Month: January 2021

• The Times now says July 6 is the “earliest date” it would require staff to return to any of its offices worldwide.
• Thomson Reuters extended its voluntary work from home policy to July as well.
• Last November, The Washington Post said it is now “unlikely” employees would return to its offices before June.
• Vox Media told its staff that no one would be required to return before September.

Most of the publishers interviewed for this story said they are continuing to consider their work from home policies amid the coronavirus crisis as they hold on to their New York headquarters.

Since last September, Bustle Digital Group opened its office for two days a week for employees who voluntarily want to work there or need access to gather items. Entry is “closely monitored and limited to a select number of employees at one time,” said Trisha Dearborn, evp of human resources at BDG.

“With new vaccines being rolled out, we are anticipating to reopen the office this fall and while it will look very different to pre-COVID times, we are confident that we can create a hybrid model that works for all employees,” Dearborn added.

A BDG employee said they had not yet heard an update from management on reopening offices.

“I want to work in an office again,” the staffer said. At home, “I’m not as productive as I want to be. I work best when I’m in an environment where I can collaborate with other people.”

Digiday spoke with four employees from BDG, BuzzFeed and Reuters for this story. Trading anonymity for candor, some expressed missing the newsroom environment and being around their colleagues, especially during the big news events of 2020.

Nearly a year of working from home “has not made it any easier to adapt — if anything it’s made it harder,” the BDG employee said. The news cycle of 2020 was “suffocating,” and being stuck at home made it more difficult. Having said that, the employee does not want to return to the office “until the science says it’s OK,” and believes leadership at the company feels the same way.

However, the BDG employee does not believe that a return to offices will happen this year and that a majority of employees prefer to continue to work from home. “Some people have discovered they have adapted well to the work from home environment — that they’d rather be working from home,” they said. “But I’m kind of old school. I wish I was at a desk. I wish I was in a cubicle.”

BuzzFeed formally extended its work from home policy for most employees until at least Aug. 31, but Albert Samaha, an investigative reporter at BuzzFeed News, is among those expecting not to return to the office until 2022. “Everyone is assuming it’s indefinite until things seem safe again,” said Samaha. Another BuzzFeed employee said they believe returning to the office in August is “certainly possible” and that updates from the company give staff “plenty of time to figure out leases and living situations.”

An internal survey conducted several months ago at BuzzFeed revealed a majority of staff plan to continue to work at least partially from home in the future, Samaha said. He is one of them.

Samaha does not miss the two-hour round trip commute to work every day, and has been using the extra time to learn to cook and catch up on reading. “It’s a privilege,” he said. “I feel very lucky to stay safe, be indoors, learn some hobbies, report on the phone as much as possible, and make the best of it.”

A Reuters employee said media companies should use this situation as an opportunity to give up expensive office real estate and cut costs. The employee said they previously “worked for so many organizations that were too hung up on having butts in seats.”

“Journalism is strapped for money,” the employee continued. “You could invest in people instead.”

Samaha also wondered if there will be a reckoning on where media companies are based in the future. “In some ways it seems counterproductive to have all these news organizations based in the most expensive cities in America, especially with more remote workers now,” he said.

Working from home could lead to more journalists not living in these cities, Samaha added, “because we have all seen and proven that we don’t have to be there … in order to be productive.”

How the media industry is changing in 2021 (so far)

Last year, it changed a lot and, because of that, will change even more this year. Some changes will seem like a return to normal. Returns to the office and in-person events and on-set shoots. Other changes will be further steps toward the future — new subscription programs and commerce platforms and 24/7 streaming channels. And still others remain to be seen, like what will actually replace the third-party cookie, whether newer platforms like Substack and TikTok can continue their rises and how many more media companies will consolidate and to what end.

Tracking the media industry’s changes has always been Digiday’s primary focus. We cover these shifts in our articles, in our events, in our podcasts and now in this briefing that our media team will produce each week.

To kick off this inaugural Digiday Media Briefing, we have compiled what we see as some of the top trends in the media industry today. In future editions of this newsletter, we will dig further into these and other subjects as they continue to develop and inevitably change.

The key hits:

• RIP to the RFP?
• More media consolidation is coming.
• The race to replace the third-party cookie is underway.
• Publishers are pivoting to connected TV.
• Publishers will need to wait to make new bets.

Publishers are hopeful that the standards of selling media will change

The request for proposal, better known as the RFP, has long been the standard of selling media inventory and signing brand deals. But according to some digital media CROs, the process is frustrating if you are consistently losing, outdated in the digital age in terms of how long it takes to close a deal, and it limits the relationships with the partners that lead to expected repeat business.

