Month: February 2021

“We’re pretty agile and we’re looking to spend on what’s most effective in the moment,” Friedman said, noting that Dr. Squatch now sees the platform as more than just an experimental channel. With its newfound Snapchat budget, the brand has utilized in-feed ads on the platform, producing paid video content geared toward Snapchat’s Gen-Z audience.

While Snapchat is a growing channel, Facebook and YouTube serve as the brand’s bread and butter, taking up more than an estimated 85% of the digital media budget, Friedman said. Currently, the brand dedicates an estimated 65% of its digital ad spend to Facebook, 20% to YouTube, and 10% to Snapchat with remaining dollars invested in what it does consider experimental channels — like TikTok and influencer marketing.

Dr. Squatch’s key to rapid growth, as Friedman sees it, is to have multiple channels to “de-risk the path forward.”

Snapchat has also made investments in its platform to better woo over brands’ dollars. Changes last spring included new original short-form shows and AR features, as per previous Digiday reporting. Since then, it may be time for more brands to take a second look at the platform, said Faviana Campbell, media director at R/GA.

“It’s really a missed opportunity that brands don’t consider Snapchat to be part of their core brand media strategy,” Campbell said in an email.

The media director noted that direct response clients don’t typically consider Snapchat for e-commerce, “but Snap has proven to be a strong partner with a unique ability to target Gen-Z, especially in retail.”

As brands continue to diversify their media strategy and ad spend, Snapchat can serve as an “an additional mechanism to deepen user engagement, whether that’s through the lens or other ad unit,” according to Campbell. For this year’s Super Bowl, R/GA worked with UberEats for a spot that included a Snapchat AR add-on during the game to target Gen Z. 

“Done right, it’s a lean-in experience and helps to deepen brand association while priming the audience to become more receptive to promotions,” Campbell said in an email.

The media director cited PR mishaps and advertisers’ lack of understanding the platform’s advertising offerings as to why it’s not widely embraced by the industry since bursting onto the scene nearly a decade ago.

Last fall, Digiday reported that Snapchat pitched advertisers what it called a “Platform Burst,” in which Snapchat guaranteed advertisers a certain reach for campaign ad spend. Digiday also reported that publishers were seeing success on the platform. 

Last year, Dr. Squatch worked within a $30 million media budget, but that number is expected to double in 2021 as the brand continues to grow. Last year, the brand hit roughly $100 million in revenue per Friedman.

“We want to continue that growth. We want to approximately double our business,” Friedman said. “But we need the ad spend to continue to drive that.”

Dr. Squatch also advertised during the Super Bowl earlier this month to boost brand awareness. The men’s soap brand has also been taking a page from sneaker culture, experimenting with limited-edition drops for soap to continue engagement with its existing customer base. 

To the savvy social media marketer, Snapchat is no longer considered an experimental channel, according to Sadie Miller, vice president of social media partnerships at Reprise agency. The executive said the platform has leveraged camera-focused, VR/AR product integrations to define its unique position as a social media platform. 

“Year-over-year, our investment in Snapchat continues to grow across the portfolio, which attests to our belief that it is a maturing and well-suited platform to help reach client objectives in creative and inspiring ways,” Miller said in an email.

Pre-pandemic when everyone was in the office, many people felt the need to be visible or pressure to attend work when they were ill, despite being less productive and probably contagious. It is a culture that damages business, the employer brand and workers’ wellbeing.

Despite the move to more remote working, brands and agencies are in danger of replacing the much-criticized physical form of presenteeism with a new online version. 

Remote presenteeism is being driven by job insecurity, poor management and a never-ending diary of virtual meetings. 

Employees feel under pressure to work when ill, to put in more than their contracted hours and to constantly check and respond to emails and messages whatever the time of day.

Stephen Bevan, head of HR research development at the U.K.’s Institute for Employment Studies, said presenteeism can be an invisible problem, particularly in a remote workplace.

