Month: March 2021

Some brands still using Checkout use it to sell less expensive products. Warby Parker, which was one of the original brands to use Instagram Checkout, has only ever sold non-prescription sunglasses and accessories using Instagram Checkout. 

In some cases, brands miss out on valuable customer data, such as email addresses, when they use Checkout. Some brand checkout pages say, “Your contact info will be shared with the seller,” but not all. This is part of the reason brands are opting to forgo Checkout and link directly to their websites, so they ensure they capture a buyer’s email when they make a purchase.

In general, social media platforms and brands are now competing to get a piece of the expanding mobile shopping pie. And for good reason — U.S. retail social commerce sales will increase by 34.8% to $36.09 billion this year, representing 4.3% of all retail e-commerce sales, according to eMarketer. 

But while Instagram is trying to get users to buy through their app, most brands would rather have traffic routed to their website. Brands’ priorities for mobile checkout are different from Instagram’s, and the end result is that Checkout appears to have gotten off to a slow start. 

“For Instagram Checkout, I’d say over 50% of our clients are asking about it and want to get it set up. But less than 10% actually have it set up right now,” said a social strategy executive from a digital agency, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

“The real battle with Checkout lies in the customer relationship,” said Dan Brewster, svp of marketing at Scalefast, an e-commerce management company. “When shoppers use Instagram rather than a brand’s native platform, their information is stored in the app and isn’t always accessible to the company. The brand loses the chance to capture a potentially loyal consumer’s email, and the ability to build a relationship through direct and personalized marketing.”

It’s unclear how widely adopted Instagram’s Checkout feature is in the U.S. An Instagram spokesperson declined to discuss the number of business accounts using Checkout. 

“I’ve generally seen that smaller DTC companies use Instagram Checkout,” said the social strategy executive. “The bigger brands want the traffic.”

But even DTCs have had their doubts.

“Our portfolio hasn’t seen the adoption of Instagram Checkout itself, but we have seen more use of product tagging and Reels,” says Katya Constantine, CEO of Digishopgirl, a performance marketing agency. “Brands aren’t using Checkout. They redirect to their website to capture the traffic and data.”

Instagram announced its Checkout feature back in March of 2019. Original partner brands were big names, including Adidas, Warby Parker, H&M, and Balmain. In June of last year, Instagram expanded the Checkout option to eligible business and creator accounts that were selling products from a website they own, then dangled a big carrot in front of them, announcing in August that it was waiving seller fees for Checkout.  

But those incentives haven’t led to widespread adoption. 

“Even though the demand is higher for buying through social platforms, I think it’s a matter of trust,” said the agency executive. “People don’t really trust putting their credit card in Instagram, or getting burned by a fake brand. They’d rather it go to their mobile site.”

“In some ways, being able to be here with them full time has been really nice and then also so challenging,” DaSilvia said from her home in Los Angeles. “All of that, you want to go crazy sometimes.”

DaSilvia isn’t alone. A year into the pandemic lockdown and remote work, kitchen tables became home offices and kids have become co-workers. The lines between work and home have blurred. Meanwhile, the lines in housework and gender roles have become glaring and women in the advertising and marketing industry are struggling to strike a balance.

Last year, numerous outlets such as NPR and BuzzFeed, published reports that shed light on the inequality in household work leading to a so-called “shecession” — reportedly the first ever economic recession impacting more women than men.

It’s a slippery slope. A “shecession” means women are leaving the workplace, devastating diversity initiatives and resetting the issue of gender equality. To combat it, agencies are introducing measures to allow flexibility for moms and caregivers, address mental health struggles and creating open spaces for vulnerable conversations as it relates to the pandemic. Digiday spoke with seven agency executives and women in the industry about the ‘shecession’ and how they’re coping.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, diversity and inclusion has taken on a new meaning as Black and brown employees, women and other marginalized communities continue to ask for not just equality, but equity. If those calls go unanswered, DaSilvia worries the results could be devastating.

“Women are still looked at to be caretakers first,” said DaSilvia. “A lot of people thought we were beyond [that], but we’re not.”

