Month: February 2021

Given that Snapchat is more sophisticated than TikTok when it comes to targeting and direct response capabilities, advertisers are increasingly interested in spending more on Snapchat now. At the same time, Snapchat has done a better job of pitching DTC brands that they should be on the platform for its e-commerce capabilities, noted Duane Brown, founder and head of strategy at performance marketing agency Take Some Risk. 

“In the coming months, I think we will see more ad dollars move to Snapchat,” said Katya Constantine, CEO of performance marketing agency Digishop Girl, adding that the platform’s conversion-optimized campaign capabilities make it more attractive for advertisers. “We will see more brands launch on Snapchat.” 

As previously reported by Digiday, brands like Dr. Squatch have been increasing ad budgets on Snapchat as part of a diversification strategy. 

“As one of the fastest growing social channels, Snapchat Ads come up in conversations with our clients a lot,” said Zach Stuck, founder and CEO of Homestead Studio, an agency that works with DTC clients. “It’s an opportunity for brands to spend more and potentially at a greater return. Less competition and lower CPMs makes that possible. And Snapchat doesn’t come with the same pitfalls as Facebook either; our reps are super responsive and helpful.”

For Stuck’s clients, the percent of spending has increased quarter-over-quarter in the last year with the majority spending between 10-15% of their overall ad budget on Snapchat now. Last year, clients were spending between 0-10% of the budget on Snapchat.

While performance marketing agencies are seeing an overall increase in interest in Snapchat now, it’s more of a mixed bag for media agencies. For clients already spending on the platform, some are more interested as part of a desire to diversify or in the platform’s augmented reality capabilities.

“For a handful of clients it is something where they want to diversify as much as possible and I think with direct response capabilities and audience targeting sophistication, Snap is definitely second best to Facebook [and Instagram] right now,” said Stef Smith, head of paid social at Dentsu Media. “So there’s one case to be made there. The other is that Snap has been really bullish on AR and I would say we see some clients leaning into that more than others.”

That being said, even as brands are eyeing Snapchat now, buyers say it’s unlikely that spending on the platform will reach the level of Facebook. Still, performance agency buyers are bullish on the platform now.

Like other publishers, The Economist saw a surge in traffic to its coronavirus coverage. Traffic was 60% higher on average on content around this topic compared to all other online articles from the publisher in 2020, according to the company.

The interest spurred The Economist to expand its coverage of the pandemic into audio — the publisher launched a weekly podcast about the vaccine rollout, called “The Jab from Economist Radio,” on Feb. 15. The podcast secured regional sponsors including Cigna for APAC and Fujifilm for EMEA.

“COVID is the most consequential and urgent story of the day, so we want to surround it with journalism in all formats,” said The Economist president Bob Cohn.

The Economist has produced podcasts since 2006, but did not launch its first daily series and flagship show “The Intelligence” until 2019. The company has grown its portfolio of podcasts to six, which attracts 3 million unique listens and 25 million downloads monthly, Cohn said.

Podcast-based revenue at The Economist is up 50% year over year. “There is a growing podcast line in our advertising business,” Cohn said. “Our podcasts are free… and we believe that they contribute to overall awareness and top of the funnel and drive subscriptions to the main Economist at the same time.” He called podcasts a “growing sector” with “organic consumer interest,” leading the company to “put some editorial and product muscle behind it.”

Most publishers view podcasts as an avenue to expand their brand and reach different audiences, with the hope that those listeners will become paying customers to their membership programs. That’s in addition to the advertising growth many are seeing from the medium.

There was a “huge uptick” in coronavirus-related podcasts around the beginning of the pandemic, according to Dave Zohrob, co-founder and CEO of Chartable, a podcast analytics service. Along with newsletters, live blogs and interactive maps, publishers embraced podcasting with a new sense of urgency to chase an uptick in traffic brought in by coronavirus coverage.

When “Coronavirus Daily” launched in March, it was NPR’s fastest growing podcast to date, for example, according to the publisher.

Other publishers also saw success with podcasts last year. Bloomberg’s overall podcast revenue was up 33% in 2020 over 2019, according to the company. Its narrative podcast “Prognosis” previously covered the future of healthcare, but became a daily show focused on the pandemic in late March 2020. Though it reduced its production schedule to three times a week at the end of last year, unique listeners per episode are up 140% year over year since it pivoted to covering the coronavirus crisis, according to a company spokesperson who declined to provide exact podcast revenue figures.

