Less BS, More Facts, Some Opinions
Bacardi CMO John Burke has been in lockdown at his home in London for the past two months. And his challenge is to figure out how to bring people together to relax and enjoy a drink … when people can’t gather together or, seemingly, relax. There are opportunities to reach consumers and be a part… Continue reading »
The post Social Distancing With Friends: Bacardi CMO Jon hn appeared first on AdExchanger.
“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 Bruno Gralpois, co-founder and principal at Agency Mania Solutions. We are all too familiar with the chain reaction produced when one event sets off a series of inevitable events. Today’s economic… Continue reading »
The post The Domino Effect: Bracing For Impact appeared first on AdExchanger.
In-housing marketing is growing.
Digiday’s quarterly benchmarking survey found that about 83% of marketers are managing their marketing either mostly in-house or completely in-house. That’s up from the 55% of marketers six months ago who said the same.
60% of brand marketers surveyed by Digiday this quarter said they were managing their marketing functions “mostly” in-house, while 23% said they were managing it entirely in-house.
No brands said they were using agencies for all tasks, while only 5% said they were “mostly” using agencies. 13% said it was half-half.
Here is what people are managing entirely inhouse: 80% said it was brand strategy, 55% said it was social media, while 57% said it was media planning and strategy. Coming in lower were programmatic and traditional ad buying, as well as creative production.
But even those, many are managing partly-in house.
The post Digiday Research: Over half of brands say they handle marketing ‘mostly’ with internal resources appeared first on Digiday.
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. TV Pullback Television ad revenues will drop 12% this year, according to MoffettNathanson – a loss the research firm WARC pegs at $25.5 billion. Despite a surge in viewership, with people stuck at home, advertisers have slashed budgets by more than 40%. Lowe’s, for… Continue reading »
The post Advertisers Cooling On TV Spots; Comcast Spins Off Blockgraph Into JV appeared first on AdExchanger.
As publisher events have been forced online, they are becoming more entrenched with other parts of the business, particularly subscriptions.
Over the last few months, virtual events have been used as an incentive for people to subscribe to publisher paid-for programs. Since launch in April, Verizon-owned TechCrunch has hosted 10 members-only investor Q&A series events, Extra Crunch Live, via its subscription tier, Extra Crunch. Most of its 2020 events are for Extra Crunch members. Extra Crunch subscriptions have increased by 600% year-on-year, the company said. Elsewhere, publishers have moved more events online. Bloomberg Media’s newest virtual event, Bloomberg Reports which focuses on the impact of coronavirus, helps attract new subscribers. One subscription publisher is seeing strong subscriber participation in its virtual events series, many of who had never been to its in-person events before.
“With the huge success we’ve had with virtual events — over a quarter of a million attendees have tuned in from over 110 countries — we’ve realized that a significant portion of our attendees were not current NYT subscribers,” said Jessica Flood, managing director, NYTLive. “We are working to engage that group over the long term in a variety of ways, including a new suite of subscriber-only virtual events launching in the coming weeks.”
The link between in-person events and subscriptions has always been there but more dimly. Often, existing subscribers have exclusive or early access to events that get them closer to editorial teams or analysts. Online, this access can be done efficiently and at scale.
Financial publishers especially have been early on the scene, building exclusive webinars and digital events to create investor communities.
For Bloomberg Media, a key benefit of its All Access subscription tier is that, as an added benefit, subscribers can attend some premier, in-person global events. With physical events on pause, virtual events are a substitute for subscribers and the broader audience to get closer to journalists via Q&As and polling.
Despite the chunk left in publisher pockets at a lack of in-person events, the wide-scale move to digital means they are more measurable. For advertisers sponsoring publisher in-person events, the model has been more proven over the years but the objectives and outcomes more at risk of being siloed.
“Publishers are starting to understand and rethink the way they engage with brands, it’s no longer by channel or by tactic,” said Tessa Barron, vp of marketing at event platform ON24. “Making digital part of everyone’s responsibility is more of an organizational issue right now, those are the conversations I’m having and the educational journey we’re on with our publisher customers.”
To counter this, publishers have re-organized and set up task forces. Since mid-March, in order to pinpoint the qualities from in-person events that can be transferred online, The New York Times created a cross-departmental team of six staffers from different departments — research and development, marketing, brand, events and newsroom — to meet once a week.
Inevitably, conversations involve more stakeholders. For an online publisher client, ON24 was initially working with the events team, when it became clear they couldn’t rely on in-person events as a revenue stream and had to be recreated digitally, the conversation expanded. Instead of only the events director, the company is now speaking with the branded content team, content studio and media sales team to drive impressions once the event has aired live, as well.