The implementation of digital media upfronts have become more common as publishers look to pre plan their sponsorship businesses, but still, only a fraction of deals can be signed that far in advance, according to one digital native publisher that asked to remain anonymous. The strategy for others is to become proactive in their dealings with a “be there first” mentality for the endemic brands that make the most sense to their content offerings, while others are beginning to narrow down the number of brands they work with all together to focus on the ones where they have the best luck in closing deals.

The RFP is long from gone, but the general consensus is that sales teams are sick of them. — Kayleigh Barber

Fueled by SPACs, media companies will likely continue to consolidate

As the pandemic rages on, the media industry will likely continue to consolidate this year.

Before the pandemic hit, we saw some big moves: Group Nine grabbed PopSugar, Vox Media acquired New York Media and Vice purchased Refinery29. Then, at the end of last year, as media companies’ businesses rebounded, the consolidation trend returned. In November, BuzzFeed agreed to buy HuffPost. And in December, Group Nine formed its own special purpose acquisition company, which raised $230 million after going public on Jan. 15 and plans to use that money to acquire other media companies.

The SPAC trend, in particular, seems set to catalyze more consolidation as the money raised in a SPAC IPO is earmarked specifically for an acquisition. BuzzFeed and Bustle Digital Group are considering going public via SPACs, according to CNBC. Vice is another one to keep an eye on, as is Vox Media.

The mergers completed before the pandemic likely helped those companies to get through 2020. But what remains to be seen is how well they hold up as more conglomerates are concocted and whether each amalgam ends up making a good match. — Sara Guaglione

The Google-led race to replace the cookie

Google is a prominent player in one of the digital media industry’s most-watched activities: the race to replace third-party cookies. But the Google-led development process is still at the tinkering and early testing stage. The company announced its latest cookie-replacement proposal called FLEDGE this week. Meanwhile, Google’s self-imposed deadline for finding a standard cookie alternative is 2022, and some industry members are leery of a development process that’s guided by the very same company that already controls so much of the tech and data that undergirds digital media.

So, maybe it comes as no surprise that, while some firms have dedicated engineers to collaborating on the Google-led effort, others are looking elsewhere. Some advertisers and publishers are moving toward first-party data identification services. Then there’s the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media, another industry collaboration for devising a universal ID standard that includes big name ad tech players and industry associations.

No matter how much firms like Google dominate, industry-wide agreement on a standard for replacing the maligned third-party cookie might be a long shot. — Kate Kaye

Publishers join the streaming wars

After pivoting to video on Facebook and then YouTube, publishers are reorienting once again.

This time they are turning their attentions to the TV screen. Some digital video publishers have already stood up connected TV properties, including standalone apps on Apple’s and Roku’s CTV platforms and 24/7 streaming channels distributed on free, ad-supported streaming TV services like ViacomCBS’s Pluto TV. But now more traditionally text-centric publishers that shifted into social video are making their moves into CTV where traditional TV advertisers are increasingly redirecting their dollars.

However, spawning a CTV business is not so simple as a publisher stitching together its YouTube library into a 24/7 stream. Well, actually it is. But turning that into a sustainable, money-making operation is much less straightforward. Within CTV, publishers will be compared to and competing against the likes of Netflix and Disney when it comes to production values, audiences’ attentions, subscription budgets and advertisers’ dollars. In short, they are entering the streaming wars. — Tim Peterson

Publishers are going to be wringing more out of what they already have

After a few years of exploring ways to diversify revenue, publishers are going to spend the first half of the year retrenching around what works.

After ten months (and counting) of dealing with the coronavirus’s fallout, publishers are paying less attention to nascent or incremental opportunities and instead doubling down on things that are turn-key, repeatable, and easy to sell.

That doesn’t mean publishers are going back to things that are antiquated, necessarily; some of the things that they’ll focus on emerged during the most uncertain stretches of 2020. But anybody who went into 2021 hoping to turn the page and try something new is going to have to wait until the second half of the year, at least. — Max Willens

Confessional

“I could absolutely fabricate my first-party data segments, and then give it to sellers, who have a lot of charisma, to go out there and get buyers to buy it. Because there’s no FDA that says that first-party data has to be of a certain quality or obtained in a certain manner. The opportunity for fraud in it is tremendous right now. Where it backfires is in the performance of spend.”

