Month: November 2020

Thanks to a global pandemic canceling in-person conferences this year, Under 30 also had a virtual, month-long Hackathon where honorees and applicants attempted to solve issues that were impacting communities in Detroit, Mich. Under 30 selects a city to work closely with several years at a time and Detroit has been the focus of the franchise since 2019 after being recommended by AOL founder Steve Case, according to chief content officer Randall Lane.

Beyond that, Under 30 has given Forbes another avenue to sell its advertising clients on cross-platform campaigns for top dollar, matching sponsorship deals that accompany decades-old franchises like the Forbes 400 Richest list or The World’s Most Powerful Women list.

“In just 10 years, the 30 Under 30 platform has added immeasurable value to our brand,” according to the publication’s CEO Mike Federle. The company declined to disclose hard revenue figures attached to the franchise.

Several of the franchise campaigns are years-long deals, according to chief revenue officer Jessica Sibley. One such brand is whiskey brand Macallan which is on its seventh year with Under 30. Quicken Loans is on its second year of a three-year deal that was tied to Under 30 Summit’s presence in Detroit.

A key selling point, Sibley said, is the community of close to 10,000 entrepreneurs who have been on the list over the years and all together are under the age of 40.

The demographic of honorees not only bring Forbes’ average audience age down quite significantly, but this community, as well as the readers and followers of the franchise tend to be more ethnically diverse and female-skewing than the other Forbes franchises or its general readership, said Lane.

This year’s list consists of 600 total names, culminating from 30 entrepreneurs across 20 categories, including Food & Drink, Finance, Celebrities, Education and Sports. Of the list, nearly half of the honorees identify as a person of color, while 40% are women. The editorial team helps sort through nominations and does vetting of finalists before passing the names along to judges that consist of industry leaders in each category. This year, Taylor Swift judged the music group.

“This audience is hard to reach in this particular ‘grown up way,’” said media consultant Gren Manuel. “The typical Forbes advertisers will jump on this opportunity to reach the younger and attractive audience” in a way that replicates a traditional and formal media buy.

It’s not just the honorees themselves that are pulling advertisers, Sibley said. It’s their large-scale social media followings and their colleagues and peers that are associating themselves with the Forbes brand after seeing the people in their life end up on the list.

Sibley said that Under 30 has brought in many new brands that might not otherwise advertise with Forbes. One example, she said, is that Forbes has worked with Microsoft in the past, but the tech giant’s Surface brand started advertising with the publication because of Under 30 in particular. Shoe wear brand Cole Haan is another advertiser that Sibley suspects would not have advertised with Forbes if not for the franchise.

The largest scale of Forbes’ audience is on its website and on its social channels. (The magazine had a total monthly circulation of about 650,000 as of June 30, according to the Alliance for Audited Media and the website had 75 million unique visitors in October, according to Comscore.)

“We’ve got limited space at an event and we’ve got limited space in a one issue magazine. We have Under 30 content all year long,” including in other magazines and at non-Under 30 specific events, Sibley said. “No one just wants to buy a print ad. No one wants to just be at an event for a couple of days.”

Delta Airlines, for example, came to Sibley’s team earlier this year to create an advisory board consisting of 18 past and current Under 30 honorees. The advisory team consisted of entrepreneurs from various categories tasked with helping the airline modify its “red-eye” flight experience. Sibley did not disclose hard revenue figures associated with the partnership. 

Ken Herts, chief operating officer at The Lenfest Institute, said that for business publications that are looking to monetize a segment of their audience, like Forbes did with young entrepreneurs, they have to make sure that it is not only an attractive enough community that will draw in the readership from an editorial perspective, but will also appeal to advertisers in a way that will keep the franchise alive.

And the community needs to have enough scale — hundreds or thousands of honorees versus limiting it to 30 total honorees as the name 30 Under 30 name implies — in order to keep advertisers coming back, Hertz said.