No one-size fits all cure

At New York-based agency Berlin Cameron, where more than half of the staff identifies as women, there’s been work on both the agency and client side to support marginalized communities. The agency has worked on several women-empowering campaigns for clients such as the No.7 Unstoppable campaign, which advocated for women returning to the workplace, and a take action initiative for Women’s History Month.

As a company, Berlin Cameron prioritized filling part-time roles as part of an initiative to re-introduce moms back into the workforce. It’s something the company has always offered, but more employees have started to take advantage of the opportunity since the pandemic set in early 2020, per DaSilvia. Currently, the company has four part-time roles where employees work 3-4 days per week.

Of course, there’s no one-size-fits all cure, but more and more agencies and companies are looking for solutions to stop the bleeding. As result of the pandemic, Publicis Groupe introduced Bright Horizons, a back-up childcare service and other family support like college coaching, and Publicis Schooling, a series of virtual classes to keep kids occupied. McKinney is working one-on-one with returning parents and their managers to ease into returning to the workplace. Salient MG banned meetings on Thursdays, to give team members time for undistracted work or mental downtime. 

Down in Atlanta, Melissa Gordon says she’s switched jobs at least twice throughout her time being a mother before settling at Dagger Agency, where an estimated 64% of staff identifies as women.

“When I’ve gotten pregnant, I’ve had these moments of reflection where ‘What does my life look like in this environment with a baby or what does it look like with two babies’ and that was a lot of the reasons why I did leave,” said Gordon, who serves as vp of client delivery and operations at Dagger. 

The agency has introduced a mental health stipend to put toward office supplies, physical health necessities or mental health subscriptions, permanent half-day Fridays and motivated employees to use PTO by closing the office one day per month, according to a spokesperson.

Offering these kinds of resources at a company-level rather than expecting individuals to request them is a really important move, Gordon said.

“A lot of people at this time are just grateful to have a job, and so they’re not going to be as likely to raise their hand and say, ‘Hey, I could really use an extra $20 a month to do this or that’ or whatever the case is,” she said. 

Women carry the weight

While working moms are often at the forefront of the conversation surrounding women and work-life balance, 4A’s president and CEO Marla Kaplowitz encourages industry leaders to be inclusive in their thinking. Often women carry the weight of housework and care-taking, whether that be kids, the home in general or elderly family members, she said, noting the uneven burden can lead to more burnout for women.

“I know a lot of people who are, right now, trying to help their parents figure out how to get a vaccine because the online site is very challenging,” she said. 

Even past that, there’s caretaking from afar, keeping up with those who live far away but still need constant check ins and more, Kaplowitz said.

As the industry works to solve the “shecession” issue and the burnout of working women — it is also left questioning which part of the ecosystem should bear the responsibility: the individual or workplace.

As far as Kaplowitz is concerned, the overall workplace is shifting and there needs to be a wholistic, industry-wide approach to support flexibility and a work-life balance.

Now is the chance to redefine this new way of working, explained Kaplowitz. And a new opportunity to put some barriers back in place since we don’t have the physical barrier of going to an office, she said.

“This is an important conversation that needs to be had,” she said. “It got pushed to the back burner for a long time because people were just in survival mode.”

With what comes after third-party cookies and mobile identifiers unclear, the ad tech market is in limbo. Yet money is pouring into publicly listed ad tech vendors.

PubMatic’s stock price has nearly doubled since it debuted on the Nasdaq on Dec. 9, and the ad tech vendor’s market capitalization is $2.2 billion. Understandably, management tried to temper expectations on the company’s first quarterly earnings call last week. That said, Pubmatic’s stock was up 22% on the day after those earnings were reported. No amount of bad news it seems — from imminent tracking restrictions to fraud in connected TV — can stem the flow of cash into these companies. 

How is this possible? One explanation is that stock markets don’t have much to do with the economy now. They’re just casinos driven by the momentum that’s accelerated by stories. Put another way: investors are buying into companies like Pubmatic in part because of the overwhelmingly positive narrative of online media’s unfettered growth during the pandemic. Even smaller ad tech vendors have been swept up in the slipstream. AcuityAds, a small Canadian-based ad tech vendor, saw revenues slip 3% year-on-year to $26.1 million in its most recent quarter but finished 2020 with its stock up nearly 1000%. Investors buying these stocks believe, no matter what happens, the market is robust enough to withstand the existential headwinds ahead. 

