Less BS, More Facts, Some Opinions
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Mark Sturino, VP of data and analytics, at Good Apple. The “death of the cookie” provides an opportunity for all brands to learn from pharmaceutical marketers and leverage new AI… Continue reading »
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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Vista Acquires TripleLift Stop me if you heard this one: Vista Equity Partners has acquired a majority stake in an ad tech firm. This time, it’s TripleLift. Read the release. Ronan Shields of Adweek claims Vista invested $1.4 billion, and the deal is expected… Continue reading »
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People don’t like it when their entertainment is interrupted by advertising. That supremely obvious insight is what’s driving marketers to invest in creating content studios — just this week, skincare brand SK-II announced its SK-II Studio — TV shows and docu-series: If people don’t want to be interrupted, then brands will create entertainment to reach them.
SK-II is just one of a number of brands increasing their investment in creating entertainment. Anheuser-Busch has a new talk show, Not a Sports Show, on Ficto.TV and Pepsi has a new dating show on ViacomCBS premiering next month. Corona has also created a studio, aptly named Corona Studios, for entertainment production, according to Felipe Ambra, vp of marketing at Corona. At the end of 2020, the beer brand debuted the “first IP” from the studio, a docu-series called Free Range Humans, per Ambra.
Brands are aiming to create entertaining video content to help them reach consumers who’ve become more difficult to reach in an increasingly ad-free world given the rise of streaming as well as ad-blockers being commonplace, according to agency execs.
When it comes to creating and funding entertaining content as an extension of a brand, marketers are eyeing TV or documentaries rather than magazines or some form of brand journalism as video consumption is on the rise, per the execs. Just this past week, Dollar Shave Club’s well-respected brand publication MEL laid off its editorial team as the brand cut ties with the magazine, which is now seeking a buyer. Dollar Shave Club did so to “better focus on our consumer business,” according to a spokesperson for the brand.
As brand dollars move to video creation rather than branded journalism, marketers are doing so out of a push to be part of culture, according to Dean Paradise, creative director at creative agency Gut.
“The more brands can be a part of culture and the ‘conversation,’ the more opportunity there is for organic growth,” said Paradise, of the strategy. “With the proliferation of content on entertainment platforms, TV and docs are more likely to be a part of culture. In addition, there are even more ways for brands to target niche audiences. In saying that, there is still a role for publications in marketing plans.”
Even so, execs caution brands that simply creating content is not enough to attract an audience.
“There’s an overload of content — the chances of a marketer breaking through with content today is like buying the lottery ticket,” said brand consultant and co-founder of Metaforce Allen Adamson. “Just because they are building it doesn’t mean eyeballs will come.”
Trevor Guthrie, co-founder of creative shop Giant Spoon, believes that brands are taking too narrow an approach to content creation by focusing on a content form, i.e. a publication or a TV show, rather than a specific story to be told. “That’s not how an audience thinks and it’s not how [CMOs] should be thinking about telling [brand] stories,” said Guthrie. “As a CMO, you should become an editor-in-chief. You’re trying to tell a curated story for the audience that buys your product or the audience you want to engage with. No one should be limiting where that story sits.” — Senior news editor Seb Joseph contributed to this report.
With a global pandemic, civil unrest and more, the last year has been unpredictable. What are some lessons learned from that unpredictability?
Expecting the unexpected and cross-training teams are two business lessons that I don’t think will have an expiration date. This era’s best marketing teams will be built around a culture of flexibility that allows them to quickly adapt and respond to a volatile market.
Over the last year, how has your team’s workflow changed?
With both the team’s safety and Dataminr’s business continuity being top of mind, I prioritized innovating our processes. That meant adjusting communication cadences and methods to be sensitive to our new remote reality, making project plans more visible and evaluating our tech stack to make sure we’re filling in any gaps in capabilities. In addition, we also prioritized cross-training. At a time where people are balancing having their work-life being in their homes, it’s important to make sure that we’re able to be flexible and pick up for each other when “life happens.” This helps to make disruptions in our workflow minimal.
Similar question: Over the last year, how has your approach to marketing changed?
The only thing in marketing that remains the same time after time is change. Preferences, needs, customer markets — they all change. In the past year, our approach has centered on adapting to those changes and considering how they’ve impacted our customers from a more “Business [to] Individual” perspective.
Dataminr’s AI platform is industry-agnostic, so our customers span across a wide variety of industries. While the enterprise risks they’ve faced since the onset COVID-19 have similarities, we’ve prioritized making our marketing content and events more targeted towards the unique challenges and opportunities that our customers face. — Kimeko McCoy
TikTok has made waves across the advertising industry. Once known for its viral dance videos, the app has piqued marketers’ interest and some have moved to make the platform part of its core social media strategy. Publishers too have started to develop branded content and explore new commercial opportunities on the video app. According to new research from Eventbrite that was provided to Digiday via email, small businesses are now looking to get in on the action for business marketing events. Here’s a look at the data:
“The irony is that now the industry’s attempt to jettison cookies may in fact trigger the political backlash we’ve all been waiting for for two decades.”