In March 2020, The Atlantic launched a daily podcast about living through the pandemic, called “Social Distance.” It became a weekly podcast in August, but its audience continues to grow steadily and attracted advertisers like HBO. Podcast revenue has also increased, though the media company did not provide exact figures.

Overall, podcast downloads are up 10% since the beginning of the year compared to downloads before the 2020 holiday season, when listening usually dips, according to Zohrob. Bloomberg Media’s audio portfolio of about 20 digital and radio podcasts has seen a 60% year-over-year increase in monthly unique listeners, the company’s spokesperson said, without giving exact figures.

Though COVID-focused podcasts were “extremely popular at the start of the pandemic,” those shows dropped on Chartable’s rankings in May 2020, Zohrob said. While those podcasts continue to be popular, they do not have the same growth rates as when the pandemic started, and are “not attracting as many new listeners,” he added.

Some podcasts launched to cover the pandemic broadened their scope.

In June last year, for example, NPR’s “Coronavirus Daily” podcast rebranded into “Consider This,” to include covering the civil rights movement, the economic crisis and 2020 presidential election. And the Los Angeles Times launched a limited-run series, “Coronavirus in California: Stories from the Front Lines” in early April with 40 episodes. Coronavirus coverage will be incorporated into other new and returning podcasts, said Abbie Fentress Swanson, executive producer for podcasts and audio at the Los Angeles Times.

Commercially, buying ads around coronavirus coverage on podcasts might be tricky for brands.

“You don’t want to be around the subject matter of the death count, but maybe around preventative care,” said Albert Thompson, managing director of digital ad agency Walton Isaacson. “You have to qualify the context of COVID that you don’t want to be around and establish those parameters.”

Hilary Ross, vp of podcast media at Veritone One, said she isn’t seeing a large number of advertisers seeking out coronavirus-centric podcasts, though in the past they have placed some ads on a few. The topic is difficult to avoid in daily news podcasts, many of which have begun to cover the pandemic. Podcasts are “generally an ad-lite environment” while brands’ messaging “has a higher share of voice in this ecosystem compared to others,” Ross said.

A publisher like The Economist, as an example, has chased this by growing its audio team to now include 17 employees.

“I have 100% confidence that we will continue to find opportunities to expand our podcasts,” Cohn said. “It is an area that we think is of growing interest to our audiences and is of growing value to the business at the same time.”

We asked people to share some of their funniest, or most exasperating, moments of remote working with kids in tow. Here is a selection of the best, lightly edited:

Dani Bassil, CEO, Digitas
Once my chair broke in the middle of a review. Like actually broke. I just disappeared and then reappeared after a screech. Also my dog threw up right next to me on a client presentation. Numerous times my daughter Kiki (1) has grabbed the cord on my headphones without me realizing and they just come off mid-sentence. But my favorite was when our three dogs were barking, Kiki was high-pitch wailing, the doorbell rang and I excused myself from a client call, thought I’d muted myself and loudly screamed: “Will you arseholes shut up!” (at the dogs), when I obviously hadn’t muted myself. I then found it was not the Amazon courier I’d expected but our new neighbors introducing themselves. Needless to say I cannot wait to get back to the office.

Casey Georgeson, founder and CEO of skincare company Saint Jane Beauty
I call my office my “co-working space” with my three daughters on Zoom classes. My Saint Jane team is all too familiar with the phrase: “Shhhh honey, Mommy’s talking.” We’ve had a few surprises, like when my daughter accidentally broke my office window during her 5th grade Zoom class (she saw a lizard), or when our new puppy, Rocky, piddled on my slippers during a Sephora meeting. My team now fully expects the daily emergencies with a math class, or a spotty internet connection. I’m grateful for their patience as we’ve navigated the chaos!

Luke Bozeat, COO, MediaCom U.K.
After a rainy day of home learning/trying to work I came off my last Teams call and headed to our living room. I discovered my 8 year-old son burning off the pent-up energy stored up from a day stuck indoors by jumping around a makeshift soft-play area created using the sofa and various cushions. I bent down to pick up the various digital devices strewn on the floor. Unfortunately, I did this at the same time that Sam performed a summersault and his heel hit me directly in my left eye. The shiner that developed meant I had to spend the first five minutes of every video call explaining what had happened. This was particularly ironic when I was hosting one of MediaCom’s parenting safe rooms!    

