Month: September 2020

Bloomberg QuickTake — formerly known as TicToc, with the name later changed for obvious reasons — is the company’s three-year-old short form video platform that was originally built to appeal to a mobile Twitter audience.

That was wave one, according to Jean Ellen Cowgill, general manager of QuickTake. Now the platform is expanding into streaming with the inclusion of the video brand on Bloomberg’s OTT app, which is relaunching on November 9.

This move will attempt to further break the company’s video coverage away from the financial news content that its television network offers in order to reach a broader, younger audience from every business sector, said Cowgill.

In the final episode of Digiday’s The New Normal, hosted by Digiday Media president and editor-in-chief Brian Morrissey, Cowgill and Bloomberg chief growth officer Scott Havens, discuss how they built a new business within Bloomberg and have since expanded the video platform from its native Twitter into the streaming market.

Why QuickTake isn’t Bloomberg TV

QuickTake has over 100 video producers, editors and other staffers dedicated to building it, which Havens said was important to have right off the bat to distinguish the products internally.

Because while the QuickTake team sources ideas and content from Bloomberg’s 2,700 journalists and analysts, having one singular production team to create 24 hours worth of content for both platforms seven days a week would leave one or both lacking, he said.

But the biggest difference between QuickTake and BTV is their audiences: BTV being very inside the financial industry and QuickTake covering the whole of business news. Bloomberg’s other sub-brands and verticals, like Businessweek, will be pulled from as well to bring those “franchises” alive, Cowgill said.

Both of the platforms’ streaming services are offered through the Bloomberg Media OTT app and Havens added that it also makes QuickTake’s introduction to OTT easier because Bloomberg TV already paved the way in establishing deals with streaming providers. 

“We’ve got paper in place and a lot of long standing relationships so it’s more about adding QuickTake to the mix versus starting from scratch,” he said. 

Beyond the OTT app and the social media presence, Cowgill said QuickTake also has partnerships with free, ad-supported television providers and connected TVs, which don’t require a viewer to download the Bloomberg OTT app, thus allowing for more discoverability as they scroll through the channels.

Still sticking to social

Because QuickTake was first launched as a 24/7 news source for Twitter, Cowgill said her team learned about what works on social and for a mobile audience, and what doesn’t.

But now QuickTake will be available on OTT and short form content for social won’t cut it as streaming audiences come to the platform for longer docu-series and other binge-able content. 

But this doesn’t mean that QuickTake is sunsetting its social distribution strategy. The increase in content production that will take place for the OTT app could lead to the temptation to simply cut down that content and republish it on Twitter and other mobile platforms, Cowgill said, but the learnings that her team gleaned from being social-only for the first two years indicated that that strategy will not work for a social media audience. The content has to be created with social media in mind from the start. 

Therefore, there will be a mix of content between the “longer form experience for the bigger screen on their TV at home and also … the shorter insights that are right for them when they’re dipping in and out of their phones,” said Gowgill. 

Entering the streaming wars

Despite a surplus of media companies and networks launching their own streaming platforms, Havens is optimistic that there is still a lot of white space in the news and analysis content category.

“There is so much battle going on in entertainment, but we’re not entering that threat. That’s getting saturated with some major players,” he said.

Cowgill said she thinks that this is still the beginning of the next phase of television and based on consumer habits and the increase of cord cutters, even in just the past few months, it indicates that there is more and more consumer interest in streaming.

The ad model makes sense

At its onset, QuickTake is ad-supported but Cowgill thinks the platform has a competitive edge for standing out.

“A lot of what we think about business television today is really markets television, or ‘stocks as sport,’” Cowgill said. But that is not the mission of QuickTake. It’s looking to tell stories through the lens of business more so than give updates on Wall Street.

QuickTake has reached more than 50 million people across all of its social channels and Cowgill said that her team will be marketing the OTT channel to those platforms to try and cross-pollinate the social audience with the OTT audience. But despite CPMs for OTT being one of the most lucrative at the moment, building an OTT audience is not easy.

So, she said, her team is looking to sell more cross-platform deals that will increase the scale of the audience of these deals.

Over this time period, Snapchat guarantees advertisers that those campaigns will reach at least 40% of their target audience 15 times. The burst of ads over a concentrated period of time could help offset the fact that ads on Snapchat are easily skippable and consequently less likely to be seen. 

“The high frequency of the ads with this media buy on Snapchat could make people more amenable to the messaging if the creative execution is there,” said Simon Gill, the chief creative officer at Isobar. “That’s a simple yet powerful behavioral trait that marketers can exploit by doing this Burst over a few days in a number of different places on the app.”  

There is no fixed price for Platform Burst campaigns but Snapchat execs have pitched early iterations at around £100,000 ($127,000) according to the execs. 

For that outlay, advertisers can split their campaign into different formats across different parts of the app. A Platform Burst campaign could cover Story Ads in the Discover section of the app, Snap Ads in a media companies’ Publisher Stories and the TV-like Snapchat Commercials between Snapchat Shows, for example. 

“Snapchat is pitching this as a great media buy for competitive moments like product launches,” said a media buyer on the condition of anonymity. 

None of the execs Digiday spoke to said they had booked a Platform Burst campaign in the U.K. yet, though all three did say their clients had shown interest going into a competitive holiday season. Snapchat has, however, tested the campaign format in other markets such as the Middle East. and across tech, telco and entertainment verticals.

It’s a steep price to pay for something new at a time when advertisers are looking for the complete opposite. The alternative Take Over ad on TikTok, for example, costs around £70,000 ($88,920) while Twitter’s Spotlight corresponding ad takeover product costs £30,000, ($38,110) according to a rate card reviewed by Digiday and media buyer respectively. 

