Less BS, More Facts, Some Opinions
During a time of economic uncertainty, should a CMO put her brand on the sidelines? Or should she increase media investment – especially if buying ads is cheap? NerdWallet’s CMO Kelly Gillease has been in the midst of that marketing calculus as the brand recalibrates its strategy for the rest of 2020. “We decided that… Continue reading »
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“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 Nico Neumann, assistant professor and fellow, Centre for Business Analytics at Melbourne Business School. There were many explosive findings in the recently released ISBA report about the United Kingdom’s ad… Continue reading »
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“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Alex Magnin, founder of The Unwinder. Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward.- Lao Tzu A… Continue reading »
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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Sign Of The Times The New York Times will remove third-party data and build a first-party data market as cookies bite the dust, Axios reports. Starting in July, the Times will offer 45 audience segments based on reader and subscriber data under categories including… Continue reading »
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In trying to sell ads against their coronavirus coverage, news publishers have gone through a Kubler Ross-esque progression. First, they got angry that there was zero appetite for direct sponsorship of news; next, they tried to minimize the presence of words like coronavirus in their stories. Now they are trying to focus on the positive, highlighting packages of stories of civic, economic and public recovery, and they appear to be having some success.
The Boston Globe has gotten one advertiser to sponsor a private Slack channel it built to help small business owners share information and get answers to questions about things such as the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program, and is talking to a second advertiser about building another one, Boston Globe Media chief commercial officer Kayvan Salmanpour said.
Time, which has focused much of its Time 100 Talks programming on how people are coping and recovering from coronavirus, has secured more than $1 million in sponsorship revenue for those talks over the past several weeks, global chief revenue officer Viktoria Degtar said. A separate collection of stories, “Apart, Not Alone,” about people who are helping people cope with the pandemic, landed State Farm as a sponsor.
A video series NowThis News launched last month, “In This Together,” which highlights the ways that people are getting through this, has attracted several sponsors.
And later this month, Gannett will be launching a large package across its USA Today Network exploring the recovery of the American economy at both the national and the local level. Local editors have been encouraged to write op-eds about their commitment to their local communities, and to produce sidebars focused on the local economy, per Poynter’s Rick Edmonds.
Not every publisher is framing its pitches to advertisers in this way. While seemingly every advertiser’s message – and every publisher’s pitch – focused on themes like relief and support for frontline workers in late March and early April, a slightly narrower band of publishers can offer this kind of coverage to brands.
“I wouldn’t say it’s in every RFP,” said Steven Bloom,
managing director of enterprise partnerships at Omnicom USA. “But there’s
definitely a market for these. It’s a logical progression from the immediate
relief [theme].”
Bloom said he’s noticed more advertisers investing in
campaigns oriented around themes like recovery in the past few weeks. And while
national advertisers are interested in spending, in the near term, the
publishers that are best situated to win those budgets are those that can speak
to local communities. “The recovery is going to be unequal,” Bloom said. “There’s
going to be varying degrees of recovery [from market to market].”
In the early days following the spread of coronavirus, many
advertisers paused their spending, in large part because the creative assets and
campaigns they’d planned to roll out suddenly felt tone-deaf or inappropriate.
Once they came back, many settled on packages that focused on the heroes battling the virus.
Local publishers benefitted. A Boston Globe package saluting the nurses on the front lines of the effort drove more sponsorship revenue than any special package in the Globe’s history, Salmanpour said, partly because the Globe’s sales team was able to get both national and local advertisers involved.
“Anything that’s about supporting or highlighting an important community,” Salmanpour said. “Packaging it so there’s small price packages and large price packages, and having the whole team rally around it, and have a give-back element in it, that works.”
Over the past few weeks, however advertiser interest has shifted. “It’s not about the hero thing anymore,” said Josh Brandau, the chief revenue officer of the Los Angeles Times. “It’s about what we can do to reopen the economy.”
Brandau said that a number of categories that had paused their spending, such as automotive, have begun to come back, and they are most interested in campaigns that explain what is going on. “It’s almost an awareness thing,” Brandau said. “It’s more, ‘Here’s what we’ve done to make this safe.’”
That service-oriented goal also allows some publishers to
frame themselves as providing service and value to their readers. “No brand has
come to us asking about ‘recovery and rallying,’” said Viktoria Degtar, Time’s
global chief revenue officer. “We have been in the market ensuring that brands
see the value or utility we provide them.”
In the case of Time’s
coronavirus newsletter, for example, Goldman Sachs had a great deal of branded
content that it wanted to distribute, and the newsletter provided a great
vehicle and environment for that content, Degtar said.