— Jeff Chester, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Digital Democracy, on the possibility that privacy advocates may also convince lawmakers that email collection does not equal consent for identity tech, reports platforms, data and privacy reporter Kate Kaye.
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Turner Sports is using the recent return of sporting events to bolster new initiatives in both advertising and audience building.
In the heat of March Madness, which has returned this year after taking a 2020 hiatus, Tina Shah, evp and general manager at Turner Sports, said her team has been integrating innovation in both production and content for the event’s ad campaigns after seeing a strong return of interest from advertisers.
Beyond that, Shah said in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast that these events mark the perfect time to try and engage both younger — and female-skewing audiences — after recognizing the linear coverage of live sports is not quite cutting it. Bleacher Report’s House of Highlights is leading that charge by creating new livestream competition shows while B/R is working to champion representation of women athletes across its site — something both fans and advertisers appreciate, she said.
At the end of the episode, Shah also spoke about her experience as a woman building a career in sports media and how representation of women both on screen and behind scenes on the business side is important to creating a successful, impactful business.
Highlights from the conversation have been edited and condensed for clarity.
I think the storylines and the upsets are just part and parcel of the tournament, it’s part and parcel of what fans love about it, and what advertisers love about it. And so while you certainly have certain teams that draw larger audiences, we see Cinderella teams draw huge audiences. Because that is, again, what’s so unique about the tournament is those storylines, and that’s really what we’re trying to do this year, even though, we’re still in the middle or tail end of a pandemic, really still making sure that we create these engaging experiences for fans across all of our platforms.
We’re trying to create experiences that are very tailored to the demographic of the platforms. And so for us, we know that younger audiences consume sports content differently, so we use a lot of data around our planning. We did two events around NBA All Stars, both of which were new, original live events. One was the House of Highlights Showdown which was a knockout-style event with top influencers and was distributed on YouTube. And the other was B/R Open Run, which is a two-on-two basketball game featuring some of the biggest names in hip hop. Both of those were really complementary to what we were doing around All Stars, but they were very tailored to a younger demographic using influencers, as the “talent,” or having hip hop artists not only compete in a two-on-two, but also experimenting with an NFT collection.
The female sports fan is not a monolithic group, just like the male sports fan. This idea that if you’re female, you’re a fan of female sports, or if you’re male, you’re a male sports fan — I’m looking forward to debunking that. We have a huge female audience that is interested in many of the sports we have like the NBA, Major League Baseball, NCAA. In fact, half of our tournament viewers are women. From our perspective, it’s all about powerful storytelling.
We really looked at [engaging female audiences] in a few different ways — how can we use our platforms to tell really powerful stories about female athletes and [female] teams? Recently, we had one of our shows, “The Arena” on TNT, and [basketball player] Candace Parker produced the entire show. And it was exclusively dedicated to women in sports and that kind of shows the power of female voices influencing what the content is.
The post How Turner Sports uses new platforms and content to expand audience, advertising offerings appeared first on Digiday.
This article is part of the Digiday Privacy Preview, a digital issue of stories examining what the coming changes to Chrome and iOS will do to the worlds of media and marketing. Read the rest of that coverage here.
The clock is running out for publishers trying to figure out their first-party data strategies and media buyers are starting to more carefully analyze the options laid out ahead of them.
While many marketers are going to stick with what they know until the last possible minute — and some publishers are still putting their offerings together — Digiday rounded up some buyers’ opinions of the first-party offerings that are currently available.
Some acknowledge that these early results need to be taken with a pinch of salt. “Ultimately, we’re not going to know how all of these things perform in a cookie-less world until that time comes. We can start testing these things against each other now, but you’re still going to have the support of third-party cookies,” one buyer said.
The quality of the users and the lists that publishers can produce will help set the winners apart from the losers in marketers’ minds, come the cookie-apocalypse, according to Travis Lusk, head of tech, North America at media consultancy Ebiquity. But the agencies have made it clear that most of the publisher-focused programmatic deals will come down to scale and relationships.
Media buyers are going to use common tech stacks, like DMP Permutive, to spend the bulk of their media budgets, one media buyer explained. But for the remaining budgets, it will be the larger media companies, like Condé Nast and The New York Times, “who have the resources to actually go into agencies and sell more strategic partnerships based on data.” Those relationships will secure the rest of the buyers’ media budgets, he said.
Below are some media companies that buyers, speaking on the condition of anonymity, say are noteworthy because they are either outpacing — or lagging behind — their competition.
Quotes have been lightly edited and condensed for clarification.
