Month: February 2021

Agreements Google has made to pay publishers participating in its nascent News Showcase program spotlighting their branded content have been conducted on an individual, bilateral basis, said Richard Gingras, Google’s vp of news. Gingras told Digiday that in his experience, publishers would rather work out deals individually.

“My general sense of publishers, frankly, is that they prefer bilateral,” said Gingras. “It’s a matter of law. It’s not really a matter of our preference.”

But Maribel Wadsworth, president of Gannett’s USA Today Network and publisher of USA Today told Digiday if collective bargaining between publishers and digital platforms were made legal here, “having the ability for publishers to negotiate collectively would be an important start. Ultimately, what’s most important is achieving proper recognition of the value of quality, original reporting.”

David Spiegel, vp of digital revenue at LA Times publisher California Times Group took a more nuanced view, suggesting that smaller or niche publishers may want to bargain collectively for better leverage if given the chance.

“I think scaled national publishers will think they can be best served by negotiating independently, but it would be smart for niche groups to band together, especially in areas that Google needs” such as local media and service-oriented content that pushes people to its search services, he said.

Google has signed News Showcase agreements with 500 publishers in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Germany and the U.K., including its most recent high-profile partnership with News Corp in Australia. The company used the program as leverage in reaction to demands by the Australian government that the company pay publishers for links and article excerpts it features in search results.

“News Showcase deals in Australia ensure that Google will not be paying for links and article extracts in search results,” said a Google spokesperson. So, unless policies in Australia change, said Gingras, “We’ve reached an approach that allows us to be comfortable staying in Australia, allows us to be comfortable doing the right thing in pursuing these good faith negotiations with publishers in the country, and not breaking [Google’s] core principle with regard to the internet and free linking.”

A push for collective publisher bargaining
As publishers struggle to compete in a digital media and ad environment dominated by Google and Facebook, they’re looking to what’s happening in Australia as an indication of what might be possible to level the playing field here in the U.S.. Australia last week passed a news media bargaining code, which requires digital platforms to compensate news publishers when they feature their content on their platforms. If a deal can’t be reached, the law calls for mediation to determine how much the platforms must pay publishers.

Meanwhile, news outlets here in the U.S. have pushed for legislation giving them safe harbor against antitrust law, allowing them to conduct collective bargaining negotiations with Google and Facebook. When it was first introduced in 2019, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act was backed by several news publishing groups including the American Society of News Editors, the National Newspaper Association and the News Media Alliance which includes The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, among its members. The legislation is intended to ensure that negotiations benefit all publishers rather than just a few with large market share. A similar bill is expected to be introduced in the coming weeks.

Google won’t launch Showcase in the U.S. without several publishers
Gingras said Google News Showcase discussions with publishers here can be expected to take place “over the next couple of quarters at least.” And launching the program here will require signing deals with multiple publishers. “Showcase is not something we would launch with just two or three publishers,” he said.

Executives from two U.S.-based publishers Digiday spoke to, and who asked to remain anonymous, suggested they are open to learning more about the program, but haven’t been approached yet by Google. One publisher expects to discuss it during an upcoming regular quarterly partnership check-in with Google.

“We have not been offered anything around News Showcase and have not yet been told that they are doing anything with it for U.S. publishers yet,” said one of those publishing execs.

Others declined to comment on the Google program at all, indicating that the talks could be sensitive. The New York Times declined to discuss the program with Digiday. So did the Local Media Consortium. “While the News Showcase is an interesting topic to wax on, the LMC board has adopted a position of not speaking publicly to it or similar activities,” said Christian Hendricks, president of the group, which negotiates deals for members with partners including Google, Facebook and jobs listings firm Monster.

Larger publishers will get more money
Google over the years has clung to the idea that the distribution it brings to publishers is so valuable that it shouldn’t have to compensate media organizations for it. However, it’s evident from the way Google determines News Showcase payments that it derives value from the content and the audiences publishers deliver.

Because larger publishers produce more content and have better traction with national and local audiences, said Gingras, “Large publishers with very large audiences will get fees under Showcase that are beyond what, say, a small publisher with a small audience will get.” He added, “It seems fair and appropriate to adjust the structures in that fashion.”