The publishers that are able to whip up sponsorship opportunities quickly will benefit most, at a moment when brands are trying to be nimble in their ad spending.
“In this environment, we need to reevaluate the speed at which our team receives, responds and creates opportunities,” Degtar said. “What was a year is now a month, what was a week is now a day, what was a day is now a few hours.”
The post News publishers new tactic: Emphasize the good news to lure back coronavirus-weary advertisers appeared first on Digiday.
Three days before one of Quibi’s shows was slated to premiere, a Quibi executive emailed the company that produced the program to ask if they could help to promote it. “Any promotion would be appreciated,” recalled an executive at the company behind the show. “That was basically it.”
For a company in the business of getting people to pay to watch shows, Quibi has not done a good job of getting people interested in its shows. While it’s too early for Quibi to have a Game of Thrones, the service is going to need to put more promotional muscle at work to get people excited about a new place for streaming video. That’s especially true after Quibi’s initial slate of shows failed to deliver a breakout hit. With new shows debuting every week, Quibi is in a position where it needs to convince those who may have already made up their minds about the app to give it another try.
Quibi has 1.3 million active users, according to The New York Times. Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg told the Times that the figure fell short of expectations. The user stat is even more troubling considering that Quibi’s app has been installed 3.4 million times excluding re-installs and multiple installs by the same account, according to mobile app market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. However, people continue to give Quibi a try. Last week the app — which has offered 90-day free trials since launch — received roughly 288,000 first-time installs, an increase from 262,000 first-time installs the prior week, per Sensor Tower.
Still, for all the talk of tech, Quibi is about programming. And without must watch programming, it will go the way of Go90, which never gained traction with users despite $1.2 billion poured into it by Verizon and big-name programming muscle. After all, name your favorite Go90 show you wish was still around?
Katzenberg can choose to blame the coronavirus crisis for the app’s disappointing debut — the quarantine negating Quibi’s on-the-go entertainment pitch — but it’s not like people are averse to watching videos on their phones while holed up at home. The week of May 4, people spent 66.7 billion minutes streaming mobile videos, an 18% increase compared to the first week of May 2019, according to Nielsen. Quibi’s problem is not the pandemic but its promotional strategy. Actually, the problem for Quibi is closer to home: The only buzz its shows have received seems to be the episode of “50 States of Fright” in which the main character weirdly obsesses over her golden arm.
“Their marketing strategy has been disastrous almost from the beginning,” said the first executive. “They’ve done nothing to market their shows.”
Leading up to Quibi’s April 6 launch, the app’s advertising largely concentrated on familiarizing people with Quibi as a noun, with teases of shows like “Chrissy’s Court,” a “Judge Judy” send-up starring Chrissy Teigen. And once launched, Quibi limited word of mouth by not allowing people to take screenshots of its shows to post to platforms like Twitter or Instagram. Quibi’s aim may have been to prevent piracy, but the move had the effect of prohibiting free promotion of its programming.
As one sign of how Quibi has struggled to break into the zeitgeist, Google search queries for “Quibi” have fallen to pre-launch levels, according to Google’s trends data.
Quibi seems to recognize its misstep. In late April, it began posting episodes of some shows on YouTube, an established marketing strategy among TV networks. This month it ran ads during ESPN’s “The Last Dance” to promote Quibi’s documentary series about the Los Angeles Clippers, “Blackballed.” And sometime soon it will let people share content from the app to social platforms, according to The New York Times.
The strategy shift may not pan out. Quibi’s programming pipeline could be loaded with “Lillyhammer”s and lack a “House of Cards.” But so long as Quibi has the money to make — and market — new shows, it has a shot. As much as many people have written off Quibi already, those producing shows for the platform have not.
“If Quibi wanted to buy stuff from us, we would prioritize it,” said a second executive at a company that has produced shows for Quibi.
It’s not only that Quibi is paying tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per minute of programming, though that absolutely helps. Producers like making shows for Quibi. They liken it to working with Netflix, not Go90, with Quibi executives hailing from the traditional entertainment industry and bringing with them the same high standards and willingness to ensure a program’s success. After all, it was a content executive from Quibi that had sent the email asking the first executive’s company for help to promote the show. Maybe next time it will be someone from the marketing department.
“At least 50% to 60% of whatever dollars were able to be optioned were optioned off.”
— Agency executive on TV upfront advertisers taking options to cancel Q3 spending commitments
TV ad buyers won’t be the only ones at the upfront negotiating table looking for flexibility. TV networks will also be pushing for some pliability.