“The stocks that are doing well right now often are the ones that have the best storytellers — and investors are hungry for narratives, whether that’s for Tesla or ad tech,” said IAB Europe chief economist Daniel Knapp. “But stories don’t equal fluff. There is a lot of real opportunities for ad tech, from the much-quoted CTV to solving identity to retail media and a much stronger focus on execution than maybe a decade ago.” 

Additionally, there’s so much cheap capital sloshing around the financial system thanks to unprecedented stimulus from governments — and there are few better places to put cash where it can flip a decent return currently than ad tech. 

“When it comes to these ad tech companies you’re seeing that investors aren’t necessarily seeing them through a filter that focuses on the fundamentals of business i.e numbers,” said Dr. Jorge Barraza, a professor in the online Master of Science in Applied Psychology program at the University of Southern California. “The usefulness of narrative is that it can sustain attention in a particular place more so than warranted because humans aren’t designed to be responding to percentages and averages.”

Narrative economics, as explored in the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert J. Shiller suggests that the stories investors tell themselves drive their rationale for spending. If there’s one thing ad tech isn’t short of, it’s exciting, whirlwind narratives blustering up around several issues that include the pivot to privacy, accelerating consolidation and the topic du jour connected TV. 

So far investors are lapping up the CTV narrative as a reason to invest in ad tech, and for good reason. Advertisers in the U.S. are forecasted to spend $11.4 billion on connected TV ads this year, up 40% on 2020, per eMarketer. This spending, goes the thinking, will continue to grow much faster than general media ad spending for years to come. Magnite’s recent earnings history is a microcosm of this. It managed to grow revenue in the second, third and fourth quarters in 2020, with 12%, 12% and 20% year-on-year improvements. However, CTV was where the real gains were made. In those same respective quarters, CTV revenue grew 12%, 51%, and 53%.

But for all the growth percentages and usage statistics floating around CTV, there’s limited revenue attached to those numbers. It’s rare to see an ad tech vendor report how much money they’re actually making on the fastest growing part of the market. Indeed, CTV has a fair few unresolved issues, namely transparency into how ads are bought. In other words, intrinsic value will start to matter to investors at some point and when it does ad tech vendors will have to justify lofty valuations with solutions to problems like transparency.

Spin has always been important to public ad tech companies — even as far back as 2013. Back then, though, the narratives were complicated, while the businesses weren’t complex enough. “You had ad tech vendors telling investors that they had rocket scientists as technologists creating fancy algorithms,” said Bob Regular, CEO of ad tech firm Infolinks. Now, however, the story isn’t as complicated and business is robust. “CEOs are able to tell narratives in ways that don’t cause investors to go all glassy-eyed,” said Regular. 

See The Trade Desk. The ad tech vendor’s narrative that it’s the alternative to Google crystallizes the business in the minds of investors. Equally, The Trade Desk is good at doing what it promises investors — delivering consistent growth. 

As positive as these narratives can be for ad tech, they’re also exceptionally volatile. Magnite’s stock plunged as much as 13% the day after a short-seller released a damning report on the company’s strategy — proof that investors are buying into these narratives, good or bad.

Digital services agency Jellyfish, which has 2,000 employees globally, has gotten rid of the traditional line-management structure entirely. Traditional heads of departments and heads of regions no longer exist — a model that fully rolled out seven months ago. Instead, the agency has created a system in which every employee is assigned a five-person support network to help cultivate and support that individual’s career path within the business. 

Everyone gets a people partner, a capability partner, a finance partner who helps develop business acumen, a buddy (typically a peer) and mentor. Between them, they assist their assigned individual on developing their skills, career, and determining the best way to measure their performance to apply for promotions. They also support on personal issues, such as mental health, that have become more pronounced in the remote-working environment.

“There’s a reason there is a whole industry for personal trainers,” said Jellyfish CEO Rob Pierre. “It helps to have someone monitoring your form and then you progress and feel better. That’s the environment we’ve created.”

The agency has stripped the hierarchy out of its promotional structure. Promotions are no longer signed off by individuals, but by panels of Jellyfish staff which are rotated for each assessment. Team members needn’t wait for any new openings, but can apply for a promotion whenever they think they have good evidence for it. Once they do, they can work with their support network to make a business case (anonymously) for their promotion by showing what outcomes they have created for the company. The panel will then judge the case blindly, without knowing who specifically the individual is. That ensures any unconscious bias is eliminated in the process, Pierre said.