A company spokesperson added in an email that Google’s “globally-consistent funding model” for News Showcase also factors in “objective criteria including audience size and what paywall-ed publications charge users for digital access.”

Publishers have told Digiday they worry that the program is just another way to steer their content under Google’s control. But News Showcase does cover the cost of limited access to paywalled content, and when clicked, News Showcase articles open in a publisher’s website, whether paywalled or not.

“We purchase some additional free clicks to allow users to sample their content,” said Gingras. He said the paywall access feature is designed to drive engagement and subscriptions on publishers’ own sites.

To access paywalled content for free, people might have to provide registration data, said Gingras. In some cases, Google might automate that process using information it already has stored about a user. But he stressed, “We provide the customer identity to the publisher, but they get to own that relationship.”

“While we’ve had forays into entertainment and sales enablement and music videos and interactive ads, our primary focus now is revolutionizing e-commerce,” Fishman said.

eko is adding 22 new episodes of Cookshop and a special feature with Sofia Vergara. Other celebrity guests chefs include Jamie Oliver, Ree Drummond and Patti LaBelle. 

At the end of each episode, viewers can opt to purchase the ingredients and kitchen hardware featured in the video. Walmart said the beta version of Cookshop had a 8.7% click-through rate — eko said their click-through rate for commerce-related content averages 7%.

Interactive shoppable videos are not usually part of the advertising playbook, but their use is growing. Seven years after generating big headlines with a music video for Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” eko has worked with over 100 brands, including Nike, Ikea, and Coca-Cola, and its content output had over 45 million views last year.

Fishman sees a big opportunity to incorporate similar formats into other retailers’ sites. eMarketer estimates that advertisers will spend $44.9 billion on video ads this year, up 25% from 2020.

“Most of these retailers have the same experience,” said Fishman. “The same endless shelf space, the same cart and checkout process. We want to show customers a differentiated experience.”

But to get there, eko will have to solve for lots of problems that have bedeviled shoppable video formats for some time. 

“Shoppable video is a tremendous asset to our clients. When we think of the retail environment, it can be quite sterile,” said David Hutchinson, co-head of commerce and retail media at dentsu Media, which has previously partnered with eko. “Take a microwave as an example. They all look similar and have a similar price range. Shoppable video sets the product apart. A consumer can see it in action, how it would fit into a kitchen.”

“While [shoppable video] is a relatively small proportion of e-commerce investment, the returns are impressive,” he added. Hutchinson declined to share more specifics about how much clients were spending on the format. 

Additionally, Hutchinson noted that there are challenges for brands when it comes to shoppable videos — like that branded generic video won’t have the same impact as product storytelling. “If you sell 1000’s of products, how practical is it to have 1000’s videos? This will be the balance,” he added.

One challenge for eko is that their videos are currently not widely distributed. They can only be seen on the specific Cookshop website and currently cannot be accessed from the Walmart site. Walmart says that it plans to promote the interactive videos on social media, as well as through linked banner ads on its homepage and grocery pages. The company declined to say when these ads would run. “There is a ton of work going into making our videos more distributed in the future,” said Fishman, adding “We’re going to scale that impact even more by expanding our native social distribution into the spaces where consumers love to browse, shop and get inspired.”

Walmart first invested in eko in 2018 in a bid to attract shoppers and boost digital customer engagement through video. Eko and Walmart previously collaborated on other interactive experiences, like Camp, WonderLab, and GiftFinder. 

Outside of eko, Walmart has been investing on several fronts to grow it’s e-commerce presence. In an earnings call last week, Walmart reported that its e-commerce sales in the U.S. grew by 69% in fourth quarter last year.

“The first half of the year was nuclear winter — and that was across the board,” said Jim Spanfeller, CEO of G/O Media, citing layoffs and the economic insecurity that came with the start of the coronavirus crisis. 

However, as publishers pivoted events programming to virtual, which began to be accepted as the new normal, they started to gain traction.

For example, G/O Media’s Black news and culture-focused brand The Root shifted The Root 100 and The Root Institute events to virtual in 2020, and the change didn’t deprecate sponsorship revenue compared to previous years. The events were sponsored by Google and Target, respectively.

