Month: December 2020

“Diversification away from Facebook is the biggest conversation I’m having,” said Jeromy Sonne, managing director of Moonshine Marketing. “While it’s still the biggest and everyone will still use it, brands no longer trust it enough to go all in on Facebook.” 

Reasons vary as to why marketers are changing their tune. One major factor is cost, according to buyers, who say that CPMs on Facebook have been between $14-$17 in recent months compared to between $3-$5 on Snapchat or TikTok. Another big problem, according to buyers, has been inconsistency with the backend with Facebook’s Ads Manager breaking or not working on multiple occasions as well as accounts erroneously banned at random. 

“This summer, with Facebook Ads Manager being broken [it was clear] some changes Facebook made, made the platform harder to run ads on,” said Duane Brown, founder and head of strategy for performance marketing agency Take Some Risk, adding that he began to push diversification more for clients as a result. “The percentage is not huge — 15-20% moved from Facebook to Snap[chat]/TikTok — but that is only going to grow into 2021.” 

Those issues alone aren’t the only reasons marketers are reevaluating their reliance on Facebook. This past summer, as marketers participated in the Facebook blackout, many asked media buyers to move ad dollars typically allocated for Facebook to test out platforms like Snapchat, TikTok and Pinterest and other channels. 

Conversations about diversification away from Facebook “started with the blackout in June and kept momentum since then,” said Katya Constantine, CEO of performance marketing agency Digishop Girl. “Experiments with other platforms were successful and spending on those platforms is baked into 2021 media plans. Now, brands are more open to more experimental budgets for testing new channels to broaden acquisition footprint. Going into 2021 more brands are going to diversify.”

Testing out other channels made those marketers less resistant to continuing to spend more outside of Facebook as other platforms had delivered solid ROAS and cheaper CPMs, according to buyers. At the same time, Shopify integrations with platforms like Snapchat, Pinterest and, most recently, TikTok, have made those platforms more attractive for marketers behind DTC and e-commerce brands to move ad dollars there. It’s also become easier to create ads for Snapchat and TikTok in particular, according to Zach Stuck, CEO of Homestead Studio, as user generated content performs well on those platforms. 

Typically, marketers are moving anywhere from 10-30% of their Facebook ad spend to other platforms, according to media buyers, who say they expect clients to continue to request diversification from Facebook. That being said, marketers are still spending the majority of their ad budgets on Facebook and Google. 

“People are trying to find a more stable platform,” said Stuck. “Facebook is still the cheapest and most consistent ad platform for DTC brands, but there’s definitely a point of diminishing returns that’s continuing to get lower and lower over time.”

Like many people charged with managing offices, Deeprose is encountering headache-inducing problems. With many employees now working from home — in the UK alone, 60% of the UK’s adult population is doing so, according to research by Finder — what does this mean for the role of the office?

“Covid has forced us to rethink,” said Deeprose. “It means the traditional approach of everyone having their own desk is gone. We can’t have a desk that is empty 40% of the year.”

Jellyfish, which expects employees to work from home 40% of the time, will introduce desk-booking software in January to understand how often people are coming in and where they’re sitting. The software will help the company control how many people are in the space, identify which desks need cleaning and those that can be used after 24 hours, he added.

With vaccines being rolled out later this year, employers are looking at ways to make the future of the work hybrid. Many believe that we’ll see the disappearance of the open-plan layout, where spaces are filled with traditional banks of desks.

“The workplace used to be just for work — getting your head down and clocking in and out,” said We Are Social’s New York managing director Ben Arnold. “What we’ve seen in the past nine months is that employers in general have a greater level of trust in employees.” Now the role of the office needs to be reimagined.

Companies need to consider the benefits of a physical office which have included encouraging interpersonal relationships, the social elements, the almost unplanned elements and reconfigure them, Arnold said. For instance, the typical desk layout of lines of desks and pods that currently dominate floor space can be redesigned informal casual breakout spaces designed for time.

What it will result in is a more informal environment that encourages collaboration. “Maybe one with white boarding everywhere and flexible furniture where you can take down the walls,” Arnold said.

Before Covid-19, Sarah Baumann, managing director at digital marketing agency VaynerMedia UK, was already checking out new office space to accommodate the agency’s growth from 60 members of staff at the start of the year to 90. However new considerations have come to light following the pandemic.

“Choosing somewhere where people have a variety of routes and commuting flexibility has been fundamental,” she said. “Bike space and showers always were important, but more people will be cycling so looking at whether that provision is safe has also been high up on the list. I also started to value air con systems and technical quality of refit far more highly than I ever thought possible.”

