Month: May 2020

For Telemundo, shifting to streaming platforms — everything from parent company Comcast’s Peacock to Quibi — is an obvious choice based on a simple fact: The median age for Latinos in the U.S. is 28, much lower than that of the country as a whole.

For Telemundo SVP of Digital Romina Rosado, that means the network needs to be on every new platform it can be to reach the 60 million Hispanics in the U.S.

“Hispanics actually over-index on a lot of social and digital platforms,” Rosado said on the Digiday Podcast. “So for Telemundo, even before covid-19, it was a big part of our mission to make sure we were available on all the platforms.”

Telemundo has about 3,000 hours of programming on NBCU’s Peacock and two programs on Quibi, which Rosado believes will take off once coronavirus ends

“There’s a tremendous amount of schadenfreude here at play, which seems to be a bit of a way that media reacts to media lately,” she said. “People are making very quick judgments, and I think we might all be surprised.”

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarity.

Latinos are younger (and especially plugged in)

“What’s definitely tapering off is the insatiable desire for news that we saw at the beginning. The first couple of weeks, the first month, really, was news all the time. Our numbers for both digital and linear consumption went through the roof for anything that was news. And then we started seeing that taper off. What I think will stay behind is when you look at the Hispanic audience composition — this is something I talk about all the time because it’s one of the reasons I moved to Telemundo — is that the median age of the U.S. Hispanic in this country is very low. It’s 28. The median age of the non-Hispanic in this country is 43. So if you think about a 28-year-old and what their media consumption patterns are, right now, they are streaming a lot more content. They’re doing a lot more digital consumption on any platform, and Hispanics actually over-index on a lot of social and digital platforms. So for Telemundo, even before Covid-19, it was a big part of our mission to make sure we were available on all the platforms.”

Why TikTok is thriving where Quibi isn’t

“It’s different, because TikTok is user-generated content. It’s you doing a crazy dance at home, which is where you’re stuck. What Quibi is doing is incredibly different. It’s premium and a different format. What will also happen [is that] once everything is open again, you will not find me is in my home. I’m going to be out and about and trying to enjoy as much as possible being able to be outside.”

Join us on Friday, May 29 at 12 p.m. ET on The New Normal, a weekly interactive show focused on how publishers are adapting their businesses. Josh Raab, Director of Instagram at National Geographic, will talk with Digiday editor-in-chief Brian Morrissey about adapting National Geographic’s Instagram feed in a world where travel (and travel photography) have gotten a lot more complicated. Register here.

The current crisis has been unique in that it has caused some massive accelerations of shifts already taking place: The decline of ad-supported media, the pivot to reader revenue and the overall “boring,” simple-but-hard principles of making content that people will pay for.

This has been exacerbated by issues from advertisers: The current situation means advertisers continue to block coronavirus-related content, causing ad revenues to plummet even as traffic climbs up. 

We’ve seen this play out in various ways from a myriad of publishers: News publishers are pushing subscriptions directly in order to make up for lost ad revenue. And as we detailed earlier, publishers with strong subscription businesses and other ways of diversified revenue streams and low cost structures will win.  

Our latest research report takes a deep dive into how publishers have fared over the past quarter.

Key Hits:

• Publisher revenues took a hit in the first quarter, but the second-quarter is poised to be worse.
• News publishers had a rougher time, with more reporting worse financial performances
• Site traffic has gone up for most publishers even as revenue has gone down
• The average publisher expects things to normalize in early 2021
• The impact across business lines has been varied, with programmatic and direct-sold ads, along with events, worst hit

Full results of the survey, including dives into business lines and site traffic data, are available to Digiday+ members below.

In our survey of 127 publishers, 52% of publishers missed their first-quarter numbers. About 23% managed to exceed their forecasts, while 25% hit them.

Back in March, Digiday Research found that 88% of the publishing executives surveyed expected to miss business goals for the entire year. About 85% of them expected to see a decline in ad revenue, 79% in event revenue and 68% in commerce revenue.

It’s been an especially tough time for news publishers: 59% of them said they missed their forecasts in the first quarter, and 19% of them exceeded it.

Publishers bracing themselves for a worse second-quarter: Only 2% of raised forecasts, 17% have kept them flat, and the vast majority — 80% — have lowered forecasts.

As for the news publishers, in the second quarter, only 1% have raised their forecast, while a whopping 70% have lowered it.

One thing that’s clear is — not any time soon. The normal also looks different for many media companies. The average publisher expects that the company’s revenue will return to “pre-coronavirus” levels in the first half of 2021. About 6% of publishers believe that the revenue will be permanently impacted.