“More than the majority of our extensive work has been done with CafeMedia, especially in the last 12 months or so. They have been a great partner to us in many ways [but] there are two things that we are drawn in by when it comes to them particularly. They have a robust opt-in process, so they’re very transparent with their readers and that’s something that’s important to us from a privacy perspective. Most of the time, [the first-party data] it’s either logging-in based in some capacity or explicitly opted in so they can track exactly what people are reading, which content is working for them and how it’s working for them over time. And the second one absolutely is scale.
We do utilize a lot of the data that they provide, especially within our CPG vertical. We haven’t really run into an issue where we need [CafeMedia] to go above and beyond in flexibility. With them, it is still majorly mostly a PMP route for programmatic buyers so the data isn’t necessarily decoupled. This happens all the time with most of the publishers when they’re trying to activate outside their platform. They only provide the data costs way ahead of time, at which point, they’re going to pre-curate your inventory deal and then provide that inventory deal based on that data skewed best to us. That is great in some ways, but it is obviously a little bit more limiting because the data is confined only within their house.
I wouldn’t say that CafeMedia is somebody we prioritize — we definitely have a strong relationship with them today — but we have strong relationships with a lot of publishers in the space. As long as they are performing for us, we absolutely will make sure that the relationship is strong and moves forward.”
“I think flexibility is definitely something that I’ve experienced specifically with Condé. They are very ingrained into our strategic planning in terms of putting together what we think is the best audience based on our clients and based on their goals. They do have a standard kind of taxonomy, but it’s not something that they come to us and they say, ‘Here are your only options.’ They’re a real partner to our team in terms of taking the wide, vast amount of data that they have and turning that into actionable segments.
I think the thing for Condé that will be interesting is right now, they do execute pretty broadly. They don’t only execute across Condé properties, they have other ways of activating. And I think with a lot of the changes in terms of cookies and cross-domain tracking that are coming, I don’t know how much of that business for them will remain. Taking a lot of that away will put them in a much more level playing field with some of the other players.”
Meredith, which acquired Viant Technology in 2018 during the Time Inc. acquisition, sold its 60% stake in the media buying software company in 2019 but still uses the platform as a first-party data partner.
“Viant Media is one that we use on a very regular basis. From an operational standpoint, [Viant] is hugely beneficial because it cuts down on time, it cuts down on the need to be able to go out there and individually RFP and then also look at a totally separate platform in terms of how we’re scaling our programmatic buys. They’re the ones that offer the highest degree of flexibility because of the technology they offered us as buyers — whether it’s self serve, or managed or direct — and because of the level of transparency with the data that they provide us and the willingness to work with us as far as our trackability and what we’re looking at and what we’re seeing on our side.”
When asked if Viant being a flexible, transparent and self-serve platform will lead this buyer to work more with the platform, they said:
“Yes. We tend to view transparency more from the aspect of transparency of placement at a site or exchange level. That said, transparency of the logic and methodology of tracking will become much more important as well. Coupling that with flexibility gives us the capability to better meet client demands.”
“We start the conversation with BuzzFeed but you really end the conversation with Tasty [BuzzFeed’s cooking vertical]. BuzzFeed is the underpinning for Tasty. They’re the ones creating a much larger set of information when it comes to collecting the network of data. So we work with BuzzFeed, in that sense, but when it comes to aligning with inventory, Tasty is the primary output. We get the larger network information when it comes to the data, but the inventory itself becomes Tasty.
With BuzzFeed [as a brand] it’s also understanding if something’s controversial, or not. It’s not to say that there’s anything wrong as a partnership with BuzzFeed — they’re a very good partner and somebody that we can build a relationship upon. But they’re just there’s always kind of the push and pull of making sure that the content aligns to what we want it to be.”
“The issue that we ran into with them, and the reason we haven’t necessarily pursued it so much, is the majority of their content is still attached to news. Good or bad. Last year was a bit of a whirlwind when it came to that. Keyword blocking is something that doesn’t work — it is more so being a little bit more pre-curated on what that necessarily means when we work with News Corp. It requires quite a bit of significant lift to sift through all their content, and that’s not to say that they can’t do it on their own. Obviously, they do. But it goes back to the idea that we’re very much performance based. So if the performance was there, I think we would pursue it a little bit further, but we haven’t seen it so there was no necessity to go down that route.
From our perspective, there are very specific KPIs that weren’t necessarily attached to some of the work that’s been done. And we haven’t seen the performance we wanted to in comparison to the rest of [the publishers we are working with]. We just needed to be very aware of where we’re trying to stretch ourselves into.”
“[Vox Media] has a very wide variety of publications that allows them to really have a wide spectrum of the segments they can create. They’re not just in one type of vertical, they’re in multiple verticals, so that allows different types of advertisers to feel comfortable working with them. Concert has been building up its offering for quite some time and I actually worked with them even before the cookie announcement. It’s pretty straight forward [from a transacting standpoint].