Jason Cammorata, senior vice president and global head of operations at MDC Partners, feels fortunate that the company recently combined 13 agencies to one office in the One World Trade Center in New York.

“It had already been built for nimble, flexible environment in the first place,” he said. One of the features that lends itself to the new way of working is its tech infrastructure. “It’s a wireless environment,” added Cammorata. “The technology conference was always voice-activated but we did make some changes to the kitchen and bathrooms so it’s all touchless.”

For example, soap is dispensed with a wave of the hand and the coffee machine turns on with an app.

Many offices that are allowing staff to return are asking they do so in limited numbers to reduce risk of infection.

“Some of our staff admitted to struggling working from home,” said Stephen Kenwright, co-founder of Rise at creative SEO agency Seven, whose office has increased the frequency of cleaning and is allowing a maximum of 15% of the team to come into the office.

Agencies all believe the pandemic will lead to a marked shift in the way they communicate with teams and clients.

“Counterintuitively, working remotely has brought us closer together in many ways, removing some of the geographical boundaries that previously existed between offices,” said Ed Hill, managing partner of media agency Space & Time. “I have spent more time speaking to some colleagues around the UK in recent months than ever before. The same is true with our clients; getting everybody around a virtual table is quicker and easier than traveling across the country, and so it often happens more frequently.”

Still in the midst of a pandemic, agencies admit they’re taking it day to day.

“It’s difficult to know really what is going to happen,” said Deeprose. “We will adapt, but the exciting thing is that it has forced us down a path that we may not have considered before. Now we need to rethink how the space is used and how we can collaborate rather than come in to sit at a desk all day and work.”

3 questions: Marc Nohr, group CEO of Miroma agencies on leadership challenges in a remote-working world

How challenging is it to manage a team purely via video?

It’s an issue that gets harder to spot when you’re not around people to pick up on non-verbal cues that might indicate they’re feeling that pressure. It’s also compounded by those moments of connection with other people that put people at ease. That’s harder to do over a Zoom call. Good leadership or management is about being compassionate. It’s recognizing that when you as a leader do call someone at 7 p.m. because you’re still at your desk working late, that it’s done with respect. You say ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you’ in recognition that you might be working but that doesn’t mean that they are — that’s just about being a human being and empathetic. Leaders need to remember that they’re responsible for human beings who have priorities, and are only productive for certain hours of the day. They need downtime, have relationships and have their own emotional needs too. You can’t treat them like robots.

How important is HR here?

HR comes into its own. Having people who are trained to spot instances like when people are feeling presenteeism pressure and then be discreet and respectful about how they broach the subject is invaluable.

What can agency leaders do to better support teams working remotely?

In the absence of physical proximity we need to replace one ritual with another because rituals help us get into a groove, into something that’s systematic. So if you can’t see someone then maybe it’s incumbent on the team leader to check in with people regularly, just to ask how they are. A leader I know does something he calls a weather forecast at the beginning of every meeting, to see how everyone is feeling. It’s quite unusual when you’re in one of those and it can be quite disarming at first, but it has become ritualized and people will say ‘you know what I had a tough day yesterday but things are better today.’ People are prepared to do that on that call.

Quote of the week:

“I’ve seen senior newsroom execs doing videos with people on social media on mental health who I know don’t really care — they are treating it as a PR project and not dealing with it as a fundamental humanity issue. Why can’t people just do the right thing, there is always an excuse — that they’re too busy. If someone broke their leg they would be off work. But if it is a mental health issue, people think they are slacking.”

—Shirish Kulkarni, community organizer at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism  

Checking the numbers

— 72% of 3,200 executives polled by Deloitte said the ability of their employees to adapt, reskill and assume new roles would be a priority for navigating future disruptions. Only 17% said their organizations were ready to do so. 

— 23% of 35,000 marketing, advertising and communications executives surveyed globally by WeTransfer said the state of their mental health has affected their creativity during the pandemic.

This briefing is edited by Jessica Davies, managing editor of Future of Work.

That access, along with the indirect preferential treatment AMP pages got in mobile search, was one of the chief benefits for many of the publishers using the framework, many of whom adopted AMP grudgingly and spent years grousing about AMP’s monetization issues (including some that were partly the fault of advertisers).

But even with that advantage gone, publishers that have invested in the framework are unlikely to walk away from it, sources at four different publishers told Digiday. For one, AMP still offers a framework that provides a good user experience on mobile, where so much content consumption happens. Additionally, the experiences that favor the AMP framework, including AMP Stories and, to a lesser extent, Google Discover, represent another possibility for incremental traffic — and Google’s plans to make pieces of AMP work inside publishers’ pages will keep them from dumping it.