But generally it wasn’t easy going. Group Nine held fewer events in 2020 compared to 2019, so revenue from that side of the business, mostly from sponsorships, was down year over year. Group Nine wouldn’t share specific numbers, but less events meant less opportunities for sponsors, said Group Nine CRO Geoff Schiller. Many of its events are tied to the entertainment industry, so “the volume dip was driven by entertainment industries’ challenges because of COVID,” Schiller said.

The company does not see the events business getting back on track completely until the industry and the world can safely return to in-person events. “When it does, we can make up for it and intend on again leading in the space,” said a spokesperson.

There were silver-lining plays for some publishers. Time, for example, created “Time100 Talks,” a virtual series spun out of its flagship “Time100” franchise that brings together leaders in different fields to discuss solutions to global problems.

The ‘Talks’ “didn’t exist in March of 2020, but now is a tentpole [that] I don’t see leaving our brand anytime soon,” said Ian Orefice, head of Time Studios. Sponsors for Time100 Talks in 2020 included P&G, State Farm, Citi, Siemens and DBS, among others. Time also partnered with TV networks like ABC, CBS, NBC and Nickelodeon to support its largest franchises. “Person of the Year” and “Kid of the Year” will return to broadcast in 2021, Orefice said.

Forbes says virtual events have allowed the brand to reach more people and drive deeper engagement with its audience. In the second half of 2020, Forbes held 66 events that reached over 50,000 registrants from 188 different countries. Last year was the eighth annual Women’s Summit, which usually hosts up to 500 people. The event pivoted to a free, virtual experience, and 23,000 women registered to attend. 

“It was not just a pivot. We invented a new business, which we fundamentally think is here to stay,” said Jessica Sibley, CRO at Forbes.

At the beginning of the pandemic, virtual events had “a very negative connotation,” said Patrick Garrigan, global head of Bloomberg Live. The team’s first hurdle was to tell sponsors and partners to “bear with us,” and get on board with the idea of virtual events.

“Audiences change, and they were willing to accept this as a meaningful way to connect at this moment,” Garrigan said.

Once the company had a couple of events under its belt though, Bloomberg sold all of its 2020 events inventory by July. “We exceeded our projections in virtual events by nearly 2X,” he said, without giving exact figures.

As 2020 wore on, capabilities, investment and resources improved to provide better events programming to audiences and sponsors alike, publishers interviewed for the story said.

“Sponsors are generally not interested in supporting ‘just another online meeting,’ so brands who have been successful in the past year with online events have invested in reimagining the shape and texture of the programming for virtual delivery,” said W. Joe DeMiero, CEO of experiential agency Hawkeye. “The most successful sponsor integrations we see tend to integrate the sponsor’s brand into the interactive parts of the event.”

Group Nine took the approach of telling sponsors that virtual events could live beyond the slated time and that content from the events could be distributed on different platforms.

“The big question from brands was, ‘If I’m not in the local vicinity of the venue… how am I experiencing it?’” Schiller said. The answer from Group Nine was that content would be distributed and amplified on social platforms, in a similar fashion to the way influencers share content from events with followers to amplify brand integrations. “This is why we try to make earned media such a focal point of our strategy -— brands can drive even more value,” Schiller said.

Many publishers are scaling back to focus on marquee events featuring more sponsors. The Atlantic, for example, is halving its event programming to around 20 events in 2021, that despite drawing 4.5 million views to its virtual events in 2020, and 50% more attendees than for the whole of 2019. 

“Instead of trying to do everything, we are really delivering on the key topics and the content we believe our audience needs most, and delivering those experiences throughout the year,” said Candace Montgomery, general manager of AtlanticLive.

The goal is for the events business to make up 15% of The Atlantic’s overall revenue for 2021, she said. Prior to 2020, events revenue contributed as much as 20% of The Atlantic’s overall revenue.

“Everyone’s business was affected by this drastic change in the world… but we have positive outlooks on how virtual business will support our overall business,” Montgomery said. 

While sticking to predominantly virtual events in the first half of 2020, most publishers said a hybrid of virtual and in-person events will be the new normal for the foreseeable future.

“We are never going to think of a live in-person event as a live in-person event anymore,” Spanfeller said. “It’s always going to expand beyond who can attend at the moment or virtually or who can catch up after the fact through video or other kinds of applications.” 

