Adnatomy: How 3 Worldwide Teams Produced a Pokémon Ad Remotely

How have brands, agencies and production companies been pivoting to accommodate the new reality of remote production? Adweek’s new video series, Adnatomy, explores this question. We’re sitting down with the teams behind some of the most interesting ads of the last few months to discuss how commercial production has changed as a result of the…

Gannett Sells Location Data Firm SweetIQ to Uberall

Gannett announced today it is selling SweetIQ, a location data company it bought in 2017, to Berlin-based Uberall for an undisclosed sum. By offloading SweetIQ, Gannett becomes the latest publisher to divest from recently acquired ad-tech assets as privacy laws become more stringent, making the possession of such assets a potential liability. SweetIQ was folded…

The National Guard’s Fire-Mapping Drones Get an AI Upgrade

Algorithms that quickly track the movement of wildfires could help firefighters‚ but the tech could also be put to non-humanitarian use.

B2B Marketers Must Take Personalization Further Than Their B2C Peers

“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 Michael McLaren, global CEO, B2B Group, at Merkle. As more customer engagements move away from in-person contact to digital channels and virtual environments, the trends that were already driving the need forContinue reading »

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Disney Sells TrueX Ad Tech Unit; Snapchat Puts A New Spin On The Takeover Buy

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Tried And True Disney has unloaded its video ad tech unit TrueX to location vendor Gimbal for less than $100 million, The Wall Street Journal reported. TrueX specializes in reward-based interactive units that encourage people to engage with ads in exchange for fewer or no commercials.Continue reading »

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‘Taking a bite’: Major political and news headlines are sucking up all the oxygen on Facebook

In the home stretch of any presidential election season, it sometimes seems like there is no time or space to discuss other stories. Throw in a lingering pandemic, a resurgent uproar over racial injustice and burning reminders of climate change, and some publishers are feeling crowded out on Facebook.

Over the past few months, an abundance news and political content — and political ads — has cut into the referral traffic for some publishers, particularly those focused on lifestyle and entertainment content. Clark Benson, the CEO of Ranker, said that Facebook referral traffic to his entertainment and pop culture sites Ranker and Watchworthy, which is delivered across 30 different pages with close to 48 million Facebook fans, has been down about 12% since July, with the drop much more pronounced among Ranker’s U.S. pages than its international ones.

Melissa Chowning, the founder of audience development consultancy Twenty First Digital, said referral traffic from Facebook was down for 16 of her firm’s 18 clients, which range from Foreign Affairs to Philadelphia Magazine, by an average of 39% from late June to late September. 

“The election campaigns are really just taking a bite,” Chowning said, adding that publishers with large audiences in swing states have been especially vulnerable.

In a year when coronavirus has battered most publishers’ businesses, the drop was even more unwelcome for another reason: It has forced some publishers to spend more money to distribute their content using ads, right at a moment when political advertising dollars are pouring into Facebook: Close to $952 million is expected to be spent on political ads on platforms this election season, according to Kantar.

“I have some clients who have audience minimums they have to hit every month,” said Chowning.  “I’ve told them they’re just going to have to spend a little more in this area.”

Politics content has historically dominated Facebook from a referral traffic standpoint. According to the analytics service Parsely, the only time that content classified as Law, Government and Politics did not drive the greatest share of referral traffic was earlier this spring, when news about the spreading coronavirus captivated the entire country, Parsely data insights lead Kelsey Arendt said.

Over the summer, Law, Government and Politics referral traffic dominated again, rising as high as 29% of referral traffic in some weeks, Arendt said. Lately it has begun to come down. In the past two weeks, that category accounted for 23% of referral traffic on Facebook. News rose to second place, accounting for 9%, Arendt said.

The top ten content categories on Facebook only account for about 60% of the referral traffic Facebook sends to publishers, with the remaining 40% spread out across more than 300 different content categories, each of which account for under 1% of the platform’s referral traffic, according to Parsely analysis.