“There is still a stigma around mental health at work and this drives presenteeism,” said Bevan. “There are many people in senior positions who perceive sickness absence as being for wimps and that you should be working through thick and thin.”

An IES survey confirms that not much has changed despite the move to home working. It discovered that 15% of those questioned are working 10 hours or more beyond their contracted hours and 32% have worked from home despite being ill.

“Boundaries between work and home are porous and line managers are struggling to manage virtual teams. We are storing up mental health issues because some managers do not have the leadership or soft skills to manage people remotely,” added Bevan.

Sherif Mityas was chief experience officer at restaurant brand TGI Fridays based in Dallas until last year. He is now a consultant and said the blurring of lines between employment and home means people are often more “present” at work now than they were before the pandemic.

“We need to adjust that balance and continue to explore work programmes and policies to ensure our teams are productive but not burning themselves out,” he said. “If you are still a boss who needs to count heads every morning and see your people working you are definitely not a leader.  One positive outcome of the pandemic is that truly progressive leaders will remain.”

The debate around presenteeism has always been about managers trusting employees to be productive even if they cannot see them. A YouGov survey carried out in January for LinkedIn discovered that 41% of CMOs said Covid-19 had proved to them they could trust employees to work productively at home, and 44% felt the pandemic had ended presenteeism. 

“Employees must not feel like having a green Teams dot is the new staying late,” said head of marketing solutions for LinkedIn Tom Pepper.

Justin Pahl, CEO at agency VMLY&R London, said the culture in the marketing and advertising industry of long-hours preparing for pitches and keeping people at work into the small hours to “get the work done” needs to change. 

“There are challenges to address, whether that is feeling pressure to work longer hours at home or feeling burned out. It is important businesses shift the focus from being physically present towards being emotionally present to support each other,” he said. “This means making yourself available by keeping the virtual doors open. This will be less about clocking in and out and showing your face, and more about a space where teams can come to collaborate.” 

At campaigning ad agency Blue State in New York head of creative and product Marie Danzig said managers must give people permission not to be present.

“During the pandemic many employees’ vacations have become stay-cations and I have seen people check in online, respond to emails and even join calls,” she said. “They should be seeking pure rest and relaxation, which is crucial to their overall work-life balance and productivity.”

One of the problems is that technology has created an always-on culture. Sarah Moloney, U.K. managing director at international brand strategy and PR agency KWT Global, agreed the industry must avoid making things worse. 

KWT Global has offices in California, New York and London and has implemented a number of policies to avoid online presenteeism. These include call-free hours, video-free Fridays and ensuring people get fresh air every day.  

“We are facing new pressures, such as being sat in front of our screens for longer and attending more video calls. This bleeds into our home lives,” she said. “Is this a virtual evolution of the ‘jacket on the back of the chair’ phenomenon where people over-emphasize their physical presence in a space and stay late to show commitment? Businesses need to demonstrate trust and permit autonomy and flexibility.”

“From a product development perspective, I don’t think it’s anywhere near in-market completion,” said Gabe Feldman, business development lead of influencer marketing at Viral Nation.

Google has had a tough time creating a third-party marketplace, even when it made that marketplace free. As platforms vie to create an easy social shopping experience, Shoploop has served as a cautionary tale that shoppable content for the sake of shoppable content is not necessarily what consumers want. While platforms including Instagram and TikTok are capitalizing on the pandemic-fueled e-commerce boom, Shoploop has shown that social commerce has to be balanced with other content, a lesson Amazon learned from its doomed Instagram knock-off, Spark.

“Shoploop’s proposition had the ‘shopping’ part in its core and left the ‘social’ element as secondary,” said Maddie Raedts, founder and cco of Influencer Marketing Agency.

Shoploop was a brainchild of Area 120, Google’s in-house product incubator. The would-be app started by inviting influencers on Instagram to make 90-second, mini-unboxing videos about air fryers or applying a new eyeliner, with the product link prominently displayed. Influencers would get a commission from the affiliate link. Google declined to share figures around generated revenue, users, or the number of influencers on the platform.