Most of the publishers interviewed for this story said they are looking into adding paid events in 2021.

One idea Spanfeller posed is having people pay for an in-person event with potential live VIP experiences or networking opportunities, with free event registrations for virtual attendees to tune in. 

Others will likely follow suit, but with major logistical shifts.

“There is real potential for hybrid events, such as having a small gathering in person, and then amplify it to a much larger audience virtually who don’t want to travel or companies that don’t want to pay for travel,” said Sherry Phillips, svp of ForbesLive.

“It just takes infinite flexibility,” she said.

“You’re putting your trust in people who have platform expertise who may only have six months experience in a job,” said Lizzy Glazer, vp of connections strategy at social specialist shop Code3 (formerly SocialCode). “We have someone who’s our resident TikTok expert getting on the phone with clients and explaining the pros and cons and ideas on how to activate there. You need to invest in that talent, and then give them the opportunity to have important conversations with senior level, mid-level and junior level clients.”

To be clear, everyone interviewed for this story insisted this is not about ageism — it’s about finding the right person with the right experience for the job. “Let’s get this out of the way immediately: we do not make hiring decisions based on age — that’s illegal,” said Talia Arnold, head of strategy with exVerus, a digital agency. “Gen Z is a demographic that grew up with phones in their hands. They’re the generation with social media as the main way of talking to their friends … When you talk about hiring practices, it is based on individuals’ expertise, knowhow and passions.”

The reality is, this new crop of social media platforms offers opportunities for brands unlike the more mature stalwarts like Facebook, Instagram or even YouTube or Twitter — and it’s creating an opportunity for agencies to lead the way.

Independent agency SCS, which is the social media agency for clients such as Vans’ U.S., is leveraging platforms like Snapchat and influencers across channels, but especially on TikTok, said Jeff Roach, president and chief strategy officer at the agency.

“Our role for the client is to help guide them in their brand transformation and help them understand what’s coming up, how they can leverage these platforms,” Roach continued. “I look to younger folks than me who are even more steeped in the culture, who are natively part of that movement. And engaging people who are inside those platforms and native to it to help guide us to execute in a way that’s highly relevant.”

Those younger employees at agencies appreciate having their value recognized. “In my first six months here, we were giving a presentation at a client’s office, discussing where we thought they could fit best, and I was doing the majority of presenting because I had the most familiarity with these platforms,” explained Max Haberman, senior account manager at Code3. “A lot of people were coming in and out of the room. After the meeting was over, I was told the president of marketing came in to listen. I had no idea, but it was so cool to me that my experience could have relevance to someone with that level of seniority.”

Color by numbers

Float, which bills itself as “resource planning for creative teams,” crunched some numbers on employees’ and principals’ attitudes toward remote work in its 2021 Global Agency Productivity Report. What it found is a strong desire to maintain at least some balance of remote work in the future among employees, along with increased productivity but also longer hours.

The key findings:

• 98% of agency folks want a permanent policy that incorporates at least some remote work time; meanwhile, 15% of agency principals are resistant to offering any remote work options.
• 66% of teams are working longer hours remotely than in the office, despite half of teams feeling healthier and 27% feeling about the same.
• 50% of teams are holding more meetings remotely than in the office, which is affecting their productivity (and most likely leading to longer hours).
• Teams get through an extra 2.5 hours of “deep work” (the ability to work without interruption) on average working remotely than they do in the office.

Take off and landing

—With new product launches coming up, Mike’s Hard Lemonade named Haworth Media its new media and planning agency. 

—IPG Mediabrands made a few big personnel moves in the last week: Fiona Johnston, CEO of UM Australia, was named chief growth officer for global and EMEA and will be based in London. Separately, Rahel Rasu was hired away from DDB to be Mediabrands’ global chief communications officer. 

—In a busy news week for IPG, its out-of-home media agency Rapport announced Rapport Beyond, a line of billboards that work to offset carbon emissions wherever they are located.

—VaynerMedia picked up media responsibilities for mall stalwart apparel company American Eagle Outfitters, which had previously worked with Dentsu’s 360i.