“The traditional hierarchy doesn’t work anymore, everyone is hitting glass ceilings all the time. It is so subjective, it becomes a political nightmare because your progression becomes a product of how much you do for your boss,” said Pierre. This new set-up helps ensure that people get into the mindset that contributing to the company’s collective goals is what’s important and is what gets rewarded.

“There is zero unconscious bias this way. You can be 20 or 50 years old, from Mumbai or London — all we are looking for [to give promotions] is business outcomes,” he added.

As people have become more accustomed to coping with the fallout from the pandemic over the last year, they’ve become bolder about requesting more flexibility either in existing jobs, or when applying for new ones, according to several recruiters Digiday spoke to to for this article. 

“People care less about a hierarchal career trajectory now and more about a job that really lights them up inside,” said Stephanie Nadi Olson, founder of flexible talent firm We Are Rosie. And they’re feeling more empowered to express those needs, she said.

“People are starting to get more vocal about what works for them. Covid has shifted the dynamic of the employer having all the power, to the employee having the power,” added Nadi Olson.

Atlanta-based creative agency Dagger is among those that completely remodeled its promotional and career path development structure. Typical career progression had involved juggling a bunch of additional direct reports or taking a client-facing management role — spending more time in meetings and less time on the creative work itself — to move up the ladder.

Dagger replaced that template with two career path tracks: a client track and a craft track each designed to foster developing those skills. The ultimate goal is to boost job satisfaction, and ensure people feel rewarded for cultivating the skills they feel most passionate about.

“From a creative standpoint, it was a one-size fits all approach before,” said Melissa Withorn, group lead creative director at Dagger. “You had to be the extrovert in the room in that predetermined mold.”

The agency is now hearing from candidates based in New York, Los Angeles and Nashville — cities it wouldn’t typically have had a lot of interest from — who want to continue working remotely, have more flexibility and more control over their career progression, she added.

“It’s one hell of a classic example of what got us here won’t get us there,” said Christofer Peterson, SVP of people and culture at Dagger. “This last year has challenged us to think in ways we haven’t before. To get to the heart of what we need from our team, and what we can do to give our people what they want. People want to be themselves without compromise.”

Experimenting with legacy promotional structures and hierarchies may be easier for agencies that are more agile than larger groups which have more rigid, global structures. 

“With a traditional pyramid structure, opportunities for meaningful progression are limited — after all, you can only have so many people running the business. Inevitably, in that model, you are going to lose some good talent,” said Pippa Glucklich, chair of Liberty Hive and former CEO of Dentsu Aegis media investment arm Amplifi and co-CEO of Starcom. 

She said that during her time at agency holding groups people often requested promotions simply to obtain a better job title. “Agencies have been guilty at times of promoting people simply because a client likes them or they’ve won a new business pitch — but being a successful senior leader requires far more,” she added.

A side effect of these kinds of legacy promotional structures is they can lead to bloated organizations. Last year holding groups were forced to make deep cuts: WPP axed 5,000 jobs in the first six months of 2020, while IPG cut 4,100 roles, according to the groups’ annual statements. Meanwhile, Omnicom also cut 5,900 roles throughout the year and Dentsu Aegis cut 6,000 roles in December.

Glucklich believes a matrix structure is a more inclusive and sustainable model for the future, though naturally more difficult for businesses of certain sizes and structures to pull off. “Making a sideways move in a matrix structure, which comes with recognized personal and professional development opportunities, is far better than getting a grander job title, but one that is meaningless in practice,” she added. 

Simone — who reiterated that there’s an “urgent need to reclaim brand safety” — has helped lead the effort to revamp the process at Vice, which included a recent partnership with Oracle Data Cloud to see how a keyword blocking strategy at the news organization performed.

“Journalism is important and when we put in place blocklists, we regulate journalists and content creators in how they can speak truthfully — which is so important, provided the current climate,” Simone said.

The study found multiple missed opportunities, including that 93% of URLs classified unsafe by the blocklist were determined to be safe under Oracle’s contextual solution.