Raedts said that the main reason influencer marketing works is because creators have developed a close relationship with their followers and built a community.

“If I’m an influencer and my core audience lives on Instagram or TikTok, why would I want to move them to another platform?” added Feldman. “Shoploop would need to give influencers an experience they don’t already have.”

Shoploop was missing several features that brands and influencers have come to expect, like a “follow” button, or a place for creators to link to their blog, other social media, or contact information. The heavy commercial focus takes away from giving creators the tools they need to build a relationship with an audience. It’s also not possible to save videos for later, or search for certain influencers. Shoploop’s content is geared toward a high-intent-to-buy audience, which doesn’t do as well as the “snackable” content of TikTok, and is less “inspiring” compared to Pinterest searches, said Feldman.

“There are other platforms that arguably offer a superior experience,” said Gil Eyal, founder of HYPR, an influencer marketing database.

For now, Shoploop has been rolled into Google Shopping on mobile browsers. But some influencers still think that Shoploop’s core offering of product videos has a future.

Caroline Mathis is known to her 15.1k Instagram and her 13.5k TikTok followers as life_with_cam. She said Google tapped her via Instagram in October of last year to be part of Shoploop.

“I think Shoploop will work better than IG and Tik Tok once it gets more well known,” Mathis said via email. “First, video content and reviews are the wave of the future. They explain the product much better than a photo and they help people to understand the product more. Second, the link to the product is right in the video so it makes it so much easier to shop.”

Mathis said she has yet to earn a commission from a Shoploop sale since the platform is still in “early stages.” 

The agreement comes amid antitrust investigations into Google in the U.S. and U.K. and a looming law in Australia that both Google and Facebook worry could inspire similar government intervention elsewhere to level the playing field for publishers.

One executive from a mid-size publisher told Digiday that News Showcase is just another instance of Google building “features and interfaces that actually have people not leaving their platform, where all of our stuff is just consumed there.” The executive added that they feared Google or Facebook may suppress their publication’s search rankings or withhold ad deals as retaliation for publicly criticizing the companies.

“Google and Facebook have such power that I’m afraid of repercussions, so we play nice with them,” said the publishing executive.

A bargaining chip or hush money?

Whether the News Corp deal involves the firm’s U.S. business or whether the showcase will be promoted to the U.S. audience remains unclear. Google told Digiday it is only now in the early stages of discussing News Showcase with U.S. publishers.

“Currently, the News Showcase product is live in Brazil, Australia, the U.K., Germany and Argentina. We have over 500 publications signed up to News Showcase and look forward to signing up many more in the future, including in the U.S. and other countries,” said a Google spokesperson.

Google’s News Showcase is one way the firm has responded to pressure from publishers and lawmakers who argue its search engine and other tools exploit content producers by presenting so much of their content in Google’s environment that people have no reason to click through to publisher sites.

In October, the company promised to dedicate $1 billion to publishers over three years. Digiday reported at the time that Google would terminate agreements with any publishers participating in any legal claim against Google.

Jason Kint, CEO of publisher trade group Digital Content Next, said he’s not holding his breath for Google to rush out its News Showcase product in the U.S. “They appear to be starting to spend money on licensing news content in a very strategic way by creating a new vehicle for it,” he said, noting that the company is only rolling out the product “in the countries where [they] see the biggest threat right now.”

Platforms threaten to pull out of Australia

Australia’s impending News Media Bargaining Code would give news publishers leverage to negotiate individually or collectively for compensation from Google or Facebook when they feature their content on their platforms. It would also create standards requiring tech firms to give publishers notice before making algorithm adjustments that can wreak havoc on their search and social media strategies.

Google has fought the legislation, threatening to pull its search service out of the Australian market. “Our concerns about the code in Australia are about being asked to pay for all links and snippets,” wrote Kate Beddoe, Google head of news, web and publishing product partnerships for the Asia-Pacific region in a company blog post published on Feb. 10.