Divya Gugnani, CEO and founder of Wander Beauty 
This blurring of the boundaries across my workday and my kids’ school days has meant they have learned an entirely new vocabulary from hearing me on work calls — including but not limited to — f**k, sh*t, idiot. I’ve officially given up on censoring myself and have decided that songs with explicit lyrics are now fair game for family dance parties.

Recently my daughter (6) told me she doesn’t want to be a CEO. She said: “All mommy does is work, work work, and talk, talk talk. She doesn’t get any free time and I like my free time.” My son, Ashvin (8), told me he never wants to have a full-time job because it is too much work. He said this because he heard me on the phone interviewing a candidate who said she only wanted to work part-time because working full-time is too much work while juggling pandemic parenting!

Hamish Nicklin, U.K. CEO Dentsu Media 
My girls are 9 and 7 years old. Last summer during the heat wave, they spent a lot of time in the garden playing in the paddling pool and with the hose — and almost always entirely free from clothes. One afternoon, just as a call I was on with a bunch of my colleagues on the global media team was coming to an end, my 7 year-old burst into the study, totally naked and shouted at the top of her voice, “I am so hot, Daddy.” I’d only been here about two months and hadn’t physically met any of the people on the call yet as I joined the company during lockdown. It was literally as the call was coming to an end so I still, to this day, have no idea if anyone saw.

Marco Dohmen, VP sales at publisher tech supplier 1plusX
To be able to attend late night calls with clients without disturbing and being disturbed, I have set up my home office in the basement of our house. During a client call my 6-year old woke up and decided she wanted a cuddle and came down to my office. Everyone on the call was understanding so we all decided to take a 10 minute “cuddling break.” When we had a lot of snow a few weeks back, a day of seemingly endless video calls was interrupted when my home office door suddenly slammed open and my two children stormed in screaming: “Daddy, it’s snowing, you need to come out with us and build a snowman!” Pre-pandemic I would not have thought that such situations would actually occur, but today it’s a 24/7 mix of professional and family life and both parts need to be in balance. 

Lee Lythe, CIO, Spark Foundry, Publicis Groupe
The big day of the virtual pitch arrived and everything was going perfectly.  As my turn to speak approached, I glanced through my numbers and got ready to launch into my pitch. Winningly smiling at the clients I hit the unmute button. But instead of a smooth cascade of facts and figures, the only sound to emanate from my computer was a blood-curdling shriek as my 18-month-old daughter woke from her afternoon nap in a magnificently bad mood. I’m glad to say that once the clients recovered from their shock, they saw the funny side and it certainly broke the ice. My son (4) has also done his bit to help me with meetings. That typically involves engaging a bemused media owner on the other end with knock-knock jokes that don’t have a punchline. He certainly succeeds at brightening up everyone’s day.

Patrick Affleck, Havas Media Group CEO U.K. and Ireland
I vividly remember being midway through a business operations call with the executive team when my son (5) appeared at the bathroom door —  which is opposite my makeshift home office — and yelled: “Daddy, can you come and wipe my bum please!” It was much harder for us all to focus after that.

Guy Melzack, global communications director, MediaCom 
After 11 months of on and off lockdowns, my daughter (5) is feeling increasingly isolated from her school friends. So we’ve arranged weekly video calls with the people she’s closest with, except they invariably have the opposite impact we’re aiming for. Every week she ignores our calls for her to come to the call, instead playing with her brother (3). Or just as the call is starting, she’ll often begin an impromptu “show and tell” of the most obscure items she can find including toys she hasn’t touched in years or ordinary household items — most recently our colander. When she does come, she’ll ignore her friend on the other side of the call, while she wanders aimlessly around the house, and then will refuse to say goodbye when it’s time to hang up. But after hanging up, she’ll cry incessantly for half an hour because she misses the friend she refused to talk to.

Elspeth Spelzini, strategy director, Starcom 
My 5-year old’s new favorite way to delay bedtime is to sit at our desk, put on my husband’s headset and have a pretend conference call. While she scribbles illegible notes (actually uncannily like my own work scrawl) she parrots phrases like “Just share your screen Darren” and “I can’t access the jam board” which is hilarious and terrifying in equal measure.

Felicity Long, managing director – Systems Acceleration and Connected Execution, MediaCom 
Fridays during the lockdowns have been especially hard because we have no childcare for our 3 and 6 year-old sons. A typical day will start at 8 a.m. when we go for a brisk walk to (hopelessly) try and use up some of their boundless energy. I used to claim proudly that we don’t allow iPad time in the day. But I’ve only held out until 11 a.m.