However, they have a limited taxonomy in terms of activation and flexibility. Some of these smaller guys tend to have a very strict list of 100 segments that [they] can activate and that’s it. They need to find their groove in terms of having the flexibility that some of the bigger players have in terms of making things custom and utilizing advertisers’ first-party data to work with their data.”
The post Scouting report: How some publishers’ first-party data offerings stack up, according to media buyers appeared first on Digiday.
This article is part of the Digiday Privacy Preview, a digital issue of stories examining what the coming changes to Chrome and iOS will do to the worlds of media and marketing. Read the rest of that coverage here.
Retail media is getting a second look from media buyers as they try to get in front of shoppers, who are spending more time online than ever before, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown. The coming end of the third-party cookie will make retail media invaluable to them, as they hunt for ad platforms that can offer scaled audiences.
Right now retail media is defined by an arms race between Amazon and Walmart. However, retail media challengers like Target and CVS are looking to compete with their own offerings.
Digiday spoke with three buy-side executives who served as scouts, sharing their thoughts about the latest retail media platforms, and weighing in on who will win big this year to come out on top in 2022.
Amazon is setting the pace with its expansive offerings and leaving other brands to play catch up. And since the pandemic has shuttered in-person shopping, advertisers are throwing more ad dollars at e-commerce platforms, with Amazon at the forefront.
Amazon has its very own DSP and a multitude of self-service offerings. According to one scout, Amazon’s wealth of behavioral shopping data is what keeps advertisers coming back, allowing them to target consumers based on what they browsed or purchased. But that’s not all.
The e-commerce giant also has properties including Twitch, Amazon Prime and Audible, all of which push it further into the audio and video space.
“Amazon is the clear leader right now and I think they will continue to be just because of their multi-platform ability,” one buyer said. “They have such great supply and distribution platforms.”
According to media buyers, Walmart could prove to be a big thorn in Amazon’s side.
From 2019 to 2020, Walmart’s digital ad impressions increased 50% year-over-year. And earlier this year, the company linked up with The Trade Desk, with big plans for major growth, including launching its own DSP, with proprietary segments based on sales data from 150 million customers every week.
Recently, the retailer merged its online pickup and delivery paid search products, simplifying campaign management and execution for advertisers while simultaneously expanding potential ad inventory and placements, per one scout.
The retailer has almost 5,000 brick-and-mortar locations, offering digital ad placement on in-store TV walls. It’s a number that eclipses Amazon’s, which has fewer than 60 Amazon convenience and book stores and just 500 Amazon-owned Whole Food stores.
“They’re the big one to compete with Amazon,” said one scout. “Really being able to tie those experiences for in-store and e-commerce together and really make it more of an omnichannel advertising experience, I think is really interesting.”
A second buyer argued that Walmart’s success will hinge on how much targeting and measurement information the retailer is willing to share with advertisers.
“They’re really being assertive in trying to market that first-party data through programmatic means,” the buyer said. “So to have their own DSP means that they actually have had a lot of requests and have seen a lot of success and want to position themselves to provide their first-party data to other brands in the CPG category — or any other advertiser that finds their audiences of value.”
Similar to Walmart, Target has made efforts to prove itself as more than an in-store retailer. Back in 2019, Target rebranded its advertising network as Roundel, with an emphasis on first-party data and customer profiles to entice advertisers. The retailer also offers paid search offerings through Criteo.
What makes Target’s offering interesting, according to buyers, is its internet-based advertising, which allows third-party companies to collect user information from Target’s website and app to serve ads.
Hypothetically now, a brand could advertise on Target.com or the app or potentially target them on another site, per the buyer.
“They’re like, ‘At the end of the day, we have a certain amount of traffic that will give exposure to your brand. So we’re going to offer paid search ads on our site,’” the scout said. “So as long as it’s not a competitor, then they actually have a very unique playground.”
A third scout said if they had to build a starting lineup of retail media platforms, Target would definitely make it to the starting five based on the “playground” the platform offers within those partnerships.
However, not all scouts are impressed with Target’s offerings.
Target’s online shopping experience — and advertising offerings — leave much to be desired, they said. For example, media buyers must go through Roundel for display ads and Criteo for search ads. “It’s not really an end-to-end, seamless integration experience for the advertiser or the brand,” they said.
Because of its regional nature, not yet available in all 50 states, Kroger may be a bit of an underdog compared to Walmart.
As of now, Kroger boasts 2,800 stores across 35 states — less than Walmart’s nearly 5,000 stores, but still more than Target’s nearly 2,000 stores.
Currently, the grocer offers customer data analytics for targeted ads, a self-service ad platform and paid search. In early 2019, the grocer announced a new attribution capability in partnership with Microsoft-owned PromoteIQ, where brands that used its self-service ad platform would also be able to view in-store and online sales results in relation to the campaigns run across Kroger properties.