The live sports hiatus and physical production shutdown have cast a shadow over the programming lineups that TV networks pitch during the upfronts. This has contributed to advertisers’ wariness of making long-term deals and desire for more favorable cancelation options. However, networks have their own concerns.
“We’re going to need flexibility from their part depending on how production rolls out and sports rolls out,” said Jo Ann Ross, president and chief advertising revenue officer for domestic advertising sales at ViacomCBS.
In particular, networks are looking for advertisers and agencies to be willing to adapt if the shows and sports they sell in the upfront are not able to air as planned, such as if a new series cannot begin production in time to premiere this year or the NFL season is postponed. Networks have some contingency plans in place, such as spreading out show schedules and acquiring programming to fill any gaps. But, the programming is not always the point for advertisers.
Swapping live sports for, well, anything else is not an equal exchange, which is why many TV sports advertisers have delayed their deals until play resumes. But the networks recognize that advertisers do not buy ads against some shows because of the content but because they believe a program will help them to push product. So, TV ad sellers want advertisers and agencies to work with the networks during the upfront to come up with contingency plans that take into account an advertisers’ underlying business objectives. That way the two sides can find alternative inventory that will fulfill the advertiser’s goals and the network’s commitment.
“It has to work both ways,” Ross said.
-33%: Expected decline in advertisers’ TV upfront spending commitments this year, according to an advertiser survey conducted by Advertiser Perceptions.
45%: Increase in live-streaming viewership between March and April, according to live-streaming tech providers StreamElements and Arsenal.gg.
261,000: Number of subscribers that streaming-pay TV services, such as Sling TV and YouTube TV, lost in the first quarter of 2020, according to media research firm Kagan.
The Walt Disney Company’s streaming czar Kevin Mayer is taking the top post at TikTok.
The TV upfronts will never be the same again:
Read more about the TV upfronts here.
How advertisers are using TikTok during the recession:
Read more about TikTok here.
With live sports on hold, Adidas turns to video games:
Read more about Adidas here.
Corona bump for free streamers:
Free, ad-supported streaming services Pluto TV, Tubi and Vudu have received a surge in downloads and sign-ups since March, according to Bloomberg. The increases are to be expected with people holed up at home and tightening their budgets. The questions will be whether these new viewers hang around and what the streamers do to keep them tuning in.
Comedy Central gets crunched:
Comedy Central appears to be pivoting away from expensive scripted original shows. ViacomCBS has laid off the majority of Comedy Central’s talent and development team and is loading up on cheaper unscripted shows, movies and animated programs, according to The New York Times. The shift seems like the latest sign of how cable TV networks’ businesses are being squeezed as cord cutting accelerates.
Apple TV+ builds its library:
Apple is licensing old TV shows and movies for its Apple TV+ streaming service, according to Bloomberg. Unlike Disney+, Apple TV+ launched without a large programming library. It relied on its original programming like “The Morning Show” and “Dickinson” to get people interested enough to pay $5 a month to watch. But it lacked a library to keep people watching and paying.
The post After a rough start, Quibi faces a challenge: How to promote its shows appeared first on Digiday.
Like many businesses, Miller High Life stopped advertising when the coronavirus hit, retooled its marketing budget and moved dollars originally allocated to the spring to the second half of the year. But this week it will resume advertising with a new campaign that addresses what life is like during quarantine.
The ads, which will run on TV, social media, online video and on streaming platforms like Hulu, show what it’s like to be stuck at home and how easy it is to pass the time without accomplishing anything of substance. Later in the summer, the brand will release more spots that speak to the changing nature of how people are getting together like barbecuing with a few friends while maintaining social distancing.
“We took a step back to realize how the marketplace was going to shift,” said Nigel Jones, brand marketing manager for Miller High Life. “There was so much uncertainty in the beginning that we didn’t think it made sense to keep spending at that level.”
It’s unclear how much Miller High Life is now spending as Jones would only say the advertiser is “putting a significant budget behind this launch.” In 2019, the beer brand spent $4.2 million on media, per Kantar, which doesn’t track social spending.
Other beer brands are also starting to advertise again. Coors, for example, is offering fans the chance to win free beer while Budweiser reimagined its famous Wassup campaign.
Overall this year, Miller High Life is taking a different approach to its media mix as the company is looking to target a younger consumer than its core 40-plus demographic. To do that, Miller High Life is now putting 70% of its marketing budget toward digital channels like paid social, online video and OTT platforms. The other 30% will go toward more traditional channels like linear television. Previously, the budget was split 60/40 the other way with 60% toward traditional channels to reach the core consumer and 40% toward digital.