For many publishers, this has been a time of feast and famine both: Lots of eyeballs, lots to cover (and hopefully make money off) but little in the way of ad revenue. 

Our survey found that for 80% of publishers, traffic is up. For almost a quarter, it’s up more than 50% from pre-pandemic levels. 

Among business lines, ad revenue was hardest hit in the first quarter, decreasing for a whopping 65% of all publishers. This included direct sold and programmatic ad revenue.

Subscriptions actually increased for 29% of publishers, and decreased for only 14% of publishers. For 57%, they stayed flat.

Other revenue lines, like commerce and affiliate commerce, increased very slightly, while event revenue is now down for 60% of publishers, and branded content revenue is also significantly down.

Consistent TV and digital measurement has been a challenge that has eluded advertisers for years as they’ve tried to cobble together different metrics and methodologies into a unified framework. Today, however, there are new ways to connect the dots for marketers, so they can understand not only whom they are reaching but also where and how often. What follow are five tips to optimize measurement strategies across TV and digital to ensure that marketers are making the most of their ad spend and truly measuring what matters.

1. Use new tools to measure cross-platform audience reach and benefit from unprecedented insights

Traditionally, cross-platform measurement tools have been bedeviled by disconnected data silos, conflicting metrics, confusing interfaces and limited reach. New tools coming onto the market, however, offer marketers the ability to undertake people-based measurement and compare reach and frequency across channels, platforms and audiences. These new capabilities will be game-changers for marketers looking to measure on an apples-to-apples basis across TV and digital for a complete picture of their campaigns. By comparing foundational metrics across all channels, marketers can adjust their campaigns to maximize the impact of their marketing investments.

2. Turn the knob to adjust TV partners for the best return

Historically, a significant portion of ad spend is locked in for the year after upfronts. This year will be different, and most brands will have more flexibility to adjust their spend to focus on the TV partners and channels that show the best results. Using new tools that allow marketers to compare reach and frequency across both TV and digital channels, marketers can identify the networks that provide the best bang for the buck and adjust their spend accordingly. They can also find the smaller networks that have a high concentration of their relevant audience, so they can use TV’s “long tail” to increase their reach. By leveraging this data, marketers can ensure that their overall TV strategy — and tactical negotiations with broadcasters — are data-driven to achieve the best outcomes.

3. Compare spend across media channels to see which ones are most efficient at reaching relevant audiences

Strategies that focus solely on aligning with the right demographic audience remains the (unfortunate) reality for many TV campaigns, and it’s time to broaden those traditional definitions of relevance to other audience characteristics that can help advertisers achieve their business goals.

Rather than focusing only on women ages 18–49, for example, marketers must push their partners to include first-party data on customers, past purchase behavior, interest segments and other relevant audiences for their brands. Once they’ve identified those relevant audiences, marketers should evaluate the reach and frequency of their campaigns to those custom audiences across every TV and digital channel so they can tell where they’re getting the best value for their investment. By focusing that analysis on their target audiences — based on demographics, purchase behavior and other criteria — marketers can ensure they’re achieving the most relevant reach for their campaigns.

4. Verify that ads are being viewed by real people

Marketers’ measurements are meaningless if they include bots, fraud or other ads that are never seen by real people. Fraud is an increasing challenge in the OTT/CTV environment, as criminals shift their illegal activities to capture the increased investment by advertisers. While linear TV ads reduce the risk of fraud, they still face challenges around viewer attention.

Marketers should ensure that their measurement tools use state-of-the-art technologies to evaluate their campaigns by incorporating important metrics around fraud, viewability and attention across all channels. Only then can they tell which channels are most effective at reaching real and relevant people, not bogus bots or invisible impressions.

5. Get a holistic view of reach and frequency across portfolios

When diversifying ad spend across a variety of channels, it’s important to gain an understanding of frequency across an entire campaign. This ensures that marketers have adequate touchpoints for their messages and helps avoid oversaturation and the wasted spend that comes with it. Frequency capping in a single channel has always been a powerful tool, but across channels it has not been consistent or comprehensive, so heavy users have often been vastly oversaturated with ads. For example, if three partners have varying frequency caps, one could end up exhausting a single message on the same person — not to mention wasting valuable dollars.

The holy grail of campaign measurement is people-based analysis across all channels of frequency and reach for each marketer’s intended audience. By using new tools that provide that unduplicated view across TV and digital, marketers are building new strategies and leveraging new tactics to reach that goal.