Although Kroger has poised itself to compete with Amazon (via its pitch to marry in-store and online sales data), it stands a closer competitor with a platform like Instacart rather than a retailer such as Walmart or Target, given its nature as a grocery retailer, per the first scout.
“The grocery space is one where there’s big opportunity for Kroger in the same way there is for Walmart,” the first scout said, noting that there’s a love-hate relationship between grocery retailers like Kroger and Instacart.
“You can shop Kroger or Walmart (products) through Instacart and I’m sure they’d rather you shop direct with them,” the scout said. “But if that’s what the consumer is, then that’s where brands are going to advertise and where there’s gonna be opportunity.”
Another serious contender in the retail media platform space is Instacart, especially as more shoppers looked to the app for grocery delivery in pandemic lockdown. Its marketplace spans 25,000 brick-and-mortar stores across the U.S.
Last April, Instacart reported a 75% increase in its active shopper base, bringing that number to 350,000 active shoppers.
Compared to other e-commerce platforms, Instacart is relatively new, with its self-service ad platform launching last year. However, it isn’t a flash in the pan, scouts say.
“Their network is extremely strong and they can actually flex as demand increases and it certainly has since the beginning of the pandemic,” the third media buyer said, adding that the retailer has seen a notable influx in business from consumers who would rather safely shop online than in person.
Instacart continues to add partners, including Best Buy and Sephora for same-day delivery late last year. This year, the e-commerce platform partnered with Walgreens on the same service, unlocking new inventory and becoming a real competitor for retail media ad budgets.
According to the first scout, Instacart’s current ad capabilities make it a strong contender, saying “they have a really robust advertising offering now, from a paid search standpoint, that’s very competitive.”
“Instacart, I think that’s a great opportunity for like your CPGs and your brands that have this really wide distribution to drive e-commerce sales, and [there are] more opportunities there than they maybe would with all those retailers directly,” the scout said.
Walgreens is one of the latest drugstore chains looking to grow its advertising offerings. Last December, Walgreens announced the launch of its retail media offering, with its loyalty program front and center.
Like other retail media platforms, Walgreens has its own DSP, digital display and custom audience capabilities. And its 9,000 brick-and-mortar stores eclipses that of Walmart, Target and Kroger.
However, it’s banking on access to its first-party customer data, derived from more than 100 million loyalty members, to lure in digital advertisers.
Still, at least one scout one isn’t completely sold on its offering.
“Do people look to go to (Walgreens.com) to buy things?” the scout said.
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There is no playbook for how to run a livestream commerce festival, but the video shopping app NTWRK is starting to build one.
This past weekend, NTWRK hosted Off Court, its fourth ever “festival,” NTWRK’s term for a two-day event of product drops, musical performances and panels with celebrities. Streaming tipped off at 9 a.m. PST and ended 8 p.m. PST on both days, with product drops happening every 15 to 30 minutes and panels sprinkled throughout.
Off Court was held within the NTWRK app, which currently has about 2 million users. Across the app, social media and influencer posts, Off Court totaled 50 million content views, according to NTWRK president Moksha Fitzgibbons. The festival was one of the app’s top ten revenue days ever, and a top five day in terms of daily active users. The company declined to share specific dollar figures. Off Court focused on basketball culture, and featured jewelry, art, apparel, and housewares by artists Matt Senna and Dan Life, and brands such as Oakley and Hummer. It also featured panels and discussions with players like Dennis Rodman, Dwayne Wade and Damian Lillard, and a product drop hosted by Monique Billings.
While livestream shopping has yet to reach the level of popularity in China, NTWRK’s events show that there is growing interest from U.S. audiences.
“We don’t need tens of millions of users,” said NTWRK CEO Aaron Levant, “We just need a very engaged audience.” According to Levant, the app sees between 11,000 to 20,000 active users on a given product drop. Typical app users are Gen Z, and over 50% of users are in the U.S.
Fitzgibbons said they’ve learned from past festivals. The app used to space out new product drops, but now will release new items within 15 or 30 minutes of each other.
“We did 66 product drops in two days,” said Fitzgibbons. “We realized that people wanted them more often to keep up the energy. It was also a quicker variety of choice.”
Though NTWRK is known for sneakers and streetwear, Off Court offered evidence that they’re drawing interest in other product and brand categories.
The most expensive product sold at Off Court was a painting by artist Lefty Out There for $4,800. The most expensive item ever sold at a NTWRK festival was also a painting during the Beyond the Streets festival in December of last year. It sold for $44,000.
Other products for sale included an NBA Jam arcade game by Chinatown Market and Arcade1Up, candles and crystal basketballs by Victor Solomon, sunglasses by Oakley, and limited edition hats by streetwear designer Don C and Hummer EV.
“I think that we often get tagged as part of sneakerhead culture from our exclusive drops,” said Fitzgibbons. “But that’s not the full breadth of what we do. Some of our best sellers are home goods and art. We lean into areas with a rabid fandom.”