“The idea of younger entrepreneurship has gone from a curiosity to the mainstream,” said Lane. 

Outpost’s initial revenue impact is likely to be limited — it is available in just one of the 12 cities that the Infatuation covers (New York City), and it will not supplant or replace the brand partnerships and experiential businesses that drive most of the Infatuation’s revenue, CEO Chris Stang said. But Outpost is part of a much bigger move into commerce that it expects to continue, even after in-person dining and events start to become normal again next year.

“We think demand [for Outpost] exists in a post-COVID world,” said Nell Potter, who heads up Outpost in addition to serving as general manager of Zagat, which the Infatuation bought from Google in 2018. Potter said that she thinks Outpost could expand into Chicago and Los Angeles next.

The idea for Outpost first emerged this summer, Potter said, as she and her colleagues were trying to figure out ways to serve the Infatuation’s audience as restaurants stayed closed to in-person dining and brands remained leery of sponsoring large gatherings. Earlier that year, in April, the Infatuation had laid off 15 of its 90 employees.

“We started thinking about the opportunities that exist outside the four walls of the restaurant,” Potter said. “We knew that our audience missed going to restaurants; they were missing the way to interact on a deeper level.”

So a team led by Potter began reaching out to small pockets of the Infatuation’s newsletter subscribers to gauge their interest in different kinds of services, ranging from virtual classes to curated grocery boxes.

Over time, the possibility of a marketplace emerged, though its offerings have changed as the second wave of coronavirus has built. At the outset, Potter said that Outpost had been evenly balanced between in-person experiences and goods, but today offerings are more tilted toward goods or virtual offerings, all offered by restaurants or culinary talents that the company has already vetted.

Like every other consumer-facing publisher, the Infatuation made some big changes this year to adapt. Its events and experiences business, which played a key role in both its advertising and membership businesses — the company hosted more than 65 events in 2019 — had to scale back dramatically in the face of local coronavirus restrictions.

“Being that our business is covering restaurants, a lot changed really quickly,” Stang said. “We had to help people make decisions inside their home, not just outside their home.”

Some of that has meant moving staff into different roles. The staff that helps maintain Outpost, for example, came over from the Infatuation’s event production staff, Potter said; an outside consultant helps manage the restaurant side of the marketplace.

Some of it has meant re-purposing existing products. For example, Text Rex, the Infatuation’s members-only restaurant recommendation text message service, has been recast as a service that allows members to ask for cocktail or drinking advice from bartenders or sommeliers.

Historically, few media companies have explored marketplace models because of the significant infrastructure they require. But if advertising continues to challenge most publishers, more, especially those that have authority and vertical focus, may consider them, said Joe Procopio, a serial entrepreneur who currently counsels founders.

“Content and product are starting to merge into this one single thing,” Procopio said. “It’s good that they’re [The Infatuation] starting to explore their reviews as a kind of content marketing engine.”

Publishers’ expertise in attracting audiences and building loyalty among them solves one of the biggest problems most businesses have. And offering a new way to leverage the expertise and recommendation at the heart of the Infatuation’s brand could make sense.

“It’s going to take a lot of infrastructure to support,” Procopio said. “But they’re centering it right.”

Despite the name, CollegeHumor isn’t a spring chicken anymore. Founded in 1999, the comedy site was acquired by IAC in 2006 and grew into one of the most successful video publishers on YouTube.

It also went premium with shows for TV like Adam Ruins Everything, and launched a subscription streaming service called Dropout. But whereas CollegeHumor succeeded in terms content side, business has been another story.

In January, IAC decided it was no longer willing to finance CollegeHumor and laid off more than 100 employees and then sold the business to Sam Reich, who had joined the company in 2006 to build out its original video business.

In his estimation, there’s a helpful paradox at the center of the company’s content strategy. “When we began, it was with what we thought was a really mature thesis for how to run a subscription business: We’re going to a have our acquisition content and our attention content,” Reich said on the Digiday Podcast.

