are vast undertakings like full computer-generated campaigns with photorealistic characters or using “deep fake” technology to modernize archive footage. For commercials that are reliant on specific talent, some production companies and agencies have floated the idea of sending a green screen to the actor’s home to shoot their lines themselves, with the production company adding the rest after. And there’s the option of switching to animation or stop-motion technology, which don’t require large numbers of people to assemble on set.
The number of options on offer can be overwhelming clients who haven’t experimented with CGI or animation before. Production companies are putting on workshops to guide clients through what’s possible — and also attempting to level-set expectations on budget and timeframes.
“With live action, let’s say it’s a $10,000 shoot. With animation, yes you can do it for $10,000, but realistically it will be $100,000 — you’d have to lower the quality of the animation or change their expectations with the budget they’ve got,” said Toby Wheeler, co-founder at Covert, a remote working production agency that offers VFX, motion design and animation for commercials. The expense can be ameliorated by shooting a single scene, or simply a willingness to lower expectations around the quality of the graphics, production experts said.
Wheeler said his agency’s volume of work is probably down around 20% compared to usual, but that the type of work has changed massively.
“Whereas before we might be adding lasers to a live action shoot, it’s now about making lasers in 3D and adding them to an animation,” Wheeler said.
For many media and marketing companies whittling down expenses in recent weeks, freelance budgets were often the first to be cut. Normally around 50% of freelancers are booked out at any one time, but now there is an “an abundance of availability” across the freelancer network, with only about 10-20% currently booked, Wheeler said. Covert is “very much still recruiting” and hired an additional freelancer this week, with more to follow next week, he said. (Both Framestore and MPC currently have a freeze on recruitment.)
Brave Bison, a social video company that produces its own shows as well as content for brands, is exploring the use of stop animation and 8-bit animation. In the meantime, the filters available for anyone to use on apps like TikTok and Snapchat have come in handy.
“We can be more creative at home — that’s solved a lot of issues,” said Brave Bison managing director for publishing Ben Sinden. “If this happened three years ago it’d be very different.”
Even for advertisers desperate to continue to push through the current challenges and produce their ads, with little visibility as to how the pandemic will play out, it may be difficult to strike a tone that will be empathetic with the mood of the viewer when it airs.
“By now the Christmas scripts would start going out,” said Jonathan Davies, managing director at Moving Picture Company, a visual effects and production studio. “No-one knows what tone Christmas will be this year.”
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The current quarantine period may lead to a baby boom in nine months time. It will also spur a surge in clip shows. As TV and video producers flock to formats that can be easily produced remotely and turned around quickly if TV networks’ and streaming services’ programming pipelines dry up, clip shows — think “America’s Funniest Home Videos” or Comedy Central’s “Tosh.0” — that rely primarily on user-generated videos and archival footage have become prized, so-called “corona-proof” programming.
“In three to six months, there’s going to be a huge glut of clip shows,” said an executive at a media company that operates a TV production business. “The part of the company that sells a lot of TV productions, that’s what everyone is asking for right now.”
In preparation for the production shutdown, many TV and video producers raced to stockpile as many episodes as they could. But less than a month later and with no certainty as to when the quarantine will end, some TV networks and streaming services are looking to line up contingency plans and seeing clip shows as one option to fill their programming gaps.
“Already when you talk to some of those companies, they’re acknowledging they’re going to have holes, even as early as Q3 and Q4,” said the media executive.
Jukin Media has similarly observed a growing interest in clip-driven programming. The entertainment company acquires user-generated videos that it licenses to others, including production companies, TV networks and advertisers, and also uses to create its own original shows. Following the lockdown, Jukin has seen a fivefold increase in inbound requests to license its video clips, said the company’s CEO Jonathan Skogmo.
Jukin has also received more interest in the original shows it produces using those clips. The company is currently in production on two half-hour clip shows for TV, one of which is a pilot and the other being a series order signed prior to the pandemic, and it has “a handful of pitch meetings this week” with broadcast networks and streaming services, Skogmo said. “We’re lucky that we can spin up an existing format pretty quickly and get in production very quickly,” he said.