That means surges in top categories can sometimes crowd out those smaller categories, especially those that target audiences in swing states But with so many different things influencing what appears in Facebook’s newsfeed, some publishers have given up on trying to figure out the root cause.

“We don’t even bother worrying about why something is causing a change,” Ranker’s Benson said. “We just go back to our tactics toolbox and say, ‘Maybe we should try more image-friendly posts.’”

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Food52 jumps further on the streaming bandwagon with its new OTT app

On Wednesday, Food52 will launch its own OTT app, two years after the food publisher first entered the streaming space.

Food52’s first OTT channel premiered as part of streaming service Xumo’s platform in November 2018 and has since averaged 1.9 million views and more than 56,000 hours watched per month. Revenue from advertising on Xumo has increased by 341% since the channel’s launch, according to a company spokesperson.

A year ago, a majority stake of Food52 was sold to venture firm The Chernin Group for $83 million.

But CEO Amanda Hesser and her team sees a larger opportunity to not only increase revenue earned from advertisers on the streaming channel, but to also build out devoted audiences with the OTT platform, despite not having any current plans to tie a subscription model to the app.

The new app will be available on the major streaming services including Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire and Android TV.

The company has seen revenue increase by 87% year over year from August 2019 to August 2020, though the company would not disclose its current earnings. Food52 gets north of 80% of its revenue from its e-commerce business, according to the company spokesperson, which has expanded into a marketplace of kitchen and home goods including its own line of products.

The other 20% of the company’s revenue comes from advertising. Revenue from video advertising has increased 150% year to date, while the company’s overall number of brand partnerships have increased by 82% year over year. Behr, The Balvenie and Visit Britain are three of the largest advertisers on Food52’s video franchises, with The Balvenie being the largest advertiser on OTT in 2019.

Planet Oat, a dairy-alternative company, is the launch partner for the new OTT app, which was a deal in the high six-figure range, according to Matt Greenberg, svp of brand partnerships at Food52. He would not disclose hard revenue figures.

As part of that deal, Planet Oat will have its ingredients featured in recipes in several different shows, as well as have its traditional ads in the commercial breaks.

“We don’t think of brand partnerships in silos,” said Greenberg, but “video is something that we know is at top of mind for advertisers.” Therefore, he added, the OTT expansion is part of a larger video strategy for offering more long-form video content that gives the company’s advertisers more options in that category. 

A strong appeal of expanding into the OTT space at this moment, according to Paul Canetti, CEO of MAZ Systems, a company that develops OTT platforms for publishers, is that while ad rates are dropping on the internet, OTT CPMS are holding strong in the range of $40 to $60.

“There is also a dream for a [smaller], more dedicated audience, but each person ends up being worth a lot,” said Canetti.

As for next year, Greenberg said his team is planning for the OTT business to grow organically by 150% year over year and to have 10 brand partners working at the scale of the Planet Oat partnership. 

The OTT app will launch with five series, said Food52 CEO Amanda Hesser, including three that are being carried over from the publisher’s YouTube channel: “Bake it Up a Notch,” “Big Little Recipes” and “Genius Recipes with Kristen Miglore.” Three additional shows are currently in production to premier on the platform, she added.

Its YouTube channel, which is where the three previously mentioned shows first debuted, saw number of subscriptions and total number of views double year over year, from more than 110,000 subscribers in 2019 to more than 225,000 subscribers this year. The channel is pacing to reach 20 million views this year as well, up from 10 million last year, according to the company.

But Food52 executive producer Gabriella Mangino said that her team is planning for “a lot of overlap between OTT and YouTube” from a programming perspective. The difference between the platforms will be in the audience’s consumption habits, she said.

“On YouTube, we’ll see people jumping from series to series,” she said, with the platform’s algorithm directing viewers to the next video within the same topic versus the next in the series they’re watching. “They’re exploring topics instead of series.”

In the OTT app, however, audiences can sit down and binge a series easily in a way that’s familiar to audiences who are used to binging a Netflix or Hulu show since all three providers now live on the same platforms.