Publishers are working out the wider role digital events play in their businesses going forward as advertisers become more comfortable with the format. With digital events, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but how subscription strategies intersect will become more clear and focused.
The FT found that subscribers who had been to physical events were more engaged online — they read more articles and visited more regularly — in the 4 months post-event than pre-event, and they remained higher.
“Subscribers that come to an event interact more and last longer, there is a direct link there,” said Orson Francescone, managing director of FT Live. Although he countered that “the Holy Grail of a 100% overlap of subscribers and event attendees is a bit of a red herring.”
The post Publishers are tying virtual events to subscriptions appeared first on Digiday.
The coronavirus presented society with two intertwined crises: a health crisis and an economic crisis. On the first front, some companies scrambled to reorient supply chains to provide protective gear, like masks, or disinfectant. But for most companies, marketing meant putting out messages of support. On the economic crisis, which is now taking center stage as economies haltingly reopen in the face of forecasts of a downturn unseen since the Great Depression, marketers have a clearer role: Sell stuff.
With that clarity of purpose, marketers are starting to realize they need to move on from the messages of support, according to the agency and marketing executives I’ve spoken with recently. The shift back to advertising products rather than messages of support is starting to happen.
For example, a creative agency, Caveat, recently got a client to agree to a new campaign that doesn’t mention the coronavirus (imagine!) but simply touts a new product.
At Madwell, the decision to put a new campaign for phone carrier Visible on television that focused on the value rather than the need for connection was purposeful, according to Chris Sojka, CCO and co-founder of Madwell. (That said, a Visible spot about the need for connection did go on social channels.)
“People don’t want brands to constantly remind them of the circumstance they’re in anymore,” said Sojka. “People want brands to tell them how they can be useful or they want brands to say what they are doing to actually help in this environment.”
The initial coronavirus response ads stood out but as the ads started to sound the same people got tired of them, according to marketing and agency executives. “[Everyone] converted to that same damn ad you saw 500 times of ‘We’re in this with you, saluting our whoever,’” said one marketing executive. “It became saccharine — which took about 30 seconds.”
That the response ads of the last 10 weeks or so quickly started to sound the same, turning into “white noise,” as one agency executive described it, wasn’t the only problem. The messages of support told people that brands were there for them but also weren’t entirely clear about their purpose beyond that. “Everyone is super sheepish to admit that our job is to sell products,” said Evan Slater, chief creative at Caveat. “But businesses need to stay afloat.”
Agency executives say they are pushing clients to go back to advertising the use of their products and sell stuff rather than the messages of togetherness. One agency CEO said, during a call with the other holding company agencies this week, that agency leaders agreed that, “we’ve done the coronavirus response moment and now we’re all talking about how do we get past the coronavirus response moment.”
As states across the country start to reopen, it’s easier for agency executives to make the case to marketers to return to advertising’s true purpose: selling something. Doing so isn’t simply to stop putting out ads that sound the same but to help boost the economy.
“The longer we stop doing marketing’s job, which is to help drive the economy where people buy and sell things, if we ignore our obligation, we’re failing everyone,” said Guy Hayward, global chief executive officer at Forsman & Bodenfors. “We know what happened in 2008 when the economy stopped. We have an obligation to continue to help drive the economy.”
Still, while agency executives say they are ready to make that shift some say marketing executives are still wary of doing so as the impact of the coronavirus still has many reeling. “I think one of the issues holding things back is the grim death toll,” said one creative agency CEO. “Brands don’t want to appear insensitive.”
During the week of March 16, we had a pitch via Zoom. At that time, the technology was new to a lot of people. We had to coach our team on how to choreograph handoffs, properly position their cameras and use ideal lighting. Today, the technological expertise feels like muscle memory, which has allowed us to put an greater focus on the content and narrative of the conversation.
We are fortunate that, through quarantine, we have continued to pitch – and win. What’s worked best for us is continuing to use our same processes and approach. This is not a time to change who you are, but it’s an ideal time to add versatility to how you deliver services.
We are looking at how we take our deep experience with health and wellness brands and extend that into other categories because, today, every brand needs to behave more like a health and wellness brand.
Most influencers don’t rely on being influencers for their full-time jobs, according to new survey data from Influence. The company found that nearly half, 45%, of influencers have a full-time job outside of being influencers and 39% have part-time jobs. Just 16% of influencers “rely solely on influencing for income,” according to the company.