The acquisition content had higher budgets and shorter run time, but in the end, the cheaper, longer-form stuff outperformed it on all fronts.

“In other words, the most expensive content was less effective in getting people in or keeping them there than the less expensive content,” Reich said. “And if that hadn’t been the case, I don’t know that we would have taken over the company.”

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

Not quite in college anymore

“The CollegeHumor audience in general and AVOD has broadened as time has gone on. When we began producing original content, our core viewership base were in their early 20s. Now thanks to YouTube, we skew both a little bit younger — in the sense of 14-year-olds reading Seventeen Magazine (CollegeHumor’s kind of an aspirational brand for ‘hey, look, I can grow up and have fun and be funny’) — and then also folks who have been with the brand for a long time. So the average is probably like 35. But the most ravenous fan of us is probably between the ages of 20 and 25. We’re about 60-40 male to female, which I think surprises some people who would expect that we would be more male. But even over the course of the last handful of years, we’ve tried to distance ourselves even further from that kind of frat boy image that we would rather not have. That really doesn’t feel like us. We index highly with LGBTQIA folks. There’s a lot of representation on the channels. So I think both on AVOD and subscription, there’s a lot of overlap there.”

Two different stories, zero home runs

“Certainly social media took a huge chunk out of all of these mid-tier publisher businesses. And we can talk about the ethics of that and how it transformed our businesses and so on. Funny or Die — we were in the exact same position at the exact same time: we went YouTube all the way. Funny or Die said ‘no, we’re going to maintain a video player on our own channel,’ and neither of us really won, you know? So kind of ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t.’ I think the advantage that we have now is a lot of subscribers, and a loyal audience, which, yeah, can be tricky to monetize. But to the extent we can figure it out, that’s a business.”

When cheaper is better

“We saw this opportunity to sort of right size it. ‘Okay, if the expensive content isn’t moving the needle, maybe that opens up a window for us to do a less expensive version of this.’ And it’s that pitch that we made around town to try to sell CollegeHumor. And it’s only when no one took us up on that offer that I went ‘you know what, I think I believe enough in this to try to do it myself.’”

CollegeHumor isn’t a soldier in the streaming wars

“Netflix, HBO Max, Disney Plus… they don’t scare me in [the] sense [that] I’m not their competition. Arguably, the more truly premium stuff that gets produced by Hollywood for streaming — in other words, the more these services represent the higher echelon of Hollywood — the better it is for us. Because we’re an alternative to that. What we are is scrappy, experimental, weird. And there will continue to be a market for that, especially on the internet, which has historically always celebrated those things.”

A post-Covid renaissance for higher production values?

“We are developing this big catalog right now of content shot by video conference. But if we’re being honest, remote Twitch streams were a thing before all this went down. I think by the time we can be get back into the studio and do stuff that’s of more traditional production value, there will be a kind of a celebration from the community like ‘oh, thank God, I missed this.’ As an audience member, I’m fatiguing of Zoom stuff. We’re trying to find ways to mitigate that feel fun and interesting. With Gamechanger, specifically, the fact that we were shooting remotely meant we could get some talent to the table who otherwise might have not done the show — so we had Tony Hawk do an episode, we had Giancarlo Esposito do an episode. We’re trying to champion ideas and formats that really use the fact that we’re shooting remotely as an asset as opposed to a drawback. But it takes a lot of ingenuity — let’s put it that way.”

Not even the coronavirus crisis has been able to slow gaming’s growth. In fact, the games industry has thrived at a time when other entertainment mediums have floundered. Gaming sales in the U.S. in August rose 37% compared to the previous year to $3.3 billion, per market research firm NPD Group. That was the fifth straight month of huge jumps in sales compared to the same periods in 2019.

But most advertisers were caught off guard by this surge. Sure, gaming was already well on its way to taking up a larger portion of attention away from other mediums. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said as much in January 2019 when he branded Fortnite a bigger threat to the streaming kingpin than Disney, HBO et al.