While producers flock to clip shows, some are wary of how long the current market may last. TV networks and streamers may be seeking out this programming today, but their interest may change once the outbreak is contained and physical production can resume. Additionally, ad-supported networks and streamers may find that clip shows are insufficient for maintaining advertisers’ interest.
“If it’s more short-form, it could possibly work, but if it’s a half-hour clip show, I don’t know that that’s what clients are interested in,” said a TV ad buyer.
Conversely, if the pandemic leads to a recession, some TV networks may prefer to cut clip shows from their own programming libraries rather than pay for unproven series. “If you’ve made 200 episodes of ‘Diners, Drive-ins and Dives,’ you can do two seasons of Guy [Fieri]’s greatest burgers without having to do anything,” said an entertainment executive.
But those concerns are made somewhat less pressing by the present demand for clip shows. The potential for an oversupply of clip shows “is something we’re not even thinking about right now because there’s such high demand for these types of shows,” Skogmo said.
“We have a deal at Netflix. They pay us to bring them material, and I’m hopeful they don’t force majeure their deals.”
— TV and film producer
As the live sports hiatus continues, TV ad buyers are beginning to worry about advertiser demand piling up and networks not being able to accommodate it.
TV ad buyers have been talking with TV networks about how to redirect the ads that were meant to run against the sporting events that have been postponed. But, many advertisers have decided they would rather wait to air their campaigns once play resumes, according to agency executives. Problem is, the networks don’t know if they will be able to satisfy all of that pent-up demand, especially if leagues like the NBA, NHL and MLB return with shortened seasons.
“When we’re talking to Disney or ViacomCBS or NBCU, some of them have said, ‘If there are condensed seasons, we probably can’t even take the [the full amount of ad dollars] you probably had,’” said one agency executive.
300,000*: Number of people in the U.S. and Canada that downloaded Quibi on its April 6 launch day, according to mobile app store analytics firm Sensor Tower.
700,000*: Number of times Quibi was downloaded in the U.S. and Canada on its April 6 launch day, according to mobile app analytics firm App Annie.
* Yes, the numbers are wildly different. No, I don’t know why and neither does a spokesperson for App Annie. I’m waiting on Sensor Tower.
If art is supposed to reflect life, then how long until scripted shows start to reflect the fact that, right now more than ever, life is being lived on screens? Not long at all.
Next month, CBS will air an episode of its legal drama “All Rise” that incorporates Zoom, FaceTime and even WebEx to tell the story of a virtual trial, according to Variety.
The producers of “All Rise” are not the first to tell a fictional story through the lens of what appears on people’s computer and phone screens. Here is a list of some other examples:
Despite all that, this genre — which Snap has dubbed “screen life” — hasn’t shaken its reputation for being considered gimmicky, which may put off others from seeing if they can do more with the form.
As someone who actually enjoys this type of programming and would like to see more shows capture the parts of people’s lives that don’t play out in the physical world, I hope that changes. With so many creative types holed up at home and looking for outlets that extend beyond TikTok dances and trick shot designs, maybe it will.
Quibi’s initial slate of shows doesn’t remake TV for the phone:
Read more about Quibi here.
Why AT&T tapped Jason Kilar to make sense of WarnerMedia:
Read more about Jason Kilar here.
Creators increase production volume to offset ad price declines:
Read more about creators here.
It took a global pandemic, but Facebook Live is back:
Read more about Facebook Live here.
At the center of the streaming wars has been the question of how many streaming services are people willing to pay for. That’s a much bigger question today — and the answer is likely lower — as millions of people have lost their jobs because of the coronavirus pandemic, according to CNBC. Even as companies like HBO and Quibi temporarily make their programming available for free, the pandemic-related job losses will likely lead people to be more discerning with their subscription dollars. On the flip side, ad-supported streamers are also facing a money crunch. So of course, this situation could serve to benefit big, free entertainment platforms like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
Clip shows aren’t the only options for TV networks fearing a scarcity of shows. ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC are looking at all kinds of options, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Those options range from shows on sibling networks or streaming services, picking up international series and repackaging old episodes with new content.