Often I resort to throwing snacks in an attempt to diffuse tantrums, and McDonald’s drive-throughs — previously only offered as special treats when out driving — have become more of a go-to bribe, which I then try to offset by throwing them out on the trampoline in the garden. Colleagues have become very patient about me cooking while on calls with them, and my boss always politely offers to call back at a more convenient time when met with the boys chanting “go away, go away at him.” I tend to stay up later than I should, because it’s so nice being awake with no one asking me any questions.

Every second counts in the consumer shopping experience

In the digital age of marketing, attention is currency, and with multiple demands competing for a consumer’s ever-decreasing bandwidth, something as simple as clicking a link creates friction, lengthening the buyer’s journey and introducing distractions. 

Imagine the following scenario. A consumer is reading the news and sees an ad for boots. They’ve wanted to buy new boots, so they click on the ad. The ad takes them to an e-commerce website. The consumer puts a pair of boots into their cart and clicks the checkout button. 

The next option pops up: Would you like to create an account or continue as a guest? The consumer hesitates. Do they want to spend the time creating an account with a password and then confirming their account? They choose to continue as a guest. And just as the consumer finishes inputting their address, they get a notification on their phone. It’s the kind of distraction that causes them to forget the boots, maybe not return to the content at all — the chances of them purchasing what was in the cart are now slim.

“With content commerce, consumers have the ability to check out directly within digital content,” said Mikaela Jaconelli, head of Sales and Key Accounts at Tipser. “It’s the same as with old retail management models; what matters when it comes to sales is location, location, location. This has been true in the physical space for a long time, and the digital surfaces are no exceptions. Today’s consumer wants to checkout at the point of inspiration, as conveniently as possible. The best opportunities are often granted to early adopters, and this is an opportunity for brands and publishers to keep up with this trend to stay relevant, keep reaching their target audiences and scale revenue.”

Content commerce: Keeping publishers and consumers together

Instead of encouraging consumers to navigate away from a publisher, content commerce gives consumers the option of buying an item without ever leaving the page. The result is a seamless experience in which a consumer remains immersed in the publisher’s content but has access to the entire shopper’s journey, from browse to purchase.

This doesn’t mean that affiliate strategies are obsolete, but it does mean they will be joined by other dynamic approaches that expand brands’ and publishers’ toolkits.

“Affiliate marketing, in my point of view, will still exist,” said Harm Heibült, director of BurdaStyle Group, a publisher based in Germany. “But if you are a publisher like us, where the entire experience is around inspiration and shoppable inspiration, then affiliate marketing is not the right approach because you have friction in the user experience by linking out to somewhere else … We were aware that if we wanted to become successful in the e-commerce sphere, we had to find a way to have somehow a fully integrated user experience.”

As an example of what “fully integrated” means, if a consumer is scrolling through Facebook or Instagram and comes across an ad for a product, they can simply click on the creative, see photos and descriptions, pick a size or color and check out with already saved payment information — all without leaving the feed. The content commerce environment fuses a more seamless on-site or in-app content experience with something close to a one-and-done purchase experience.

Adding content commerce and shoppable content to the marketing mix

So how do publishers get started with content commerce and shoppable content? 

One answer lies in partnerships. And while finding the right technology partners is essential to creating this type of unique experience, there are some key questions publishers should ask to ensure they’re working with the right external team.

• Do the products, the brand and the partner all align with the brand position and target group?

• Can the partner ensure that data regarding stock availability is consistently updated, avoiding customer disappointment? This is particularly important for specific campaigns featuring discounts that can drive a high volume of sales.

• Customer service quality — including factors such as shipping times and easy returns — is non-negotiable. Does the partner have an embedded shopping approach that ensures a premium customer experience? 

As Heibült notes, it’s premature to say affiliate marketing is a thing of the past — but as customer expectations continue to focus on increasingly seamless experiences, shoppable content has emerged as a viable solution to pitfalls such as abandoned cart syndrome and consumer distraction. The more steps that are required to complete a purchase, the likelier a customer will lose the inspiration to buy.

Keeping a customer’s attention — and driving purchases — requires brands and publishers to combine forces to deliver shoppable moments within content. When they create that outcome, everyone wins: The customer gets a seamless experience, the publisher sustains and drives engagement and the brand gets a new customer.

Sponsored by Tipser.