Most marketers, however, hadn’t gambled on this shift happening so fast. And when they finally did catch a glimpse of gaming as a cultural touchstone at the onset of the pandemic they didn’t have a playbook for in-game ads. A few months later and most advertisers still don’t have a full plan in place, but that doesn’t mean they’re not trying to figure it out — quite the contrary. 

Bud Light is arguably further along than others in that regard. Over the last five years the brewer has pitched itself as the main beer of esports, funding everything from teams to players, channels to competitions. Now, it wants to do the same for games, starting with a branded character next month for as yet unannounced title.

“In the month of December we’re going to be launching an in-game video character which we think is going to transcend anything we’ve been able to do with the brand through our partnerships,” said Joe Barnes, director of sports marketing at Bud Light. “The thing we love about gaming [as a marketing medium] is that it’s not so established that there are predetermined rules of engagement. That means we’re able to innovate and do things that have never been done before.” 

It’s a far cry from a decade ago when Microsoft tried to convince advertisers to buy ads in Xbox games. Back then, the infrastructure wasn’t in place to make in-game advertisers a cost-effective endeavour. There were no ad tech vendors like Anzu around to help marketers buy impressions at scale, video game publishers weren’t as open to working with advertisers as they are now and it was expensive to hard code ads into games. As the infrastructure around in-game ads has matured, they’re getting more experimental — and more frequent. 

“Over the course of 2020, we’ve had 21 partners participate in our new in-game SR Arena Banners programs including Mastercard, Spotify, and Mercedes-Benz,” said Naz Aletaha, head of global esports partnerships at Riot Games. “Our partnerships enable brands to be woven throughout the fabric of our game and sport in ways that are meaningful and drive value to them and our community.”

Naturally, agencies sense an opportunity. Dentsu launched its specialist gaming division DGame in the U.K. and Ireland over the summer and has several clients including Kellogg’s, Mondelez and Santander. 

“The in-game advertising boom has caught our interest because it’s the type of inventory that can be bought via ad tech now,” said Peter Jacobs, DGame’s client partner. “We’ve seen some big developers want to engage with us because there’s untapped potential for revenue as well as the fact they need expertise [that] can help advertisers respect the player’s experience.”

Take Duracell for example. Earlier this month, the advertiser became the first-shirt sponsor of footballer Gareth Bale’s Eleven Sports team inside the Fifa 21 game. The deal will last for the remainder of the 2020-2021 season, though it could be extended should it pay off. 

“The events of this year have elevated the ability of games to provide both kids and adults some connection with their friends and make them feel like they’re participating in some social part of the world,” said Christina Turner, marketing director for Duracell in the U.K. 

In other words, games are now an extension of how people socialize online with another. Fortnite, for example, has become more a hangout spot than just a battle royal game. 

Like the best video games, the emergence of advertisers in games comes with an unexpected twist. It’s not just the likes of Bud Light and Duracell that are looking to capitalize on gaming’s pivot from sub culture into popular culture, it’s also those not traditionally associated with the space. 

There was a time when the idea of L’Oréal targeting gamers was pretty much unimaginable — not least because so few of them were believed to be women. While that may have been true for a time, it isn’t anymore. Indeed, women now represent more than four in ten (41%) gamers in the U.S., per Statista. It’s a case of when — not if — gamers will see the L’Oréal brand in a game. 

“We want our brands to be where people are and increasingly women are spending more of their time on the gaming platforms,” said  L’Oréal’s chief digital officer Lubomira Rochet. “We’re thinking about doing product placements in games where the player or the viewer is able to buy what they see through micro-transactions.”

BMW has similar plans. As explained by a spokesman for the automotive advertiser: “We are working on various advertising possibilities such as in-game ads, but at the moment we can’t tell much more than that. It’s still an ongoing process.”