Seeing the sea of same with coronavirus response advertising, adam&eveNYC pitched Miller High Life on a campaign that would speak to and celebrate the strange moment. “You could turn on your TV, hear the piano music play and know what was going to happen,” said Jones. “We saw it as an opportunity to tell a different story about our brand. We wanted to spark optimism with a little bit of levity and find ways to celebrate, even when we’re still at home.”
As people have been stocking up on alcohol during the pandemic, when it comes to beer they have opted for bigger beer brands that offer bulk packages over craft brews, according to Nielsen data. That has helped boost Miller High Life in recent weeks. “Because of where High Life sits in the beer industry, if you think about a lot of large packs and from a price standpoint, we have picked up a little bit of momentum in this time,” said Jones.
Getting back to advertising now makes sense to Grace Teng, executive director of media and analytics for advertising agency Zambezi. “It’s data driven,” said Teng. “People are not picking up craft [beers as much], alcohol consumption is up and sales are up, so it’s aligned with consumer behavior. Also, [some areas are] starting to open up so it could be a good time to explore. But they have to be really careful because the coronavirus is still happening.”
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Anheuser-Busch InBev has seen a sales decline as bars and sporting venues across the world closed their doors. But while that’s led to pullbacks in “discretionary spending,” the beer maker has continued to advertise but with different messaging.
One of the first actions that AB-InBev took for its brands was sharing the charitable donations and actions that the brands and parent company were taking, including a campaign showing the reallocation of money from sports sponsorships to giving it to the Red Cross, which hosted blood drives with the Budweiser brand.
“We had to go through every single ad and marketing campaign and adapt the messaging in real time to make sure that it was sensitive to the current situation,” said Spencer Gordon, the company’s vp of digital at DraftLine, AB-InBev’s in-house agency in the latest edition of Digiday+ Talks, a weekly series of practical tutorials for media and marketing.
Because each state is reopening at different rates and has different social distancing mandates, AB-InBev is taking a regional approach to advertising. This is something that DraftLine was already well versed in, however, because each state has different rules and regulations regarding online alcohol sales and different regions have different tastes towards AB InBev’s brands.
“When we go local, we tend to do significantly better and win more frequently,” Gordon said.
AB-InBev is also putting renewed focus on e-commerce in order to keep selling while bars and stadiums are closed. DraftLine created and distributed hundreds of e-commerce ads with specific partners to make sure that the brands were growing their online presence. Since restaurant and bar sales were so far down, the company wanted to make sure that it would still be able to sell beer in regional locations that allow online sales of alcohol.
Gordon said the team of 85 has created hundreds of e-commerce ads to help push direct sales in states that allow the online sales of alcohol.
Gordon, who who founded DraftLine in 2018, discussed what he learned while building and in-house agency from the ground up and how DraftLine is helping AB InBev keep its marketing strategy optimized during an economic downturn.
See the event video and slides below.
DraftLine was built to help AB-InBev understand consumers’ behaviors to make sure that the messaging used in old and new ads isn’t tone deaf.
DraftLine is better equipped than any third-party agency to do this, Gordon said, because it has access to the company’s consumer base and can drive deep understandings of what consumers want and are talking about right now. This has enabled the in-house agency to not only vet thousands of its existing ads, but also create a whole new slate of assets that avoid tone-deafness and insensitivity during a pandemic, leaving the company in a better position than it would have been in two years ago, he said.
“Now has been a moment to shine for us,” said Gordon, adding that two years ago, the company would have been in worse shape trying to understand the wants and needs of consumers right now. This is because it didn’t have DraftLine, which was built to gather consumer insights and then share them with its brands to create more effective messaging.
When launching DraftLine, Gordon said there was some uncertainty towards it from the brands, so Gordon said his team didn’t mandate that every brand had to use DraftLine at first. Instead, he said the team started small by pitching ideas, delivering creative that the brands needed and ultimately proving that the in-house agency could be effective for the brands.
“We had a ton of headwinds when we first started,” Gordon said. “We had to earn credibility.”
Despite being an in-house agency that can take on a lot of the creative needs of the company, Gordon said that DraftLine is not replacing agencies, but rather supporting its agency partners.
A major reason for this is because the company has acquired more brands in the past few years and the advertising landscape has changed as well. “It’s an enormous company with a lot for creative needs that have splintered and expanded in the past years,” Gordon said. He added that no two brands work the same or take the same approach to its advertising strategy, which makes the job of managing each brand even more difficult.