Jamie Barbour, senior manager of advertising and media at the automaker GMC, said NTWRK offered “an appealing way to engage a global community of tastemakers and creators.”
Looking ahead, NTWRK has two more upcoming festivals — a food festival in April, and SneakerCon in June. The app is also looking into trying out festivals on weekdays, and leaning into talent partnerships.
“I think livestreams and social shopping are a ways off from what’s happening in Asia,” said Levant. “But it will just take off when it gets here. I mean, no one was talking about NFTs three weeks ago.”
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What to do with all that space?
It’s the question companies eyeing hybrid or remote work arrangements post-pandemic have had to ask themselves about the extra room they have on their hands. The answers have ranged from renting it out to startups and freelancers to spreading out workspaces for social distancing to novel ideas like gyms, nap rooms and art installations. (The prize for the most creative solution for suddenly unneeded space has to go to Austin, Texas-based software company Zoho, which, once it was clear its people would not be returning to a physical office full-time, transformed 360 acres it had purchased before the pandemic for a new HQ into a community farm.)
While a healthy inventory of commercial real estate in many cities has made subleasing a nonstarter, companies have taken the surplus square footage problem and turned it into an opportunity to generally create a more utilitarian and employee-friendly environment. That has meant instituting flexible workspaces and bringing the comforts of home into the office.
“We know the expansive, open concept will need some adjustments, and there are options for creative teams to collaborate at their level of comfort and need,” said Allan Smith, VP of global marketing at the office solutions brand Steelcase. “People’s experiences at home have shaped what they want to see in the office.”
While many employees enjoy working from home, it has also led to feelings of isolation and decreased productivity. That’s inspired Steelcase to develop new products like flex-frame walls and a collection of rolling TV screens that pair with Microsoft Surface computers to connect remote and in-office teams wherever they want to meet. Another of its innovations — and another use for all that extra room — is the freestanding, individual “work tent,” which the company describes as “rooted in the human desire to seek shelter and protection from the natural elements … providing people in the office with the same shelter and protection they crave.”
Several companies said they are converting their extra space into studios for creating marketing content. Among them is the New York and Miami-based digital marketing firm Socialfly, which, after going fully remote last March, needed to make use of its main office space in midtown Manhattan. The project “allowed us to utilize every inch of the office, which was completely empty, and take advantage of all the natural light,” said business development and marketing manager Breann Antokal. Using existing layouts of the different rooms, it created multiple photo and video rigs, mock living spaces and other turnkey production setups that could be easily modified to suit various content and production needs.
Meanwhile, Mark Hayes, head of marketing at the Sydney-based consultancy platform Kintell, recommends filling the void with flora. He points to a study by the University of Technology in Sydney finding that greenery leads to lower rates of stress and depression among employees. “If you’re looking to fill up that extra space with something affordable, beneficial to your team and that is appealing for the office environment, get creative with your interior décor and start with plants,” he said.
Grant Aldrich, CEO of the edtech platform OnlineDegree.com, plans to convert his company’s spare space into a nap room, which, he said, “shows employees you care about their wellbeing.” Such a quiet area can also be used as a meditation space or for brainstorming with other employees. “The key is that employees can go there when they need a retreat from the stress of work,” he added.
Devin Johnson, CEO of the Indianapolis-based software company Kennected, is in the process of reimagining three separate office locations now that the company has transitioned to remote working. He is considering options like an employee gym (complete with locker rooms and showers) and a fully equipped kitchen — an idea that came to him after arranging for Zoom cooking classes for employees during the pandemic. Creating a “sleeping quarters” is another concept. “We have an international team in seven countries and it would be awesome to be able to put them up in our offices when they are allowed to travel again,” said Johnson.
However they are reconfigured, the office of the future will be a whole new world — with room to spare and plenty of ideas on how to fill it. “Maybe it’s a brainstorm on couches with colleagues or a quiet work area,” said Stephen Brown, CEO of the Toronto agency Fuse Create. “We envision a collaborative team environment where workers can make the space what they want it to be.”
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The real impact on media spending from Apple’s imminent tracking crackdown isn’t yet clear, but the actual amount is likely to be severe — at least in the short-term.
When it comes to forecasting how long it will take spending to recover there are two underlying assumptions: first, that mobile marketers will still need to acquire customers to grow — regardless of the situation; second, that the pandemic has strengthened the perception of mobile gaming as a mainstream media channel for brand advertising.
Given these two parallel views, marketers believe spending will recover from the knock of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) plan, but the trajectory will be U-shaped, not V-shaped — a dip to start, followed by a slow but steady recovery over four to six months.
“Once the ATT update arrives, there will be a drop in media efficiency for performance marketers who have fewer Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) they’re able to use,” said Jean-Sebastien Laverge, svp of growth at mobile game publisher Tilting Point. “Then it’s going to slowly grow again as those marketers learn to walk in this new environment.”