The likes of L’Oréal, BMW and Budweiser have built global businesses on slick TV ads featuring celebs and memorable straplines, but these days the media businesses that are thriving want no part of such stuff. At least not in the traditional sense. As a result, advertisers are placing more emphasis —and media dollars once earmarked for traditional advertising — on partnerships with the likes Riot Games to develop non-intrusive ads. 

In-game advertising is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how we monetize our content,” said Florent Castelnérac, the studio head of Ubisoft owned Nadeo. “Advertising in the free-to-play space is away to support the fact that these games are played by wide audiences but there are also opportunities around the fact that more people are watching games.” 

Every digital surface is now a portal to serve targeted digital communications. But a great digital experience is more than just reaching a consumer. That interaction loses momentum with each click — moving further away from that moment of inspiration. It’s why some brands and publishers are seeing an opportunity to capture spend in the moments when people are searching via content commerce — a way for brands and publishers to capture revenue through digital content. For example, this would be a piece of content that allows consumers to click and buy directly from the post, be it in an article on social or in a stream. 

In-store shoppers are turning their scrolls into sales 

As restrictions and lockdowns came into force this year, it meant that in-store shoppers, including non-digital natives, turned to online shopping. This caused a behavioral shift — consumers became more confident and comfortable with spending in a digital environment. That confidence is now beginning to shift to buying via social media as well. 

“The pandemic has forced consumers to become more flexible, creative and risky in the way they shop,” says Tamara Littleton, CEO at The Social Element. “As we become increasingly reliant on our digital options, this has meant we’ve seen consumers shift to online channels to make the majority of their purchasing decisions.”

Product discovery via the feed is growing, as social players including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok are entering the shoppable market. Being able to check out on their chosen platform adds an element of ease for consumers — turning content into commerce. Vicky Banham, TikTok manager at Jungle Creations, says there’s a lesson to be learned from China about what can be achieved via social commerce, thinking of the scale at which it works via messaging app WeChat. 

“Online shopping is becoming a central part of our everyday lives and coupled with increased use of social media, it’s no wonder more publishers are making the move into social commerce,” says Banham. “As we approach the Christmas period and brands compete for sales in the absence of physical stores, they need to ensure they stand out and are utilizing these creative platforms to their advantage.” 

Linking content to produce safeguards instant gratification

What content commerce delivers is a level of convenience that takes e-commerce to a higher level. It removes the sequence of seeing a product, searching, researching and buying — and mitigates one of the pain points for online shoppers today.  

Aaron Goldman, CMO at Mediaocean says: “One of the major gaps for online shopping has been around gratification — both in terms of instantly acquiring goods and in terms of being in a space that’s designed to please and engage the customer. Shoppable content helps to close that gap, allowing consumers to turn inspirations directly into action. Online behaviour is constantly evolving, and brands and publishers need to adapt accordingly to ensure they’re delivering the frictionless experience consumers expect and demand. With the lack of in-person sales this holiday season, that’ll be really important.”  

For brands, experimenting with shoppable content is only the first step — brands must also pay attention to syncing it with the rest of the business. Littleton, at The Social Element says: “Shoppable content requires an engaged team who genuinely care about the shopper experience to keep on top of changes. If products sell out or are discontinued, you need someone to quickly and efficiently archive the posts.” 

It’s about managing user expectations. Littleton says: “There is nothing worse than falling in love with something you can’t have. Keeping your content and product teams close and the lines of communication clear will allow any changes to products to be updated quickly and content production to produce assets optimised for social selling.”  

Digital shopping is here to stay

Improving online shopping experiences goes beyond what’s happening in the industry, where content commerce provides a value that physical stores or other e-commerce shops cannot. 

Goldman, CMO at Mediaocean, says: “The pandemic has exponentially accelerated the shift to digital shopping, and no matter the big or small return of ‘normality,’ consumers will continue to shop online. All brands and publishers should learn from those retailers that have already fully embraced e-commerce and shoppable content, but they need to act now.” 

This is the first in a six-part series exploring the rise of content commerce across platforms, channels and devices.