The post How Anheuser-Busch adapted its ad messaging appeared first on Digiday.
Log-level data was meant to be the key tool for advertisers seeking transparency into the programmatic ad bids they’ve won and lost. The reality is most advertisers aren’t asking for it.
In vetting the programmatic supply chain for ad trade group ISBA, PwC expected it would be far more straightforward than it was to get log-level data from 11 ad tech vendors. But it took the auditor nine months and cost £1.2 million ($1.7 million) to get the job done. And even then it was only enough to track 31 million of the total 267 million impressions that were bought.
“Log-level data is really important, but in isolation, it is not a panacea,” said Sam Tomlinson, a marketing assurance partner at PwC. “It’s just a vast amount of data that you have to store, analyze, and action. It’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient. To be really useful, that data needs to be in a consistent format, with a unique identifier for each impression, all along the supply chain.”
Over the last two years, log-file data has been pushed as the ultimate insurance policy for those advertisers not sure about what happens to the auctions they’ve won and lost. With this data, advertisers can get valuable intel on each impression like its viewability and true cost and then use it all to prune ad tech vendors and tweak bidding strategies. Getting those answers, however, is no small feat. Some log files contain up to 150 different things about an impression. Extrapolate that across the hundreds of billions of impressions that are bought daily across a variety of different ad tech vendors and it’s easy to see why PwC struggled to make sense of it all.
“Often advertisers can be worried about the complexity of receiving raw log files and the costs that this complexity might entail,” said Cadi Jones, commercial director for Beeswax’s business across EMEA. “Volumes for win logs and bid logs can soon add up, and if you’ve chosen to work with a partner who will share your full auction logs, the volume of data can be significant.”
In fact, only a handful of advertisers like Nestle and agencies like Essence are accessing this data, and they’re going straight to ad tech vendors for it. Joey Leichman, vp of buyer development at OpenX, an ad tech vendor that shares log-level data with media buyers, explained: “Event-level data is enormous, from a volume and breadth standpoint. The potential use cases for the recipient can be limitless, but there is also a considerable investment required to produce, store and analyze the data.”.
Ad tech vendors have seen their efforts to ease those challenges barely register with advertisers. Of the 250 companies that Index Exchange shares all its log-level data with, just 10 are buyers, none of whom work directly at an advertiser, for example. It’s a similar story at ad tech vendor TrustX where it has had no requests since the start of the year and had just one last year. It’s slightly different at Adform where there are a large number of tier one advertisers and agencies that get sent log-level data, but only the most sophisticated ones have the in-house expertise to process it.
“CMO organizations aren’t very hands-on with the technology needed to be able to crunch the data at scale, which means something like log-level data becomes a project across their team and a chief technology officer’s team, which takes up a lot of time,” said Jochen Schlosser, chief strategy officer at ad tech vendor Adform.
While there’s an abundance of log-level data from various vendors now, they don’t always share the same thing, and when they do it’s not always in a standardized format as the head of display at a retail advertiser recently discovered. Most demand-side platforms will limit the information they share with clients to details about the impressions they have won, while SSPs aren’t always permitted to reveal the full extent of their relationships with publishers. It’s part of the reason why there’s so much disparity between what each ad tech vendor records and subsequently shares via their log-level files. At the core of this issue, is the fact that there’s no standard format for log-files.
“If the ad tech industry wants log-files to be useful for brands then we need to have standards for how they’re reported,” said Tom Kershaw, chief technology officer of Rubicon Project. “Without standardization, log-files aren’t a workable way to get transparency into the supply chain because of how many there are.”
There are workarounds and alternatives to the log-level data problem. None have been widely adopted yet, but they’re all pitched as more cost-effective ways for advertisers to see what happens to their programmatic bids.
Given that many advertisers want log-file data to audit what happens to their money before it gets to the publisher, some ad tech vendors have found another way to share that information. The likes of TrustX has moved to a post-auction fee model so that advertisers know there are no buy-side fees, and publishers know they are paying a flat rate at the end of the month. Others have moved away from the log-level data approach entirely and are accessing many of the same sorts of insights using readily available APIs and standard data ports.
“I don’t believe that log-level data is the right long-term answer to this transparency problem,” said David Kohl, CEO at publisher trade body-funded private marketplace TrustX. “While we’re happy to provide the data, it often takes a lot more effort than anticipated for our clients to get a complete and accurate picture of their buys across providers. We’d much prefer to see the industry investing in a simpler and more sustainable transparency solution
The post ‘It is not a panacea’: Why log-level data hasn’t lived up to its promise for advertisers appeared first on Digiday.