In addition to Google’s deal with News Corp, the company also this week announced Australian partnerships with Seven West Media and Junkee media. It remains to be seen whether the publisher deals satisfy the Australian government enough to alter the proposed code or to opt not to pass it into law altogether.

Google declined to comment regarding whether the recent deals with News Corp and the other publishers are signs that it will back down on its threat to pull out of Australia’s search market.

Facebook has also opposed the Australia legislation. On Feb. 17, the social network announced that it would stop distributing Australian news publishers’ content to anyone who uses its platform and prevent people in Australia from accessing any news publishers’ content. 

While Facebook has been compensating publishers for news content through its Facebook News program, the move to block news content in Australia fits the company’s broader plan to deemphasize political content in people’s news feeds.

A U.S. media bargaining code

Members of Digital Content Next generally support the proposed Australia code, according to Kint. “It’s one approach to addressing the very competitive imbalance,” he said.

There has been an effort here in the U.S. for Congress to pass a law resembling Australia’s proposed code. A bill introduced in the last Congress aimed to give smaller publishers better leverage in negotiations with Google and Facebook. The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act was backed by several news publishing groups including the American Society of News Editors and the National Newspaper Association as well as press associations throughout country when it was first introduced in 2019.

The bill, which would need to be re-introduced by the current Congress, would provide a four-year safe harbor period during which newspaper companies can negotiate compensation terms as a collective with the big digital platforms. The legislation is intended to ensure that negotiations benefit all publishers rather than just a few with large market share.

News Media Alliance, a news publisher trade group that includes The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal among its members, supports the legislation. David Chavern, president and CEO of the group, said he expects it to be re-introduced in this Congress.

“What people miss is the big national publishers already have some leverage today, so the question is how do you get leverage to small publishers, and I don’t understand how you would do that outside some kind of bargaining code that ensures they’d be included,” said Chavern.

The media business’ new normal

The media business seems to have settled into its new normal. Companies may have yet to return to the office, in-person events may remain on hold and some advertisers like travel companies and movie studios may still be on the sidelines. But based on how the fourth quarter panned out for publishers and platforms, business is looking pretty usual for media companies, even if it’s not necessarily business as usual.

The key hits:

• In the fourth quarter of 2020, digital continued its takeover of media companies’ traditional businesses.
• In addition to rising digital subscriptions, digital ad sales increased across traditional and digital-centric media companies as well as platforms.
• Legacy media companies’ traditional businesses, meanwhile, continued to decline.

“Conditions are pretty normal other than the absence of the travel and entertainment categories,” GroupM global president of business intelligence Brian Wieser said regarding the advertising business.

However, this normal is still fairly new. While the shift in media companies’ businesses from traditional channels like print and linear TV to digital publishing and streaming has been underway for more than a decade, it wasn’t until last year that some traditional media companies reached a tipping point. 

The New York Times, for example, saw its digital advertising and subscription revenues combine to exceed its print advertising and subscription revenues in the second quarter and then saw the dynamic hold in the third and fourth quarters, though its digital ad revenue dipped in the fourth quarter. Meanwhile, Meredith-owned magazines’ digital ad revenues surpasses their print ad revenues for the first time in the final quarter of 2020.

However, the shift from traditional to digital continues to be somewhat slower — and more painful — for media conglomerates with a foothold in linear TV. 

Of the major TV network groups, Disney has been most successful in building up its streaming business. But its streaming revenue remains a fraction of its linear TV revenue, and whereas Disney’s TV networks’ operating income totaled $1.7 billion in the most recent quarter, its direct-to-consumer division, which is home to its streaming business, operated at a $466 million loss. 

But at least Disney’s linear TV revenue increased.

Comcast-owned NBCUniversal’s TV networks experienced a 9% drop in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2020 compared to Q4 2019. And the $568 million gap between the two periods was nearly five times the total revenue raked in by Comcast’s “corporate and other” division, which is home to NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming service and which lost $1.2 billion in the quarter.

