Month: June 2020

“All the consumption of gaming during the lockdown has further legitimized it as a proper entertainment marketing vehicle,” said Misha Sher, Mediacom’s worldwide vp of sport and entertainment. 

In particular, there’s growing interest in how to run campaigns inside of video games. In-game events, whether it’s a Travis Scott rap concert in Fortnite or a football tournament recreated in FIFA 20, are giving advertisers a better understanding of the opportunities for gaming partnerships. Unlike previous forays into in-game advertising, advertisers see current opportunities more like extensions of social media strategies than a way to get an ad on a virtual billboard.

“It’s clear that gaming is the new frontier of social media, and this groundswell around gaming drives innovation across technology, advertising, and more, and brands are eager to be a part of that future,” said Abby Long, content editor at digital agency PMG. 

Adidas recreated the canceled European Championship in the FIFA Playstation video game last month as a way to offset some of the inventory it lost from the live matches. Matches between 12 footballers and 12 celebrities were live-streamed across Adidas’ Facebook Live, IGTV and YouTube Live profiles in Turkey. Aside from all the players wearing Adidas-branded apparel in those broadcasts, its logo was also visible in the game thanks to it being a kit manufacturer and sponsor for many of the teams recreated in the game. In other words, Adidas turned the FIFA game into a straightforward sponsorship opportunity but found a way to amplify it across its main social networks. 

So far the results have been encouraging for Adidas. 

Live audiences for the virtual matches have so far been twice the size of those for Turkey’s top football league, according to Adidas. To date, the matches have generated around 1.2 million viewers who watch between 20 and 40 mins of a match. The popularity of the matches is also having a material effect on the business. Adidas shopping app downloads in Turkey have doubled since the beginning of the campaign that’s fuelled a 25% rise in daily revenue from the app, per Adidas. 

Adidas’ test shows the importance of distribution in getting advertisers to commit to in-game ads. It’s part of the reason why developers like Electronic Arts are trying to broker more deals with broadcasters to show their esports events on TV.

“The value of our in-game executions goes up as the viewership of our games goes up,” said Todd Sitrin, general manager of the Competitive Gaming Division at Electronic Arts.

“We’ve been able to do greater deal value in the last six months — even in the last two months — because markers want our content because they now know it will resonate with a younger audience.” 

This period of forced experimentation from advertisers is forcing a shift in the commercial ecosystem from developers and the ad tech vendors they work with. Indeed, developer Codemasters agreed to let ad tech vendor Bidstack serve native in-game ads into its upcoming 2020 racing title DIRT 5 in March. Both MG and Monster Energy are already using Bidstack to serve contextually relevant ads into the developer’s older driving simulators. 

Similarly, Riot Games will feature in-game ads during broadcasts of its League of Legends tournaments. The ads appear on banners dotted throughout one of the game’s most popular arenas, meaning both players and their fans will see them during the broadcast. More than 100 million viewers watched the League of Legends World Championship last year, per Riot Games. Keen to capitalize on those audiences, Mastercard and Alienware are among the first few advertisers to buy the ads. Riot plans to have different advertisers in each of its 12 regional leagues. 

“These banners are going to be some of the most valuable media assets in our portfolio because of all the attention we have from viewers on the gameplay,” said Naz Aletaha, head of global esports partnerships at Riot Games. “It opens up a whole new arena for us given that these sorts of opportunities have been limited to only those fans at our in-person events.”

“We’re taking into consideration similar metrics to what you would see in other media deals like frequency and the number of impressions on offer, which varies based on how the game is played,” said Aletaha.

Despite the growing interest in gaming, measurement continues to be a barrier for many advertisers. The varying viewership statistics for the recent Travis Scott concerts are a timely reminder of just how challenging it is to measure viewership in such a virtual and social environment. 

“Between dozens of live streamers attracting audiences of thousands of viewers for any single event, combined with the subsequent YouTube videos garnering millions of viewers, it’s near impossible to tally the reach of an in-game event and how it’s shared online,” said PMG’s Long

Initially, many advertisers, such as retailers, responded to the coronavirus crisis by reorienting their advertising around retaining existing customers. This pushed them away from video to more traditional direct-response ad formats, like search and social display ads. But over the past three to four weeks, advertisers’ strategies have shifted to attracting new customers, said Natalee Geldert, brand media director at PMG. The crisis is not yet over, she said, “but we’ve seen the tide turn, and brands are more comfortable now.”