— Media executive

The Year of the SPAC

The media consolidation trend of the past couple years has spawned a new craze: Media companies preparing to go public via special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs. The two trends are of a piece because many of the same media companies at the center of the consolidation current — BuzzFeed, Bustle Digital Group, Group Nine, Vice and Vox Media — are reportedly leading the SPAC charge, per CNBC.

One of the main reasons these companies are kicking the tires on going public — or, in Group Nine’s case, getting in the car with the key in the ignition — seems to be that they have come out of 2020 with stronger businesses. BuzzFeed, for example, said it turned a profit last year. Profitability may have been out of reach if it weren’t for the layoffs that these companies underwent. Nonetheless, the companies were able to cut costs to the point that they entered 2021 with leaner, more sustainable operations. That cost-cutting combined with revenue rebounds in the second half of 2020 can make them more attractive to potential investors.

But another likely factor is that the companies’ existing investors that put in their money years ago are looking to cash out. Considering the ups and downs of the media business, investors may be itching for these companies to find an exit while their businesses are on firm footing, and they may be weary of the all-stock deals that have become common in media consolidation and don’t really return anything to investors.

A sale would be one option, but it’s unclear who the buyers would be. The tech giants seem uninterested in owning a media company and attracting even more regulatory attention. Private equity firms are usually a destination for media companies in distress, like local newspaper chains. And the major media conglomerates like Disney, NBCUniversal and WarnerMedia are pouring so much money into their streaming shifts — and at a loss — that it’s unclear how much willing they would be to pay hundreds of millions, if not more than a billion, dollars for a company that lacks a solid history of profitability.

So, SPAC IPOs make sense. They lack the scrutiny of a traditional IPO roadshow that risks diluting a company’s value, which would seem to make those existing investors happy. And they allow these media companies that have relied on investors to subsidize their businesses but seem ready to stand on their own to finally do so — or at least to merge with public market investors footing the bill. — Tim Peterson

Numbers to know

$150 million: Total revenue that Insider Inc. generated in 2020.

74%: Percentage increase in The Washington Post’s editorial headcount during outgoing executive editor Martin Baron’s tenure.

$545 million: How much money Taboola plans to raise by going public through a special purpose acquisition company.

17%: Share of publishers that expect events to be a “large focus” in the first half of 2021.

3 Questions with Complex Networks’ CEO Rich Antoniello

When the pandemic hit the media business last spring, Complex Networks was in a pretty precarious position like many other media companies. Not only was the company in the advertising business, but also the in-person events business and the TV and video production business. But it has come out stronger on the other side of 2020.

As of Jan. 25, Complex Networks had 55% more revenue booked for the first and second quarters of 2021 than it did at this time for the first and second quarters of 2020, according to CEO Rich Antoniello. — Tim Peterson

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What’s the biggest difference in your current business strategy because of everything that happened last year?
Because ComplexLand had so much appetite and was so successful for us from a brand and e-commerce perspective, instead of spreading our bets around with a whole bunch of little things and hoping they work, we are going to make bigger bets this year. Last year we launched our first scripted program, “Sneakerheads,” on Netflix. Now we’re going to be deficit-financing larger-scale plays in that arena. Those are not cheap. They are aggressive. My viewpoint is we’ll make fewer and bigger bets on large-scale tentpoles this year.

What’s the biggest new bet you’re planning to make this year?
We made a lot of bets last year. We launched the Sole Collector app. We launched ComplexLand. We launched our first scripted series. We launched several new hot sauces. We launched (Hot Ones Nugget Honey). We launched our first game (Hot Ones Truth or Dab: The Game). We made a lot of those big bets, so we don’t have to make them now. There will be some new things coming that I can’t completely talk about. I don’t need to share our entire calendar of launches this year and then everybody do shitty also-ran crap versions of what we do and say they’re great. I’m a little tired of that from an industry perspective.

There’s a lot of talk about media consolidation again with all these SPACs popping up. Complex Networks is a joint venture, but are you looking to go public or merge with another media company?
You’d have to talk to — I don’t own the company anymore. You have to remember our structure is very different. I have no pressure. I’ve returned my capital to all my venture investors. Accel [Partners] and [Austin Ventures] made a lot of money. I don’t have an angry bunch of capital. I’m not nine years, 10 years, 12 years in on an investment when usually they look to turn their investment in seven years.

What we’ve covered

Why Denmark’s biggest news site cut reliance on Google’s tech:

• Three weeks ago, Ekstra Bladet stopped using google Analytics in favor of a homegrown alternative.
• Having full control of its site’s entire data flow means the publication can manage that data much easier.