More to the point, both Disney and NBCUniversal saw their TV networks’ advertising revenues shrink in the fourth quarter. The year-over-year ad sales declines were due to linear TV viewership continuing to erode and despite ad prices increasing.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are the digital-centric publishers and tech platforms that ended the year on a high note. “Those that really thrive relative to the digital ad space, their earnings reports are undeniable,” said Jana Arbanas, who leads Deloitte’s telecom, media and entertainment sector.

Insider Inc. said its revenue increased by 30% year over year in 2020 and that the company netted a profit for the year. Group Nine Media’s 2020 revenue was flat compared to 2019, but the company turned in a record fourth quarter, Group Nine Media chief revenue officer Geoff Schiller said on the Digiday Podcast earlier this month.

Then there are the tech platforms. Facebook’s advertising revenue increased by 31% year over year in the fourth quarter to top $27.1 billion. Google’s ad revenue increased by 22% year over year to to reach $46.2 billion. Pinterest, Snap and Twitter similarly reported double-digit year-over-year increases in ad revenue. 

“2020 ended up as not as bad a year as anyone would have reasonably expected given the state of the economy. It was the worst economy since the Great Depression, yet [the market for] advertising was barely worse than the 2008 recession,” Wieser said. — Tim Peterson

Confessional

“Facebook’s efforts to be a destination platform [for video] have completely failed. But the result of that, from a content consumption standpoint, is we can sometimes post a YouTube video [to Facebook] three to six months later and see it perform just as well. So our back catalog of content has a lot more value.”

— Media executive

States move to tax digital ad sales

Media companies have gotten used to feeling dwarfed by the global scale and might wielded by platforms. But a number of state governments are trying to change the balance of power in digital media through legislation.

Late last week, Maryland’s house and senate passed a veto-proof bill that would impose a new tax on digital ads served inside the state. The tax rate differs depending on who’s paying. On the low end, companies that generate between $100 million and $1 billion in global ad revenue each year will pay a 2.5% tax. On the high end, companies with annual ad revenues exceeding $15 billion will pay a 10% tax.

A number of platform-funded special interest groups will likely challenge the bill in court, but Maryland may not be the only front they have to fight on. Here’s a primer on similar bills in other states. — Max Willens

New York (Senate Bill 1124)
In January, New York lawmakers reintroduced a bill nearly identical to Maryland’s, with taxes on digital ads ranging from 2.5% to 10%, depending on the annual global ad revenues of the company selling them.

Indiana (House Bill 1312, House Bill 1572)
Indiana is considering two bills. House Bill 1312 would be applicable to any social media platform with more than 1 million active users living in Indiana that generates at least $1 million in annual revenue from selling ads to Indiana users or selling Indiana users’ data. Those companies would have to pay 7% of the gross income they generate from selling ads served to Indiana users, plus $1 for each Indiana resident using that service.

A separate bill, House Bill 1572, would impose a flat fee of $5 per Indiana user. (For reference, Indiana’s population in 2019 was 6.7 million, according to U.S. Census estimates).

Connecticut (House Bill 5645, House Bill 6187)
Like Indiana, Connecticut is considering two bills, one simpler than the other. House Bill 6187 would impose a flat 10% tax on gross revenues from digital ad sales inside the state by companies with annual global revenues exceeding $10 billion. House Bill 5645, like Indiana’s 1312, would be based on gross revenues generated from ads served to Connecticut residents, but the precise numbers have not yet been laid out.

Oregon (House Bill 2392)
Any company that sells an Oregon resident’s personal information, including, but not limited to , heir email address and IP address, would receive a 5% tax on the sale. Similar to California’s California Consumer Privacy Act, the bill takes a broad definition of sale to include “exchanging personal information for consideration other than cash or cash equivalents,” which seems to mean using the information to sell targeted ads.