The turning of the tide has been most apparent on Facebook. Facebook ad CPMs bottomed out around $4.83 the week of April 5, which was the lowest mark of 2020, said Kevin Simonson, vp of social at Wpromote. The week of May 25 Facebook ad CPMs reached $8.22, which is the highest mark of the year, he said. While those numbers apply to Facebook’s entire ad product portfolio, Simonson said that the initial CPM drop stemmed largely from advertisers cutting back on brand advertising campaigns, which often concentrate on video placements. 

“When the CPM is the highest it’s been, it’s a signal that brand dollars are coming back in the market,” Simonson said.

Advertisers have moved money away from traditional brand advertising channels like TV and out-of-home placements to digital video, including social video and connected TV, Geldert said. “If a brand is closely aligned with sports, which we have a few, we’ve seen TV dollars make their way over to digital video and social video,” she said.

While Facebook has been the primary benefactor among social video platforms, Snapchat and YouTube have also seen upticks in advertiser demand. However, the rebounds on Snapchat and YouTube have been slower among advertisers compared to Facebook, said the agency executives. That’s in large part because of Facebook’s video footprint, which includes Instagram’s inventory. “Facebook is such a staple with the marketplace because you’ve got Facebook and Instagram,” said Brendan Gahan, partner and chief social officer at Mekanism. 

Additionally, advertisers continue to see Snapchat primarily as a means of reaching teens and twentysomethings, which makes the platform more of a supplement to Facebook or YouTube for brand advertising campaigns. Meanwhile, YouTube’s surplus of available inventory, thanks to people watching more videos on the platform, seems to have diluted the increased demand’s impact on ad prices. One agency executive said they have seen YouTube ad CPMs remain in the range of $5 to $8 before and during the crisis.

The brand advertising resurgence is not only a reflection of companies reopening for business but also preparing to do more business later in the year. “We’re starting to have some of those discussions: what are mid- and upper-funnel tactics to implement now to help performance as we come to the holiday season,” said Katy Lucey, director of paid social at Tinuiti.

Another contributing factor to the social video ad rebound is the lower cost to produce video ads at the moment. Following the crisis, many advertisers scrapped their campaigns’ creative assets to come up with new messages that better reflected the cultural climate. However, with physical productions shut down, advertisers had to rely on user-generated videos and animation. While the videos’ production quality may have been an odd fit on TV or streaming services, it is suited to social video platforms.

“The emphasis on lightweight video with user-generated content made it easier for brands to adopt video because historically it’s incredibly expensive to produce branded video,” Lucey said. Not only are these videos cheaper to produce, but they also perform better, fetching lower CPMs and higher clickthrough rates, said Lucey.

Within its commerce business, BuzzFeed is driving more direct relationships with retailers, said Nilla Ali, BuzzFeed’s svp of commerce. For home decor and furniture company Wayfair in April, BuzzFeed used social media, newsletter channels and on-site promotions to push commercial content to readers, increasing the brand’s monthly sales by 362% year-over-year. During this time, she said, publishers can look at not only selling ad campaigns featuring commerce opportunities but how to include storytelling and the discoverability of new brands and products in those campaigns.

“Marketers are more involved at the coalface of selling, necessity is the mother of all invention,” said one global magazine publishing executive. “If we can start justifying [marketing] by showing the clicks to the site and help sell products, that builds longer-term partnerships. We want to be a more important partner in the buying process.”

As the messages from brands about helping people through the virus have taken on a hollow ring and attention turns to driving revenue, selling products is of primary importance. That’s not to say all campaigns focussed on brand-building objectives have been on hold, but the number has greatly reduced. And to make themselves helpful, even indispensable, publishers flex their services to adapt to a changing market. 

This magazine publisher has also built more performance-driving ad products, one ad unit displays a carousel of retailers’ products during a 50%-off sale, for instance. Putting single products in these units used to be the reserve of the big U.S. retailers, but now mid-size U.S. and U.K. retailers are buying them too, said the publisher. To help drum up interest, the publisher is more flexible with the conditions of the ad buy, like charging more for the unit but offering fewer conversion guarantees or increasing the minimum spend but driving higher performance. It’s still working out the optimum benchmarks for the market climate.      

“[Brands] have had marketing budgets on hold and are bringing them back online — we can see the spend increasing — and they’re asking us to help them put a value on marketing spend,” said the publishing executive. “This current crunch is still about managing balance sheets and a cash-positive position.”

These are tentative seeds of optimism. Partly, publisher sources say, most people working today are doing so because they are also in a good position. May is beginning to look up as marketers realized what they needed to say and spend. In the U.K., the IAB estimates that June spending will be down around 16% versus last year.

“During this time I have been more receptive to a broader array of media owners,” said Lawrence Dodds, client director at Universal McCann London. “Some media owners have a lot of [audience] insight, some have innovation, some offer training. All of them tend to focus on where their strengths are.”