“Our product team would be very interested in not supporting AMP any longer,” an SEO director at one large digital publisher said. “But they’re looking at a lot of work to make up.

“The work to make non-AMP pages as performant as AMP pages is not insignificant,” that source added. “The conversations are going to be not around saving resources but tradeoffs.”

When AMP launched in the spring of 2016, it was seen in some ways as Google playing catch up to Facebook, which had launched Instant Articles the year before. And Google more than caught up, in part by extending the reach of AMP across several media platforms and leveraging its open source nature to build more support for it.

For all the progress Google made in adding a foundation to ad networks and vendors’ proprietary formats, many publishers say AMP’s monetization opportunities still lag well behind what’s possible for their own mobile sites.

“It’s still a significant gap,” said one executive at a large digital publisher, who asked not to be identified while discussing a key partner.

That source noted that those issues go beyond things like how quickly the ads load. “[AMP] limits your session depth, which kills you,” that source said. “If you go from 1.8 pages per session to 1.3, that’s a big deal.”

But publishers have known about these issues for years and have stuck with AMP, often for the simple reason that building fast, high-performing mobile pages is very hard. And as Google continues to prioritize high performing mobile pages, sticking with a proven format makes sense. “Our non-AMP pages are never going to be as performant,” a second executive said.

In addition to that tradeoff, publishers have two reasons to keep an eye on the AMP framework: Google Discover and AMP Stories.

Since its launch in 2018, Discover has turned into a promising, if unpredictable, source of traffic for publishers. Sources at three different publishers said that, on good months, Google Discover delivers up to 25% of the referral traffic they get from Google.

“Google’s really trying to give away free traffic [with it],” the first executive said. “I wouldn’t build my business on it, but it’s interesting.”

The giveaway is also coming at a moment when publishers are getting more interested in AMP Stories, as well. After a slow start in 2018, the format has gotten more traction, thanks partly to its inclusion in Discover. A few publishers were excited by last month’s news that programmatic demand would be available to monetize content in those formats as well.

Moving forward, publishers may also be hoping that they can pick and choose certain parts of AMP to integrate into their mobile plans. That will be a point of emphasis for AMP moving forward, said Rudy Galfi, the product manager of AMP at Google.

“Flexibility around monetization is an area where people want to go with a non-AMP path initially,” Galfi said. “The point is that you can have an assimilation of various experiences together.”

“We want to work on making that work.”

Can marketers measure brand lift on a 90 percent opted-out audience?

The cookieless future is already a reality for Ster, the exclusive sales house for the Dutch national public broadcaster NPO. Due to a strict interpretation of GDPR, Ster made user tracking opt-out by default, resulting in a 90 percent opt-out rate. Ster has since ceased all advertising cookie usage, making performance measures such as post-view, plus running any form of programmatic activity, extremely difficult.

With standard performance metrics largely removed from the equation, Ster could trace the direct revenue generated by providing brand lift measurements to advertisers. In the second half of 2020, Ster saw 30 percent growth in digital display campaigns, half of which it directly attributes to adding brand lift measurement to every pitch.

Ster also set a minimum budget threshold for campaigns to qualify for brand lift measurements, resulting in a 45 percent increase in average order value for H2 versus H1. Some advertisers even quadrupled their average campaign spend. “Looking forward to next year,” said Tom Van Bentheim, manager of digital strategy, operations and technology at Ster, “there are conversations with some of the big agencies, where all campaigns will include brand lift measurement as standard.”

How to measure small campaigns, and thousands of them

Local news publishers typically deploy smaller campaigns, which are harder to measure. Not only that, they tend to run these campaigns in huge numbers, which makes measurement even more difficult. JPIMedia, one of the UK’s largest news organizations, ran more than 2,000 directly-sold campaigns in the past year – up to 300 per month. In addition, its clients are predominantly SMEs. As a result, average campaign impressions and spend tend to be modest, which makes measurement more challenging.

With Facebook as a key competitor, JPIMedia made the strategic choice to measure brand lift at scale. The publisher efficiently ran brand awareness, consideration, preference and action intent metrics across most campaigns. Now, a year and a half after beginning to take this approach, JPIMedia has seen 55 percent year-on-year growth in average direct-sold display campaign impressions for September 2020. Next year, it is looking to drive a further 70 percent increase.

Brand lift data has also informed what JPIMedia Research Director Simon Baty called “a positive feedback loop on campaign outcomes.” In other words, the publisher is now  better able to apply insights to improve future results for its customers. Achieving an initial average brand lift improvement of 11.6 percent, in recent months this number has increased to 15–16 percent, even reaching 21 percent in October.