“We’re not artists,” said Evan Slater, chief creative at hybrid creative studio Caveat, when asked about coronavirus response ads. “We’re not, by and large, a bunch of Scorsese’s running around making 60-second Oscar films. We are creative business people and, it’s times like these that remind you that what we do, if it doesn’t sell something, it’s entirely useless.”
The post ‘Our job is to sell’: Marketers, moving past coronavirus response, return to selling products appeared first on Digiday.
Instagram is finally turning on the ad revenue spigot for its long-form video platform IGTV. But media companies that have waited nearly two years to receive ad revenue from their IGTV videos will likely need to keep waiting until next year for that money to flow their way.
Starting this week, Instagram will run video ads in IGTV videos and share 55% of the resulting revenue with the video’s creator. However, the monetization program is in a testing phase and is being limited to individual video creators for now. Facebook, which owns Instagram and manages the app’s relationships with media companies, has told media companies that it does not expect to open up the monetization program broadly to them until 2021, according to media executives.
“IGTV ads will be testing for the remainder of 2020. We believe that emerging creators will see the most benefit from monetization in IGTV but will test with a variety of accounts as we roll this out slowly to ensure we get the experience right. No specific plans to share on expansion at this time,” said an Instagram spokesperson.
Slow-rolling IGTV monetization for media companies may be for the best if Instagram wants them to be creating original videos for IGTV rather than repurposing what they post to other platforms. Media companies tend to have higher production costs than individual video creators, such as paying for studios or to film on location, and media executives questioned whether IGTV ad revenue would be sufficient at the outset to offset those costs. “It just feels like an unrealistic expectation in the near term,” said one media executive.
Initially Instagram will be selling IGTV inventory as a standalone option for advertisers. For advertisers to be willing to pay up for IGTV ads, Instagram will need to prove it can deliver a large enough audience and sufficient performance compared to Instagram’s other video inventory as well as platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat, according to agency executives. One agency executive described advertisers’ level of interest in IGTV as “tepid because it’s unproven.”
Tepid would be a generous way to describe media companies’ and creators’ adoption of IGTV. Since the platform’s debut in June 2018, video makers have been waiting for Instagram to add a monetization program. Some video makers have posted to IGTV anyway, establishing an audience for the day when Instagram opens up a revenue-sharing programing and selling sponsored videos to make money in the meantime.
“We’ve definitely been doing it at an increased amount. The viewership has been stable to slightly increasing,” said Joe Caporoso, svp of content and brand platforms at Team Whistle. The media company’s @whistlesports account has received 35.3 million views on IGTV over the past 12 months and 1.69 million views in the past 30 days, according to data from CrowdTangle.
Many media companies and creators, however, have refrained from consistently posting to IGTV and concentrated on platforms that share revenue, such as YouTube, Facebook and Snapchat. “It’s just a product that has struggled to find its place, and I’ve lost pointed interest because of opportunities to develop elsewhere,” said a second media executive.
Media companies’ interest in IGTV will remain largely lukewarm until the money comes. “That’s still more than six months away, so I’m not even planning for that. We’re not going to do anything on the platform until there’s monetization there,” said a third media executive.
However, media and agency executives believe the money will be there — eventually — based on how Instagram will be placing ads in IGTV videos. At least initially, Instagram will only insert ads after people watch an IGTV video preview in their main feeds. Once the 15-second preview ends, people need to tap to watch the rest of the IGTV video, and before the video continues, a 15-second-or-shorter ad will play.
Since the placement is effectively a mid-roll ad, many viewers may tune out upon seeing the ad. However, media companies and advertisers have seen that people are willing to sit through mid-roll ads, though the executives interviewed for this article declined or were unable to provide statistics. The mid-roll ad experience mirrors TV’s commercial breaks and has become more common on YouTube and Facebook, where creators and media companies are inserting more mid-roll ads to increase their ad revenue and to offset CPM declines on the platforms over the past few months. One agency executive said that “some of our brands have dedicated line items and investments against mid-roll placements because they’ve performed well for people who do stick through.”
The IGTV ads’ post-preview placement may make people more likely to sit through an ad. Media companies saw an uptick in IGTV viewership after Instagram began inserting video previews in people’s main feeds in February 2019. Meredith said last year it attributed a double-digit lift in average episode views to the feature. As Instagram opens up the revenue-sharing program, media companies and creators will be incentivized to edit their IGTV videos to pique viewers’ interest enough that they will sit through the ad.
“We definitely do need to reorganize certain edits to ensure there is some type of hook in the early seconds to convince you to stick around longer,” Caporoso said.
The post Media companies will need to wait until 2021 for IGTV ad revenue appeared first on Digiday.