Publishers still face an uphill battle trying to compete with Facebook and Google for performance marketing budgets. “Facebook and Google have both been heavily pushing their shopping and commerce products,” added Dodds.

The Ad Fellows initiative is to help those in the program land jobs but this year’s class graduated in the midst of coronavirus. Did that change things?

In the middle of the pandemic we had the graduation of the third class; 35 of them graduated. We decided to have the biggest graduation virtually that the world has ever seen — we had Pharrell come in — to celebrate. Then, there was a conversation with some [agency] partners who said, “Maybe, we can’t hire them now.” One of the goals of the program is that we need to 90% of the people that come through the program hired. [Some agencies had hiring freezes in place and didn’t want to change that.] I said to them that in a moment like this we need to step up and say, “We’re committed to this. We’re going to deliver it.” This is maybe a smaller example in the bigger scheme of things, but I believe that everything starts with what you can control.

What was the result?

Actually, we ended up with 94% [of the graduates] getting hired. So we surpassed our objective. [Also,] we need to start talking less about diversity and more about equality. We don’t want diversity in the sense of as many groups as possible or separated. We want people to feel respected. We want people to feel included, but we also want people to feel equal. In this moment in particular, it’s maybe a little bit of an optimistic view but we have to aspire to equality and make it real.

We’ve heard from some black employees before that when you’re the only black person in the room it can be difficult to speak up.

That’s why diversity and inclusion are like two sides of the same coin. I always say, you could go on and hire all the diverse people you want, but if you don’t create the conditions inside your company for those people to flourish, to be able to speak up, to be able to have a voice, to be able to be understood, that those people won’t stay.

We have multiple crises going on. Has that changed how you are thinking about your marketing and advertising now?

As I was saying to my team the other day, “Truth is the best marketing.” So many companies have tried to make it up. But you can’t become an ethical leader overnight and just create an ad and expect people to believe it. And you can’t just talk about things that should be done or values that should be upheld but then don’t act on them. 

What have you done?

We created a series of programs [to help]. For example, we partnered with The New York Times to provide free access to the digital edition of The New York Times to 14 million kids in the country. We also started with supporting and feeding first responders and frontline employees. We donated more than $15 million during this time.

Did you reduce how much you were advertising?

No. I would call it more optimizing. We shifted our messages to be under the umbrella of being helpful so we were driving less direct promotional sales effort.

Do you plan to reduce advertising now because of this current social justice crisis?

We’re always looking at making sure that the tone of our messages are right and with the time. In our case, I don’t think we’re going to go and do an an ad about social justice. You’ll probably see us go and do more things [to help directly address these issues] instead of [a message in our] advertising. This is a very sensitive issue. We’re having a lot of the deep conversations with our employees internally. Talking is important but the doing is more important.

When do you think marketers will start spending as they had been?

We’re going to start seeing some signs of that happening in Q4 and then early next year but it’s difficult to predict because things are very volatile at the moment. 

Teen Vogue editor-in-chief Lindsay Peoples Wagner believes the time is now for change in media and fashion.

“I want to see brands, publications, everyone in the industry commit to a long, sustainable change,” Peoples Wagner said on this week’s episode of the Digiday Podcast.

Peoples Wagner is a rarity in glossy media: A 29-year-old black woman from a small university in the Midwest, without connections or a rich family bankrolling her initial career. Instead, she worked her way up, moonlighting dressing mannequins and working as a waitress. In October 2018, she was named the top editor of Teen Vogue, which has made a name for itself by melding fashion with social issues.

She recognizes her path isn’t for everyone — and media and creative professions need to adapt in order to expand opportunities to underrepresented groups.

“You have to be willing to hire different kinds of people who will challenge you,” Peoples Wagner said.

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

No agenda

“I don’t approach anything we do on Teen Vogue as this elitist way of telling you ‘how it really should be.’ It should be a community. Our readers have a voice. They should be able to be amplified on our site and not feel like it’s just people telling them how to think and feel. That’s the approach that we cover everything [with]. I’m not going to pretend something isn’t happening. I’d rather give you the tools and resources and knowledge to decide for yourself. I think it’s worked for us because that’s honestly the way things should be. “

Those suffering injustice often cover it best

“Even in my own position, it has to be younger people, a lot of times. There is this difference of opinions on a lot of different changes that need to be made. It has to come from people who are actually feeling hurt by things that aren’t being changed. It’s very appropriate. You see that with Greta [Thunberg], you see that with Malala [Yousafzai], with so many people that we’ve had on the covers — young people starting this revolution of saying ‘this isn’t good enough. We’re not going to just take what the adults and older people are giving us, because that’s unacceptable.’ The weight has a lot of times fallen on people and people of color, and specifically black people. If that’s the only way change is going to happen, we just have to keep doing it.”