First passes
The bills up for debate only tell part of the story. Legislators in a number of different states and Washington, D.C., proposed ad taxes that never wound up seeing a vote, though the interest suggests that future legislation could come up.

• D.C. lawmakers wrote, then removed, amendments to a budget that proposed a flat 3% tax on all ads, including non-digital ones. The tax would have taken a bite from every step of the process of producing the ad.
• In Nebraska, a proposal to extend its sales tax to any “advertising message delivered over the internet” failed to get out of committee.
• South Dakota lawmakers introduced, then removed, a plan to take advertising services off its list of exceptions applied to the state’s sales tax.

Numbers to know

94.9 million: The number of subscribers that Disney+ accrued by the beginning of 2021, approaching the halfway point of Netflix’s 203.7 million customers.

$630 million: Tribune Publishing’s valuation following Alden Global Capital’s agreement to buy out the rest of the company, of which it already owns a 32% stake in.

70: Forbes’ first-party data platform, ForbesOne, grew from 22 audience segments to 70 audience segments in the 18 months since its launch. 

3 Questions with The Economist’s Bob Cohn

The Economist is assembling a growing podcast portfolio. On Feb. 15, the publisher premiered “The Jab,” a weekly series focused on the global coronavirus vaccine rollout. The show marks The Economist’s six podcast series. Its five existing shows draw in 3 million unique listeners and 25 million downloads each month, according to The Economist president Bob Cohn. — Sara Guaglione

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why are podcasts a valuable format for The Economist and its audience, and what does the company gain by investing in this space?
It’s not only to reach our existing audience and audience types. Podcast listeners tend to be a little bit younger on the whole. If we can reach younger people and bring them into The Economist family, then it’s part of an overall goal of using our podcast business to acquaint people with The Economist and ultimately become subscribers. From a revenue perspective, podcasts play two roles for The Economist: sponsorship and advertising revenue. We believe that having more people listen to The Economist’s podcasts means they will fall in love with The Economist’s journalism and become loyalists to the brand and lead to more subscribers.

What is The Economist doing to increase podcast revenue in 2021, and is this a main goal for the company or are you experimenting in this format and hoping for successes along the way?
Podcasts are a small but growing portion of our overall revenue, and we do expect that to continue to grow. We are adding to our existing portfolio. We are monetizing the shows with advertising as we try to grow the business. Our podcasts are free, and we believe that they contribute to overall awareness and drive subscriptions.

With so many podcasts launching left and right, how will podcast shows like “The Jab” draw in listeners, and how does it fit into The Economist’s overall product strategy?
The COVID story is one that we think is especially suited to our journalism. It’s a multidimensional topic that ranges across science, health, politics, business and culture — and that’s also where we range. We have a real ability to connect the dots and think horizontally around the story. Podcasts fit into our product strategy because we are eager to meet our readers and our listeners where they live. Some of them live in a hammock with a magazine each week, some want to scroll through their phone while waiting in line at a grocery story or some want to go on a run or cook dinner while listening to a podcast.

What we’ve covered

After 18 months in the oven, Forbes’s first party data play hits the market:

• The publisher’s ForbesOne platform has grown from 22 audience segments to 70 different datasets.
• Forbes expects to use the platform not only to bolster its advertising business but to inform other areas within the company, like its virtual events business.

Read more about Forbes here.

People file lawsuits to test boundaries of California’s privacy law:

• California’s privacy law has been notoriously ambiguous, so people have turned to the courts for clarity.
• More than 100 CCPA-related lawsuits have been filed, and California’s attorney general has sent out dozens of notices to companies for noncompliance.

Read more about California’s privacy law here.

Why ESPN decided to put some of its top writers behind the ESPN+ paywall:

• In November, ESPN put some of its top writers behind its ESPN+ paywall in a bid to increase paid subscriptions.
• The move could help ESPN to build its standalone streaming business.

Read more about ESPN here.