Next steps: demonstrate a powerful impact (beyond clicks)

The Ozone Project is a premium advertising platform, and its members include some of the leading publishers in the UK, including News UK, the Telegraph, the Guardian, Reach, Bauer Media, DC Thomson and Time Out.

According to Bryan Scott, The Ozone Project’s marketing director, “Brand lift allows us to measure and put into words the powerful impact our environments can deliver for our customers, in addition to the measures they have in place elsewhere.”

Ozone’s average campaign brand lift last year was around 21 percent higher than the Brand Metrics platform global benchmark. “Today, the agencies of course still have their benchmarks around clickthrough rates (CTR). But what [the brand lift approach] has done is to help transform the limited thinking around what the value added of a digital campaign actually is.”

Clients need more data to support their buying decisions 

South Africa’s largest publisher, Media24, leveraged brand lift metrics to take post-campaign reporting to a new level, “one that is not simply tick or cross, but able to diagnose various outcomes,” said Gareth Lloyd, head of data and analytics at 24.com. Recently, 24.com used the brand lift metrics to measure a series of campaigns with the region’s top advertisers in an effort to gauge the branding effects of mobile. With 80 percent of its audience on mobile, it was a strategic priority for mobile spend to reflect time spent. “Adding brand lift measurement has given a whole new dimension to our reporting; clients love it, and it brings them back for more,” said Lloyd.  

The picture these and other major publishers paint is clear. In a shifting market, focusing on brand lift measurement is bringing them stability — and even driving revenue directly. As advertisers become more familiar with brand lift measurement — and even start to require it — publishers are beginning to deliver brand lift as an always-on metric. In doing so, they are helping to reinforce the unique strengths of premium advertising environments.

Connected TV is exploding with year-on-year growth, not just in the U.S. but around the world. Global users of over-the-top (OTT) TV services are forecast to increase from 1.8 billion in 2017 to 2.9 billion in 2025. For our part, Xandr is seeing the growth of CTV in the mid-triple digits, and come next year, video will likely surpass display in terms of spend share in our marketplace. Any platform that hasn’t already adopted a serious video-first mindset won’t keep up with market demands.

Alongside the rise of CTV, the introduction of data and automation to linear TV is helping to drive performance. Emerging technology enables TV ad buyers to negotiate with multiple broadcasters with speed, flexibility and holistic insight into reach and frequency.

Still, a completely audience-based approach is not yet widely accepted. According to the 2020 Relevance Report, slightly less than half of the U.S. buyers responsible for both TV and digital video say they are currently turning to data beyond traditional age and gender demos to create more relevant advertising.

This matters especially because one of the most significant opportunities for the industry in the next six months is the convergence of CTV and data-driven linear TV. The benefit to advertisers from the converged buying and selling of premium video is enormous: Think of bringing a single target audience to a DSP, uploading a single budget and executing a single buy that provides de-duplicated reach and campaign reporting across both connected TV and data-driven linear TV.

While these are exciting times, they’re also tinged with the anxiety and loss of the pandemic. The events of 2020 necessitated quick adjustments to rapidly changing consumer behavior — some of which represent short-term shifts, but others that will likely remain established practices. More audiences stayed home, of course, and that happened just as CTV streaming services were already driving growth in viewership away from traditional TV. This has led to double-digit declines in ad revenues for traditional TV, and programmers have had to innovate around their data-driven linear solutions.

It’s said that necessity is the mother of innovation, and collaboration is key to this. And when it comes to collaborative innovation, a rising tide lifts all boats, so this is not just about one company but the industry at-large.

We’re better together.

One area in which working together is particularly critical is bringing identity solutions to bear outside the walled gardens worldwide. Advertisers across international markets, with varying sets of data privacy regulations, are marrying first- and third-party data sets to reach the right audience. They need partners that can help them integrate data effectively and compliantly across content and media types.

Working with an open, end-to-end platform is a highly effective way to achieve these integrations. Such a platform is uniquely positioned to work, internally and with partners, on a diverse array of global identity efforts, from common industry data solutions to support for clients’ proprietary data strategies, to differentiated partnerships with scaled first-party data owners. It’s all on the table.

This mindset is also why Xandr collaborated to bring Prebid as an open standard header bidding solution for display inventory several years ago and why the work continues on a similar open standard for OTT. Open, transparent and interoperable solutions ultimately benefit all parties in the ecosystem, fostering innovation rather than fragmentation and driving more spend to premium video.

Looking forward, the industry can build on the extraordinary resilience it has shown this year. Technology partners can help by delivering marketplaces that give advertisers a better way to connect with the audiences they want and need. It will be extremely exciting to see what the industry can accomplish together in the coming year.