Read more about Ekstra Bladet here.

Twitter’s acquisition of Revue heats up the battle of the inbox:

• Buying the newsletter platform marks Twitter’s first step into consumer revenue.
• The social platform is also stepping into the emerging newsletter arms race.

Read more about Twitter’s Revue deal here.

WTF is FLEDGE?:

• FLEDGE is part of Google’s attempts to replace the third-party cookie.
• A lot of details about how FLEDGE will work still need to be sorted out.

Read more about Google’s FLEDGE here.

Complex Shop’s journey to prevent cart abandonment:

• Complex Networks used the Google News Initiative to give its e-commerce platform a boost.
• The partnership helped Complex Shop to increase conversion rates by 300%.

Read more about Complex Shop here.

Publishers welcome rise in Black History Month RFPs:

• Publishers focused on Black audiences are seeing more Black History Month pitch requests from advertisers with larger dollar amounts and longer durations.
• The publishers hope to convert the increased interest into longer-term deals.

Read more about Black History Month RFPs here.

Why publishers are adding benefits to lift employee peace of mind:

• Media companies are providing employees with more virtual wellness services, mental health app subscriptions and career development programs.
• Core benefits like paid time off, health insurance and wellness services have remained relatively unchanged.

Read more about publishers’ benefits here.

What we’re reading

Vice turns things around:
Vice may have bottomed out following sexual harassment allegations and Disney writing off its investment in the media company. The company cut its costs last year to the point that it turned a profit in the fourth quarter, according to The Information. However, Vice still faces an uphill climb to increase its revenue because its growing TV and movie business accounts for less than half of its total revenue.

Podcasting is a top-heavy business:
For all the companies and individuals putting out podcasts these days, success is pretty limited, according to Axios. Admittedly, the chart showing the top 1% of podcasts accounting for a disproportionate share of downloads relies on two-year-old data. But the narrative around podcasting seems to be morphing, from being an increasingly popular medium waiting for the ad dollars to catch up to one in which the money and listenership is concentrated to a small share of the overall market.

What is Emerson Collective’s ambition?:
Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective is not a charity for news publishers, but it’s also not a typical media investor looking for the publishers it backs to strike it rich. Instead the organization sits somewhere in the middle, with a focus on journalism outlets that can operate sustainable businesses, according to Columbia Journalism Review. While Emerson Collective has invested in nonprofit news organizations like Texas Tribune, ProPublica and The 19th, it is very much interested in profitable publications as well. The organization seems to have cut off Pop Up Magazine Productions because it was unprofitable and does not plan to turn The Atlantic into a nonprofit.

“This year, unlike last year, we had something more to say than just ‘Get your favorite restaurants on DoorDash,” said David Bornoff, DoorDash head of consumer and brand marketing. “[Super Bowl] is a huge, tuned-in audience — let’s take advantage of that.”

The company is aiming to do so with a multi-platform marketing campaign, titled “The Neighborhood,” featuring actor and rapper Daveed Diggs alongside Sesame Street fan favorites like Big Bird and Cookie Monster, that shows the other goods the company will now deliver including household supplies and convenience items as well as local restaurant fare. In addition to the Super Bowl broadcast spot, it includes a $1 million charity initiative and a full-funnel campaign across digital media, social, CRM and experiential efforts.

DoorDash worked with The Martin Agency on the spot. Executive producer Tricia Hoover said because of COVID precautions, the spot took four days to shoot — a job that could have otherwise been completed in two days.

“Everything was done in stages. It does slow you down, but obviously was necessary because we didn’t have a single incident on set,” Hoover said.

The 60-second spot was filmed in Brooklyn and directed by Michel Gondry. Production approval closed by October and filming started in November, with strict rules in place to curb COVID transmission. Anyone traveling for the shoot had to be tested for COVID frequently. Teams worked in shifts to produce the set, film and cleaning was constant.

The number of people on set at any given time was also reduced. Everyone except The Martin Agency core team worked remotely, in different time zones across New York City, Los Angeles and Virginia. This included DoorDash representatives, who oversaw their Super Bowl spot from afar — an unusual move, but necessary in the age of COVID, said creative director Jonathan Richman.

“Since [DoorDash is] not there, you kind of have to put on the client hat and be thinking for them on the ground in anticipating what they want, what options they’ll need. We become the stand-in clients in a way,” he said. 