How a proposed antitrust law could rein in tech platforms with ‘long overdue’ enforcement money:

• A new antitrust reform bill would provide more funding for regulators at the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice.
• The CALERA bill would create a new division within the FTC to investigate anticompetitive conduct.

Read more about antitrust reform here.

Esports orgs borrow from the media owner’s playbook in search for new revenues:

• Esports organizations are borrowing business strategies from media companies.
• Their strategies include striking influencer deals, selling ads and selling shows to TV networks and streamers.

Read more about esports here.

Why Tegna is making a bet on its fact-checking vertical Verify:

• Tegna plans to turn its fact-checking vertical into a standalone property by this summer
• Tegna expects Verify to differentiate from other fact-checking properties like Snopes by focusing on video.

Read more about Tegna here.

How TheSoul Publishing grew revenue via platforms with viral social media life hacks:

• TheSoul Publishing owns 5-Minute Crafts and makes money by posting videos to Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat.
• The company’s revenue increased by 45% in 2020 compared to 2019.

Read more about TheSoul Publishing here.

Even with expansion into other categories, Crooked plans to keep things political:

• Crooked Media plans to diversify further away from politics and national affairs this year.
• But the podcast startup is still developing a slate of politically charged shows.

Read more about Crooked Media here.

With Forte, Vox Media looks to drive a majority of display revenue with its first party data:

• More than 100 advertisers used Vox Media’s first-party data platform in campaigns last year.
• By the end of 2020, nearly half of Vox Media’s display ad revenue came from ads using its first-party data.

Read more about Vox Media here.

What we’re reading

Facebook is shutting off the news in Australia:
The Australian government wants Facebook to pay news publishers for distributing their articles and videos, but Facebook doesn’t want to do that. So instead the platform has decided to stop distributing Australian news publishers’ content to anyone and any news publishers’ content to Australians, Facebook announced on Feb. 17. Facebook’s argument seems to be that it’s willing to pay some news publishers — as it’s already doing through Facebook News — but that it doesn’t want to be told which news publishers to pay or allow regulators a say in how much publishers should be paid. The Australian lawmakers’ argument seems to be that Facebook — and other platforms including Google — has too much power and needs to be legally bound to ensure it negotiates with publishers in good faith. Considering Facebook’s willingness to walk away from the negotiating table altogether rather than strike deals with Australian news outlets as Google is doing, the lawmakers may have a point.

Google is paying for news in Australia:
Google threatened to leave Australia just a few weeks ago, following the prospective legislation that would force platforms to pay media companies for the news published on their sites. As of this week, however, the legislation looked as though it was expected to pass and the company began coughing up money to media companies, including two in recent days worth tens of millions of dollars a year, The New York Times reported. For years, publishers have claimed that they were not being fairly compensated for articles and content that generate ad revenue for platforms like Google and Facebook with little impact. This deal shows what the power of government intervention can have in changing the narrative of these relationships.

Gannett and McClatchy are selling ads together:
Gannett’s USA Today Network and McClatchy are combining their local newspaper markets to sell national advertisers on local media, something not commonly done, Axios first reported. Their combined footprint will give advertisers a way to reach more than 300 local communities through a single ad buy. The USA Today national sales team will lead the go-to-market strategy for both companies, as well as take the lead on pitching clients and agencies about the new partnership.

iHeartMedia buys $230 million worth of audio ad tech:
iHeartMedia Inc. is buying E.W. Scripps Co.’s Triton Digital for $230 million, according to The Wall Street Journal. This deal will give the radio company, which first began its investment into growing its podcasting business in 2018 with its acquisition of Stuff Media LLC., a full tech stack of audio advertising and measurement tools. Those tools will provide distribution for digital-audio streams and podcasts as well as the capability to insert ads based on who is listening. Triton Digital also runs a digital ad marketplace that uses automated technology that will help iHeartMedia’s streaming audio service iHeartRadio to expand its ads to smaller, self-service ad buyers.