Referral hiring can be deadly for diversity

“The hiring practice pipeline needs to be changed completely, honestly. The way we recruit people, find people — and I say ‘we’ as in people in the industry — is always too insular. Fashion can be such an inside baseball game of who you know. As someone who didn’t come from this industry, I know what it’s like to try to prove to people that you’re working hard. The hiring practices have to be reconsidered [in] how you’re even finding people in the first place. People are so lazy about just hiring a friend of a friend or someone they know. Too often in media there’s this idea that people want to hire only a person of color or black person who is palatable for white people, who they feel won’t speak out too much or cause any trouble or won’t ruffle any feathers. That bias has to change. You have to be willing to hire different kinds of people who will challenge you.”

Join us this Friday, June 12 at 12 p.m. ET on The New Normal, a weekly interactive show focused on how publishers are adapting their businesses. Chad Mumm, SVP of Entertainment at Vox Media Studios, will talk with Digiday editor-in-chief Brian Morrissey about its approach to remote video production and the future of live-streaming. Register here.

Advertising industry events and awards shows are awash with “purpose marketing” case studies. But in reality it’s a catch-all buzzword that’s difficult to define, and even trickier to forcibly execute. 

So many marketers now believe that part of their role is for their brand to become part of a social dialog or debate — even when it has nothing to do with them, Daniel Knapp, the IAB’s chief economist told me.

“Brands were looking for purpose,” Knapp said. But “they were over-inflating their own importance.”

That’s not to say companies aren’t important in advancing equality. Companies can be extremely helpful in supporting social justice organizations financially. Companies can recruit a diverse workforce, from the board to entry-level positions and actively contribute their employees’ career development. Companies can have sometimes difficult but always necessary conversations with their staff, customers, partners and communities about how they have conducted business in the past and how they plan to improve in the future. And companies can choose to make themselves accountable for those pledges — preferably by an independent auditor — to ensure their vocal support of the black community now doesn’t lose volume over time. 

Purpose marketing missteps aren’t just confined to when companies clumsily attempt to insert themselves into the cultural zeitgeist. They can also happen when advertisers anxiously seek to remove themselves from the conversation, too.

While 90% of brand safety tech vendor Cheq’s clients had requested some form of tightening of restrictions for stories related to the Floyd protests, an early poll of GroupM clients found that close to 60% of those surveyed had actively chosen not to blanket-block news related to the unrest, though some were discussing whether to pause campaigns. But that still meant 40% of the poll had sought to avoid appearing in news articles covering a huge story that is having a profound impact on society.

Will consumers really punish brands that have chosen to continue their ad campaigns without editing their message to reflect the current circumstances? And as one newspaper executive put it to me (with the obvious caveats of airline ads appearing next to plane crashes aside) : “What evidence really exists that being next to news has a detrimental impact on a brand?” 

If anything, one simple step marketers can take to be the change they want to see in the world at this moment is to actively spend money on the publications and platforms that are elevating the stories of black communities. 

But yet: “You can pretty much guarantee every black publication has been blocked,” by advertisers with overzealous content block lists, said Christopher Kenna, CEO of diversity focused media network Brand Advance. A report from Vice Media published in 2018 found terms such as “Asian,” “gay,” “black” and “interracial” appeared higher on many brands’ keyword block lists than words such as “death,” “gun,” “heroin” and “rape”.

Dino Myers-Lamptey, founder of marketing consultancy The Barber Shop, noted that advertisers missed the mark in their communications by broadcasting bland messages that didn’t convey the emotion of the issue. That could be a symptom of marketing and agency teams consisting of people who are removed from the audiences who are most affected by what’s going on, or teams that claim to have good representation but only certain people’s voices get to be heard.

While many consumer brands have a relevant role to play in the conversations surrounding the current crisis, we don’t need to hear from the potato chips Twitter account right now. But people — customers, employees, shareholders — are often interested in hearing what corporations plan to do.

“I don’t see this as a marketer’s messaging going, ‘we are this’ and designing something up,” said Myers-Lamptey. “Those things have usually got an annoying hidden sell in them. Ultimately they’re doing it to generate more sales to make people like them more. That’s the insensitivity. [The message] should be coming from the leader.”

This pivotal moment serves as a reminder that companies need to get their own houses in order first before attempting to take a stand publicly. Listening is usually more powerful than tweeting.