The changes come with a bigger price tag, said Hoover. Hoover hasn’t crunched the numbers for the Super Bowl spot, but The Martin Agency executive team has noticed at least a 20% increase in budgets in light of the pandemic.

Production companies are having to get creative to work during COVID, said Greg Manago, president of Content+, the content studio at Mindshare.

The content studio has found a workaround in shooting outside or coaching talent on how to film themselves.

“It’s like that scene in Apollo 13 where the NASA engineers dump all the supplies the astronauts have on board the capsule onto a table and their challenge is to figure out how to use what they have available in space to their ship and get them home,” he said in an email.

Shooting for an event like Super Bowl only adds another layer of pressure. If key crew or talent tests positive, teams have to pivot because “the deadline for the Super Bowl doesn’t move.”

On the consumer-facing front, Bornoff lamented the campaign not having a live action element due to the pandemic. Instead, the head of marketing pointed to an experiential activation for the campaign. 

Bornoff said “part of the experience will be in the product,” although he declined to give further details. There will be, however, an opportunity for consumers to get involved through the social impact initiative, in which a portion of DoorDash proceeds will be donated to Sesame Workshop — up to $1 million.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Super Bowl ad production can be more intense than a typical spot. Production in general has gotten more difficult with Covid-19. How did that factor into the production of this ad?

That was certainly a factor when we were thinking about how and where we could get it done. At the time — and still — L.A. is in a bit of a lockdown. We managed to adhere to all the Covid regulations. A lot of [the shoot] was outside, which was a big help. There were also a lot fewer people on set than you’d find on an average day and particularly for a Super Bowl spot. We did a lot of things via video [conference]. You manage and find a way. It wasn’t your usual Super Bowl production in that you have more people on video and more of it shot outside. All of that added up and helped enable it to happen.

How did you think about the tone of the ad? We’ve heard that tone has been difficult to navigate this year. 

Yeah, I think it’s a tricky year for it. This particular commercial is very much in the Chipotle brand tone — we’re telling people what we did and there’s an element of humor in the interaction between the brother and sister. That tone is not preachy. It’s just a fun way to tell people what we’re doing and an interesting way, visually, to tell people what we’re doing. But this is not a brand that would ever do a lot of slapstick comedy. I think those brands are a bit wary. We also didn’t want a heavy spot that would weigh people down. The tone is really important. We ended up with a spot with a nice balance that really fits Chipotle, which is probably the most important thing. 

It seems like this year will have a bunch of first-time advertisers. Why do you think that is?

Everyone has to make their own decision. To your earlier question about tone, some brands have had tones — last year’s Super Bowl was very much a slapstick year. There was a lot of lower level comedy kind of tone. I think a lot of people have had a hard time figuring out what to do for the Super Bowl. Is it a big brand message? Is it a fun, light-hearted message? So a lot of people seem like they’ve decided to wait it out. I get it. It is a hard thing [to figure out]. The good thing for us is we can be true to our brand tone and we thought that would really work. It’s been successful for us the last couple of years and we think it’ll work even in these times. 

Other than having a spot you believe will work, why is it important to go to the Super Bowl? It’s so expensive.

The Super Bowl is unique in that the advertising is as much a part of the attraction as the game itself. There’s very few programs where people are riveted by the ads. But we also have a robust digital plan with this. It’s not a [situation where we’re choosing one or the other] but an and for us. It has an amazing broad reach and garners a lot of attention for the advertising itself, which is unique.

How are you looking at your media plan for 2021? What’s the division between traditional versus digital channels? 

We really take a hard look at every single one of our channels and all of our ads from an analytics standpoint. We do a lot of experiments throughout the year. One of the things that’s continued to work really well for us is linear TV. Last year, we had a much more digital [focus]. One element was the lack of availability of original programming so last year we did a lot more digitally because there wasn’t a lot of sports. This year, with a more normal schedule we’ll definitely have [a bigger] linear TV percentage than we had in 2020. That broad reach of that channel helps lift up everything else. It makes our digital ads better, it lifts up our social presence. All of it works together. 

Are there any channels you expect to invest more in this year? Any new channels? We know you were early on with TikTok. 

We’re doing a lot more with Snapchat and the like. As far as new channels, the biggest thing is to find the right creative that fits. We found this creative that fits the Super Bowl. You can’t do the same thing on TikTok as everywhere else. You need unique creative for Snapchat versus other places. There aren’t a lot that are brand new but there are places we’ll spend more. E-gaming is big for us so we’ll probably spend more there. We’ll certainly keep evaluating the social channels because it works for us.