The initial impact will be sharp — ad rates for impressions without the mobile identifier will slide anywhere between 35% (the optimist’s view) and 50% (the pragmatist’s view) once it becomes harder to track the people on Apple mobile devices.
That is to say, marketers won’t value those in-app impressions much; they’ll be cheaper, identifier-less traffic that is unqualified and doesn’t monetize. In fact, Smart Ad Server expects eCPms to drop between 30 to 40% for impressions without the IDFA. InMobi isn’t as optimistic with its own forecast.
“We expect eCPMs to deflate by 35% on non-IDFA supply,” said Sergio Serra, head of product management at InMobi. “While we must acknowledge a monetization deceleration for iOS pubs is likely to extend over the next few months, we are also positive a higher number of delivered impressions will generate similar absolute revenue overtime. Such an assumption particularly holds true for performance buyers.”
Only those marketers who see the decline in performance on those impressions as less significant than the decline in media cost will be able to act opportunistically and increase spend once ATT arrives.
Most performance marketers, however, won’t be opportunistic, especially if their marketing goals are solely focused on app downloads. Not when they’re reliant on view-based digital attribution methodologies that are being upended by the latest change.
Instead, those marketers plan to slow spending on ads on Apple devices and even take it places where there’s better measurability (like Android devices) before gradually ramping it back up once they’ve figured out how to refine those impressions with contextual data and other non-identifier related signals.
Even those impressions with the IDFA identifier are likely to be out of reach for many marketers; they’ll be too expensive because they’re one of the few impressions that can still be precisely targeted. While it’s hard to forecast the size of this inflation, the cost of those impressions could rise by 50%, according to ad tech vendor InMobi. Still, there’s a chance that marketers won’t have to pay this much to reach the narrow band of people who are expected to agree to be tracked. Indeed, Smart AdServer’s doesn’t anticipate the prices for these impressions rising beyond 30%.
“Companies whose growth is dependent on having a continuous stream of new users engaged with their product are strongly incentivized to achieve a similar scale within a very short time span to avoid a material impact on their business,” said Offer Yehudai, president of mobile ad tech vendor Fyber. “Certain segments of advertisers, typically those with lower lifetime values, are expected to at least attempt to return to normal spend levels more quickly — potentially speeding up the recovery.”
How quickly that recovery occurs depends on several factors. The main one is the readiness of the ad tech marketers use to buy in-app advertising. Companies that made the early adjustments are more likely to convince marketers they can still reach the right people without IDFA. Indeed, demand for Limit Ad Tracking traffic — those users who have opted out of targeted advertising — has been on the rise for some time as marketers are using it to see how mobile ads perform on the back of non-personalized traffic.
In fact, eCPMs for LAT traffic doubled between Apple’s announcement in June 2020 to January 2021, according to Fyber. This increase is driven by the gradual expansion of buyers actively buying LAT impressions, driven by the increased competition for this inventory. This would suggest IDFA-less traffic can be of some value to marketers, especially if they use contextual targeting for brand awareness goals. For example, the mobile demand-side platform Appreciate used Fyber’s contextual targeting tools to buy traffic without the IDFA inventory in the final quarter of 2020 and saw 25% lower cost per impression and a 30% rise in return on ad spend.
“This opens the door for more brand advertising to come into the mobile gaming space, which has historically been dominated by CPI campaigns,” said Stephen Upstone, CEO at ad tech vendor LoopMe. “This will drive iOS CPMs to drop for CPI advertisers as spend drops creating an opportunity for brands.”
But there’s only so much companies, like Fyber, can do to encourage marketers to funnel money quickly back into Apple devices once the crackdown on tracking starts. A lot will depend on how measurement solutions adapt to Apple’s changes, from the likes of Facebook and Google or elsewhere. If it isn’t easily measurable, then it’s difficult to see performance marketers shifting budget to that inventory.
“To me, the big question will be, ‘who can best close the measurement loop and circumvent the limitations of Apple’s protocols the fastest?,’” said Bryan Karas, CEO of performance marketing agency Playbook Media. “Google and Facebook will have a huge leg up if they can get fast adoption of their conversion APIs, where I believe Facebook is leading the charge. However, Google is better equipped to steal share from DSPs so they may benefit the most in the long run.”
The mobile marketers who adapt the quickest, by building a good SKAdNetwork conversion strategy, using privacy-centric attribution, and or smart web-to-app campaigns will find the environment to be much less crowded.
“This new reality, while challenging, may also present opportunities for advertisers that are able to adapt quickly, resulting in them actually increasing their budgets,” said Barak Witowski, vp of core product at mobile measurement firm AppsFlyer. “Why? Because marketing is a game of supply and demand. Let’s take for example the hyper-casual game industry. Today, all gaming companies are fighting for the same audience: high spenders. The demand is high, so the CPIs to bring in these users is also high.”