What’s more, the audience that comes to Food52’s OTT app is going to be made up of dedicated fans of the platform, said Canetti. The person searching  for Food52 app “cares in a way that the random passerby [on YouTube] doesn’t,” he said.

Having another long-form video platform is also giving the company more opportunity to hone its internal talent — like Food52’s baking consultant at large Erin McDowell, who hosts “Bake it Up a Notch” — as well as create programming around external talent.

The reason why we’re seeing many more publishers enter the OTT world right now is because the barrier to entry has significantly decreased, according to Canetti, especially for those companies who license the platform technology versus building their own.

He said that a publisher could potentially build their own OTT app or channel for under $100,000 and start competing with the Netflixes and Hulus of the world, whereas that audience was only potentially available to large networks a few years ago. 

“There is potential to build up audiences by series,” said Mangino.

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‘All taking a chance on each other’: Jasper Wang on Defector Media’s collective ownership structure

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In recent years, unionizing newsrooms has given journalism-focused media companies a bit more say over how their workplaces are run. But Defector Media is something else entirely.

The group of 18 former Deadspin employees — who quit the company after a bitter clash with management last year — have launched the company with a much more collective ownership structure. Like its predecessor, Defector Media focuses on sports and culture.

With a two thirds majority, they have the power to vote out the site’s editor-in-chief — or this week’s guest on the Digiday Podcast, Defector’s vp of revenue and operations, Jasper Wang.

“Is it a little bit more stressful? Sure. But they’re all taking a chance on each other, and they’re taking a chance on me. So I gotta bet on myself, too,” Wang said on the podcast.

“I think probably more executives should feel on their toes and beholden to the experiences that their employees are having.”

For now, employees and shareholders are one and the same. Anyone who joins the company will have the same voting rights.

Defector also provides full transparency on how much everyone is making, which “has driven some awkward conversations. But you’re just getting that out at the beginning rather than along the way,” Wang said.

Beyond its unique housekeeping model, the site is betting on subscriptions. Defector, which launched just this month, had a “dare to dream” target of 30,000 paying members by the end of the year, Wang said, for which they’re ahead of schedule.

Part of Wang’s calculus is that Deadspin’s brand resided not just in the Gawker umbrella that owned it, but in the names of its writers, most of whom are now at Defector.

By the same token that Substack is proving highly remunerative for certain journalists on staff and the Deadspin pedigree should attract subscribers who miss the old site’s irreverence and coverage of both sports and politics.

“It was clear that the dedicated following would be there,” Wang said.

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

A four-part set of insights

“One is, we reject the idea that the media property brand is all that matters. The byline matters, the collective group of writers — that matters. People will follow the writers. We see that in the way Substack is gaining success as well. [Second], there was a clear need in the marketplace. There’s pretty little by way of accountability journalism in the sports space right now. ESPN The Magazine is gone, Sports Illustrated is pretty different. So there’s a gap in the sports coverage that’s antagonistic, almost, to power and authority. Third, I think media consumers are just more and more comfortable with paying for content. This is a trend that gets talked about on your podcast, the speed at which subscriptions have grown especially over the last six months with the pandemic.

And finally, like a lot of industries, the technology and surrounding ecosystem make it theoretically easier than every to put together a revenue generating company pretty quickly. We outsource and partner on basically everything. At the moment, I’m the one full-time operations person in house. We have an array of other partners and lawyers and accountants and insurers and folks who have media expertise.

The hardest part is just the people willing to hold hands and jump together. Once you have that, building out a business scaffolding is probably easier than it’s ever been.”

How collective ownership works

“At the moment employees and shareholders are one and the same. But going forward, we still want the focus to be on employees. Everybody who joins will get basically the same voting rights in the company and the same compensation sharing as everybody else.

The sustainability question

“We’re co-owners in the business and we’re sort of thinking of compensation like a law firm [but] an order of magnitude smaller. We take a small salary throughout the year and then we settle up throughout a year where we can pay it out. People keep asking ‘what’s the number where you guys are sustainable?’ And the answer is, we’re sustainable now. It’s just a matter of what our team can tolerate in terms of their take-home compensation.”

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