Whether advertisers are willing to stump up the cash for the media buy depends on how much of their TV dollars they’re prepared to move into online video platforms. And Snapchat is becoming a bigger contender for video ad budgets in markets like the U.K. and the U.S. because it has an audience who seem more engaged with that type of content. Over the last year, commercial execs(at Snapchat have stressed that “more than half of the U.S. Generation Z population are watching Snap Originals. 

“A guaranteed buy like Platform Burst could interest advertisers because it removes the uncertainty of fluctuating costs in an auction,” said Carly Carson, director of social at digital agency PMG. 

In some ways, Platform Burst has a similar premise to TikTok’s Take Over ads that let an advertiser dominant the first post someone sees when they open the app. With the rollout of the new campaign format, Snapchat is widening its moat against TikTok and other challengers for short-form video budgets.

The media buyers interviewed for this article said the rollout of Platform Burst is a timely reminder that Snapchat has been quietly building a robust video business during a year when TikTok has been pushing its own to advertisers. 

“Snapchat’s Platform Burst feature won’t do much to retain advertisers looking to shift to TikTok, however, it may be appealing to those looking to shift linear TV dollars into digital,” said Carson

Matt works on the engineering team at ad-tech company Polar, which since September, is giving its 30 employees Fridays off indefinitely to explore their own passions and hobbies — The Someday Experiment — after a successful trial of a four-day week in May.

“The Someday Experiment isn’t a three-day weekend. It’s about trying to create space to invest in something that’s important to you,” said Polar CEO Kunal Gupta, who is using his Fridays to write a book on meditation, (and guides a zen two-minute Zoom meditation during press interviews).

The four-day working week has been a trend before the pandemic — which, as we all know, has been the great accelerator. Earlier champions are Microsoft Japan and design tech company Normally. Basecamp and other tech companies have Fridays off during the summer. This adoption was spurred by a convergence of trends: tech advancements led to more constant contact, a growing understanding of attention and what fuels productivity and placing higher importance on a work-life balance.

In May, The Telegraph was among those who implemented a four-day week for non-editorial staff in line with pay reductions. While this is commercially motivated, other companies — such as Ireland-based developer 3D Issue and U.K. magazine publisher and events organizer Target Publishing — made similar moves and noticed no negative impacts, so continued with salaries restored.  

The four-day week is very ad tech. Or at least, very tech. High-profit tech companies are au fait with redesigning working processes, from communications tools to remote work and annual retreats. Silicon Valley’s way is to “take something fraught or complicated, utterly revolutionize it through smarts, force of will and an unironic ‘mission’ to change the world and then figure out whether it was a good idea,” wrote The Times’ of London’s West Coast correspondent Danny Fortson. 

Making the switch to a four-day week isn’t a smooth process: Polar reduced its meeting times to 30 minutes, shaved Slack channels from 200 to 30 and halved the number of sent Slack messages. Ongoing employee surveys and interviews will check it staff stay as happy and productive as they were in May.  

While it’s hard to attribute sales or cost-savings directly to a four-day week, it feeds into the amorphous view of culture — harder than ever to foster when companies aren’t used to pandemic-induced remote work. Polar has grown revenue 50% year-on-year and profits are up. This buoyancy allows it to undertake a four-day week experiment and could also be because of it. Now, the company has more discipline in which clients it takes on, focussing on larger agencies after seeing that revenue from smaller agency clients is less viable.   

Still, a knock on the four-day week’s notion is that it’s suited to knowledge-based rather than service-based industries, critics say it plays to “professional elitism” (a bus driver doesn’t have the luxury for this experiment, for instance).

For example, when Buffer, an 88 person remote-first company with staffers across the globe, implemented a four-day working week from June, the only team that it didn’t work for is the customer services team, what it calls its Advocacy Team. For Buffer, this is “an exception to the idea that fewer hours could result in similar productivity.” The company is working out how they can also make this shift longer-term by reducing the number of tickets that come through by giving customers what they need. 

“When covid started … the response to surveys, and anecdotally, found that folks were tired,” said Hailley Griffis, head of public relations at Buffer. “Our CEO’s goal was to get Buffer through [the pandemic] unscathed, one debt companies are building up is burnout,” she said. And surveys showed the four-day week improved staff autonomy, lowered stress levels and increased happiness.

Earlier on, opting for ultimate flexibility, Buffer let teams choose what day off day they wanted. The company was split into Wednesday or Friday off. The outshot was there were only three guaranteed days of crossover, which, when also dealing with multiple time zones, became untenable. Now it’s settled on Fridays off.

“We adjusted goals, expectations, deadlines and meetings,” said Griffis. “The biggest thing is changing expectations, otherwise people work late and long hours. For us the purpose is to avoid burnout, it will feel like a crunch if the expectations don’t change.” 

Other critics question how hard people must be working if they can cut 20% of their working time. Proponents of the move argue that the perception people give 20% of their value and time is flawed, particularly on a Friday, nicely illustrated by going into most media or marketing companies on a Friday after lunch.  

For tech companies, the four-day week incites laser focus and shrewd prioritization. Whether it will take hold outside of tech circles remains to be seen.

“If progressive companies take a gamble and offer a four-day week they will have the pick of talent,” said Ken Charman, chief executive of digital reward system provider uFlexReward. “Others will have to follow. “But global competition could upset that. That depends on who you are competing with. In China, the norm is working six days a week [as in the U.K. and U.S. 100 years ago], or are you competing with the person next to you on the train.”