Here is Simone’s case study. Click on the magnifying glass icon below

Decrypt is incentivizing its users to read and interact with its content in exchange for the publication’s unique take on cryptocurrency: its utility token (DCPT).

The publisher is also capitalizing on readers’ affinity for games by turning engagement into a rewarded action. Users of the site’s app, which launched nine months ago, can create an in-app wallet and earn tokens for taking actions on articles like reading (three tokens), reacting with an emoji (one token), or sharing (two tokens).

The tokens are closed within the publication’s environment and are not publicly tradable like security-backed cryptocurrencies, but they are exchangeable for items of value provided by Decrypt and site sponsors. These items include T-shirts, stickers, access to promotional events or premium content.

The token, which has been in beta for six months, is serving as an engagement tactic, similar to a rewards program. Currently, there are 51,000 people on the waitlist for DCPT, all of which joined organically by word of mouth, according to Decrypt’s new publisher and CRO Alanna Roazzi-Laforet, who joined from blockchain software company ConsenSys.

The publisher expects DCPT to help grow its audience. In 2020, the publication’s traffic increased by 350% from when to when do we know and in February 2021, Decrypt had more than 4.5 million unique visitors to the site, said Josh Quittner, CEO and founder of Decrypt.

“Decrypt really wants to use the products that we speak about in the market,” said Roazzi-Laforet.

“This is an example of eating your own dog food,” said Jacob Donnelly, who formerly managing director at crypto publication CoinDesk. He now runs a paid newsletter about building digital media companies called, A Media Operator, as well as serves as the general manager of B2B at Morning Brew.

Rewards systems for loyal readers are not a new strategy for engagement, but Decrypt’s token offering is a unique take on that model because of how endemic it is to its coverage, Donnelly said. “They write about crypto, they write about blockchain. So having a wallet and a token baked in is interesting,” he said.

Donnelly equated this to Bustle Digital Group’s brand Inverse that has a newsletter incentive program, which enters subscribers into a drawing for a prize if they open newsletters regularly. Only Decrypt is taking it a step further by guaranteeing rewards once enough value is accrued.

“Inadvertently, they are assigning value to every action on their platform. That’s very hard to do that — if you talk to 99% of media companies, they still can’t tell you the [lifetime value] of a reader,” Donnelly said. “This is a very interesting exercise” but it works in a closed ecosystem.

Building a cryptocurrency is not just an engagement tactic, but part of the publisher’s advertising strategy.

Roazzi-Laforet said brands are able to sponsor each so-called season of the token, which is the period of time that 1 million tokens are released and then subsequently collected by users. The tokens are first-come, first-earned and the sponsors also contribute the rewards that the tokens are later exchanged for by the app users.

“One of the big reasons we’re doing it is to get out from under the thumb of Google and Facebook, which are taking so much of the advertising dollars and forcing everybody to sort of march to their beat,” said Quittner. “We can be much more responsive to the kinds of advertisers that we want to affiliate with and get them the kinds of users and potential customers that they’re looking for in a way that’s really ethical and doesn’t compromise our users’ identity.”

Decrypt would not disclose how much these sponsorships cost, but Roazzi-Laforet did add that they can be wrapped into a larger sponsored content campaigns that include digital advertising or creating digital assets known as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). She would not disclose who the sponsors have been, but said they consist of both endemic brands and ones that want to reinvent themselves for 2021.

Decrypt launched in spring 2018 at a time when Bitcoin had lost more than $10,000 worth of its value.

“It was a great time to launch. Crypto markets are volatile. When we’re in a big bull market, we have a huge amount of readership. Similarly, when there’s a big pop of a bubble, people are reading because they’re really worried they want to know what’s going on,” said Quittner.

While there are thousands of different cryptocurrencies, Quittner added that changes to the value of the top 10 most valuable currencies drive the most spikes in traffic. When Bitcoin doubled from $30,000 per coin at the end of January to nearly $60,000 in February, traffic spiked along with it.

“Ultimately what [Decrypt] is trying to do is create a habit with a reader,” said Donnelly. “And if you can incentivize that habit in some way, then the incentive ends up being far cheaper than the value of that engaged reader — coupled with the fact that Decrypt is actually making money because they have sponsors.”