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A global crisis is enough to make rival companies choose unlikely bedfellows. Last week, the commercial news division of the BBC, BBC Global News, teamed up with CNN and Euronews. The three entities are setting aside $50 million worth of advertising inventory, with a combined reach of 800 million people, of free ad space for public health messages.
“That’s something positive that we can do. There’s a role for commercial players like us and it’s important that everyone steps up and tries to do their bit,” said BBC Global News CEO, Jim Egan.
The global, insatiable appetite for news is showing no signs of abating as the coronavirus grinds on. Egan discusses the organization’s first Quibi show, detrimental keyword blocking and what behaviors will endure post-coronavirus. The interview has been condensed and edited.
We saw a record-breaking month in January and March has been absolutely huge for us. We’re up to nearly 180 million browsers for the month. Most of last year we were just under 100 million. Because we’re a global news entity having a story that is genuinely global where no part of the world is unaffected has allowed us to bring to bear the BBC resources in places like Asia and Sub Saharan Africa.
We’ve had some reactive innovation, a section called “coronavirus kindness,” for example, which focuses on more positive stories. We’ve also had planned launches, like the BBC show on Quibi, which launched yesterday in the U.S. and Canada. Because the production team is all now working remotely, we were just getting ready to release the show yesterday when [U.K. prime minister] Boris Johnson had to move into intensive care so that was a very very rapid last-minute update to the story, but it was good to get the first show out.
We’re not immune from what everyone’s experiencing on the advertising side which has been quite sudden really, really pronounced. I’m hopeful it won’t go on forever but it’s very, very turbulent. We are just starting to see some positive sentiment come back in China. Some Chinese tourism clients are starting to get back into the market. People in the travel sector, they want to make sure that they’re really on the front edge of people starting to travel again.
Everyone has to be a lot more flexible in an environment like this. It’s more about giving people a general sense of direction rather than a specific sense of destination. You can’t say that all bets are off and we’re going to make up as we go along. It’s important for leaders to try to maintain a sense of where we’re heading while planning for a range of different scenarios. CEOs are having to be a lot more flexible right now than they would probably prefer.
We’re running a range of different scenarios. There’s probably a bit of pent up demand out there and it will improve quite quickly. In the U.S., the very initial glimmers of the situation improving in Europe led to a more than 7% rise on the Dow Jones. Markets want to bounce back. That’s why we’re looking at short-term measures to get us through a difficult phase, rather than anything approaching a very substantial downsizing. That would be unwise strategically because we would then not be in a position to capitalize on sentiment and money starting to move back.
Globalization will not come to an end as a consequence of this. I think there will be a more pronounced sense that the phase of economic nationalism that we have been living through recently doesn’t really hold up in the face of a genuinely global crisis that’s affecting everybody.
Brand purpose. Some brands get the right side of this, and others get the wrong side. The most obvious example in the U.K. right now is the Premier League and how major high-profile football players have got themselves tied up in knots on what the response should be.
We probably will end up changing our habits, not just temporarily but permanently. How many people are working at home and actually saying, “You know what, I don’t miss that commute?”
The travel sector will return but that may take longer. I’m not sure how quickly everyone will rush out to sit with 500 strangers in a metal tube at 35,000 feet. We will be conditioned slightly differently, different things will matter to us. And a few things will change permanently and I think we need to be very, very alive as publishers to the changing consumption patterns.
It’s important to be sensitive. With keyword block listing, it’s probably not very helpful for us to be lecturing and hectoring brands, telling them what they need to do and that they have a civic responsibility to save the news industry. Those brands themselves are under enormous pressure. Our primary job is to be sensitive to the way that brands are trying to respond to what’s going on to use both our own editorial and commercial judgment to help them. The more that brands can understand that things aren’t just going to go back to normal, but some things, like consumer preferences, are going to change forever.
Traditional rules and restrictions about getting processes underway are being put to one side. We had our own experience last week with CNN and Euronews.
I’m not sure this is the beginning of something more between us, Euronews and CNN: brands want to have a clear sense of differentiation in publishers. In a crisis situation like this, there is a sense that some things are much more important, and some other things don’t matter. So our ability to work together on important initiatives, and seeing an improved sense of that, is really good.
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