Direct quote

“I’m so excited about Clubhouse! I’ve been so impressed with how multicultural it is. And I think that’s going to be a real strength if it can stay that way. It can be a voice to so many people who might not ordinarily have easy access to a megaphone … I felt like all those voices were so legitimate, so knowledgeable and so authoritative. Clubhouse is going to put market research on its head. What soap operas did for TV, Clubhouse will do for audio.” — Media Kitchen CEO Barry Lowenthal talking about Clubhouse’s potential.

Speed reading

—Digiday’s Sara Guaglione, media reporter, and Kate Kaye, platforms data, privacy and reporter, rounded up the most interesting discussion points and quotes from Digiday Publishing Summit’s first day workshops, including fears around new identity approaches, struggles with programmatic during the pandemic, and TikTok’s value as a source of traffic for publishers.

—Digiday’s senior marketing editor Kristina Monllos looks at the gains Snapchat is enjoying especially with direct-to-consumer advertisers as the platform advances its targeting capabilities.

—Variety has two interesting stories on media buying: the first offers a breakdown of one of the first national addressable ad buys, executed on AMC with the help of Omnicom Media Group, and the second on NBC Universal setting April as the date it stops using TV ratings for all local media selling in favor of impression-based selling.

However, The Showdown has yet to prove successful to advertisers, and has not sold ad spots yet — the first two iterations are being used as a donation driver to support historically black colleges and universities.

Gen Z and young millennial sports fans are consuming sports media differently than earlier generations, according to Doug Bernstein, general manager of Bleacher Report’s House of Highlights brand. This demographic is not watching live sports broadcasts on TV, but is tuning into online livestreams and watching highlight clips on social media.

And even more surprising, they are making sports idols out of social media influencers and YouTube content creators as fans have done with professional athletes.

“We’re seeing just as much success on creator-based posts as we do with [posts that feature] LeBron [James] or Steph Curry,” said Bernstein.

The Showdown was first tested against the celebrity golf event, Capital One’s The Match: Champions for Change, last November. The hour-long livestream had four influencers competing to see who could hit a golf ball closest to a pin and win $100,000. That event, which was livestreamed on YouTube and on the Bleacher Report app, accumulated almost 600,000 views on YouTube with an average watch time of 12 minutes. It also had 20,000 concurrent views within the app while premiering live.

For the NBA All-Star Game, The Showdown will have eight sports influencers competing in a basketball knockout challenge filmed in an Atlanta-based studio. The last person standing will also win $100,000. Non-winning creator participants are still given some monetary incentive for the content they post on their own channels that are tied to the event, but Bernstein declined to disclose the terms of the arrangements.

The ultimate goal for House of Highlights is to “create a program that is complementary to how people traditionally watch live sports and the audience that that delivers,” said Bernstein.

Live sports audiences are lucrative, especially when it comes to major tentpole events like the Super Bowl, which can fetch $5.5 million for a 30-minute commercial spot.

The programming could be a good opportunity to fill those gaps with audiences, said Daniel Fabé, vp and sports investment specialist at marketing agency Lockard & Wechsler Direct, but cautioned that “it will be difficult to compete with the level of linear spend seen on one of the premier events on the NBA calendar.”

Some of the participants in the upcoming Showdown include Matthew Meagher, who goes by MMG on YouTube and has 2 million subscribers; Jenna Bandy, who has 184,000 YouTube subscribers; and Mark Phillips, also known as Supreme Dreams on Instagram and has 2.2 million followers.

“We want to be able to establish something that can be a true apples to apples comparison to [live sports] that are broadcast on linear TV,” said Bernstein, adding that the hope is to match or even exceed the amount of viewers that sports broadcasts can earn while enticing a younger audience.

The Showdown’s creator-based competition is not meant to be a fleeting initiative, Bernstein said. Eventually, he hopes the show can expand to be its own IP franchise that is not directly attached to a major sporting event. He also said the idea is to create merchandise, like jerseys and T-shirts, that the company sells in its online store.

When the social media stars “come together, which they never do, it’s almost like the Marvel Cinematic Universe. All [of the audience’s] favorite creators are coming together and they’re going to be incredibly excited by it,” said Bernstein.