The post ‘A V-shaped recovery’: Slow recovery ahead for mobile marketers post-Apple tracking crackdown appeared first on Digiday.
For most of the past three years, Medium spared no expense producing content for its platform and its publications. But it seems to have been philosophically opposed to spending money to market that content or the brands that produced it.
Over the past three years, Medium has spent next to nothing on advertising and has not spent any money at all on customer acquisition, preferring instead to let its platform and the organic reach of its content drive subscriber growth, current and former staffers said.
In fact, the amount of money Medium has spent on advertising and promotion has been declining since Medium began ramping up its publication-focused strategy. The platform spent just over $1 million on advertising in 2018, slightly less than $1 million in 2019, and less than $500,000 in 2020, according to Kantar data.
Thanks in part to its large audience — a spokesperson said Medium attracts around 170 million unique users per month (SimilarWeb [200 million monthly visits] and Comscore [19 million monthly unique users] estimates diverged wildly) — Medium, a startup which has raised $132 million in venture capital to date, managed to build a strong foundation organically, piling up 725,000 subscribers paying either $5 a month of $50 a year, according to a current staffer. (Axios originally reported Medium’s subscriber totals).
That number would be the envy of many subscription-focused publishers, but it also fell short of the 1 million subscriber target the company set in 2019. Medium’s subscriber growth began to slow down in the second half of 2020. Medium also slashed commissioning budgets last year, and on March 24, Medium founder Ev Williams announced that the platform had scaled back its investment in its publications, which range from the tech-focused OneZero to Zora, a publication created for Black women, and offered buyouts to the publications’ staffers. The company’s head of editorial, Siobhan O’Connor, will leave later this year, Williams wrote. Content will be supervised dually by Scott Lamb and Jermaine Hall, and the two will report in to Karene Tropen, who will assume the newly created role of svp of marketing and content.
“We had no illusion these publications were going to pay for themselves in the short term,” Williams wrote. “The bet was that we could develop these brands, and they would develop loyal audiences that would grow the overall Medium subscriber base. What’s happened, though, is the Medium subscriber base has continued to grow, while our publication’s audiences haven’t.”
Since that announcement, many Medium staffers have announced on Twitter that they are taking buy-outs.
“It didn’t surprise me that there was a pivot,” one current staffer said, before adding, “It was maybe two steps further than we would have thought.”
Current and former employees said that while Medium did promote the platform and its publications using organic distribution, there was a feeling internally that the platform would drive its own success on the subscriber acquisition front.
But even the largest platforms spend money on advertising. LinkedIn, which monetizes through advertising as well as consumer revenue, spent $46 million on advertising in 2020; Twitter, which Williams himself co-founded, spent almost $49 million on advertising, according to Kantar.
Even The New York Times, whose 7.5 million subscribers are the envy of the journalism industry, spent over $46 million on advertising in 2020, per Kantar.
“I think it comes from an overblown sense of the superiority of the viral message in news and in digital,” said Alice Sylvester, a partner at Sequent Partners, who noted that it is highly unusual for a digital consumer product not to spend any money on consumer marketing. “At the core, it’s still a product that needs to find an audience, it needs to retain its audience and it needs to refill its user base.”
That is especially true for new products, said Michael Felice, a principal in the consumer and media practice at the management consulting firm Kearney, which have to overcome a lack of familiarity when they are trying to build the trust and value needed to convert a reader into a subscriber.
“You have to be able to prove your differentiation,” Felice said. “When you’re starting with unknown writers and unknown brands it’s hard to prove that out.”
While the decision not to pay to market its homegrown publications irked staff — “Editorial was begging for marketing,” one former employee said — both current and former employees acknowledge that Medium was trying to toe a careful line. The content created by Medium’s publications, even though its costs ran into the millions of dollars, represented a “drop in the bucket” of the total output created by the platform’s users, a current employee said.
And even though that content also represented a disproportionate share of what Medium’s members read, the current employee said, the platform wanted to avoid creating the impression that the publications and their output were being privileged over the content created by regular platform users.
“They didn’t want to create hierarchies of content,” another employee said.
The company went to great lengths to keep the playing field level. Current and former employees told Digiday that the publications’ teams were not given any insights into what made content successful on the platform. A Medium spokesperson, when reached for comment, responded that editorial staffers had data on how their content was performing and that Medium was always analyzing what worked and what didn’t.
What happens next to Medium’s subscriber base is uncertain. Following an executive reorganization, the company plans to focus more on identifying and promoting individual writers using its platform, a move toward what Williams describes as “relational media,” which prioritizes relationships between readers and individual authors.
As for whether the company decides to start spending money to acquire more customers, “it comes down to whether or not they see marketing as an expense or an investment,” Sylvester said.
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