The paper highlights a generational opportunity for permissioned data partnerships to improve scalable insights, measurement and marketing activation dramatically. In short, harnessing a collaborative data strategy will provide marketers a competitive advantage. In the sections that follow, highlighting each of its major approaches, the focus is on overcoming challenges through collaborative data solutions.

Why collaborative data?

In the report, Winterberry identifies four distinct categories that make up collaborative data solutions: data cooperatives, data marketplaces, data exchanges and technical data environments.

The research suggests an expanding number of brands using multiple solutions and multi-party partnering across the industry to build the most successful collaboration strategies. Brands spanning the spectrum, from those with more data to those that have less, all have an equal opportunity to build a more strategic and collaborative data approach with the support of this research. 

Still, the addition of multiple new solutions and partners can sound overwhelming, especially in an uncertain environment such as the one we find ourselves today. The good news is, streamlined approaches are simplifying the process.

Start with a data cooperative

So, how can a motivated marketer ramp up a collaborative data strategy without inflating the number of partners, contracts, relationships and data sharing streams? Data cooperatives offer streamlined and proven collaborative data environments, particularly for multichannel marketers with established first-party data resources.

Winterberry’s research supports this position, identifying that “data cooperatives are the most broadly adopted and accessible collaborative environment … [due to] early market entry and subsequent maturity.” Plus, the barriers to entry are low because they are “open to participants of all sizes, with limited requirements for advanced technology or data management for participating parties.” Of the surveyed brand marketers, 59.5% are currently leveraging cooperative data solutions, with another 26.2% planning to do so.

For brands that are already members of a co-op, Winterberry suggests that “to achieve the greatest benefit from the cooperative model, many members participate in two or three co-ops, reaping the benefit of a diverse set of contributors.”

What is a data cooperative?

Identified in the research as “the initial permission-based solution,” data cooperatives were originally designed to facilitate collaboration for direct mail marketers. The give-to-get model asks brands to contribute permissioned first-party data, which the cooperative anonymizes and aggregates, architecting and maintaining a collective analytic powerhouse that benefits all members. A cornerstone of this solution is the rich transactional data members contribute. Purchase behaviors and the ability to ingest digital signals across thousands of brands transform predictive models, providing “a powerful opportunity to find new prospects both online and offline.”

Crucial elements of this definition distinguish data cooperatives from other collaborative solutions. The first cooperative launched in 1992, almost a full decade prior to the launch of data marketplaces and well in advance of technical data environments and data exchanges. This head start means that while co-op driven solutions have a strong history rooted in offline data, they have evolved through digital transformation and continue to prove the value of integrating offline and online data. Three operational decades have also resulted in experienced and reliable systems of compliance and trust-building.

Co-ops can range from hundreds to thousands of contributing brands. Some require more detailed levels of data than others. And some focus on specific verticals to ensure powerful predictive signals that meet a particular industry’s KPIs. In all solutions, though, the large number of contributors ensures constantly refreshed data.  

The collaborative benefit

The benefits of data cooperative solutions are robust — ranging from organization and enrichment of first-party data to customized analytics and access to unique data. With a co-op as the hub of collaborative data strategy, another key benefit is the rich partnerships these established companies have developed across the ecosystem.

As part of a cooperative, brands can easily partner with other members — a shared, permissioned environment reduces the amount of legal and logistical resources required to activate. Many co-ops also bring in third-party enrichment sources and connect to platforms, publishers, service bureaus and even walled gardens. These established relationships provide an accessible network for marketers to easily explore collaboration and activation opportunities both inside and outside the cooperative.

Other collaborative solutions — exchanges, marketplaces and technical data environments — have their own benefits and roles to play in long-term collaborative strategies. As solutions continue to evolve, the lines between each of these are likely to blur. For example, data cooperatives taking a cue from technical data environment strengths are incorporating data clean rooms to support their existing cross-member data collaboration processes.

For most marketers, establishing a partnership with a forward-thinking data cooperative represents a quick path to success. Many co-ops allow brands to test their solutions before committing to sharing data — test driving the data, gauging how the analytics team partners with others and exploring multichannel activations and compliance practices in action. Once contributing, brands will have ready access to data at scale, proven data science resources and established compliance practices. And their teams will be armed to focus on the superpowers that drive success, such as leading-edge brand development and compelling customer experiences.