Month: April 2021

“There’s a lot of cautious optimism,” said Glenn Ginsburg, svp of global partnerships with QYOU Media, an influencer marketing agency that has worked with studios like Dreamworks on the promotion of 2020 films like The Croods: A New Age and Trolls World Tour. That being said, much of the focus for movie studios remains on streaming and “right now, films are back in theaters with significantly lowered expectations.” 

In January 2021, movie studios spent $49.8 million on traditional media compared to $201.4 million in January 2020, according to Kantar. Overall in 2020 movie studios spent roughly $669.3 million on traditional media (Kantar doesn’t track social media spending) for motion picture marketing. It’s unclear how much studios will spend on media in 2021. 

Noah Mallin, chief brand officer for IMGN Media echoed that sentiment: “We are seeing the shift again back to some theatrical [promotion] but in some cases there is that component in tandem — typically for summer release dates though most of what we are getting is still streaming.” 

While studios did promote theatrical releases for films like Tenet and Wonder Woman: 1984 in 2020, many major releases were delayed. In the coming months, studios are set to roll many of those delayed films — think Paramount’s A Quiet Place: Part II (set for May 28 in theaters, streaming on Paramount Plus 30-days later) and Disney’s Black Widow (set for July 9th in theaters and on Disney Plus). As they do so, agency execs and industry observers say spending to promote theatrical releases will likely increase.

Still, much of the return to theaters — and studios’ approach to marketing theatrical releases — is dependent on people’s behavior and whether or not they are willing to make that return as studios are still taking a “fluid” approach, according to agency execs. 

Per a recent poll by media company Watchmojo, some moviegoers are willing to return to theaters now. Out of 64,000 responses, 39% are willing to go back to a theater now, 20% expect to return in the summer and 17% say they will be back in the fall. However, 25% of respondents said they will wait until 2022. A building consumer interest in returning to theaters if the overall coronavirus outlook improves could help buoy movie marketing, said Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, CEO of Watchmojo. 

When it comes to marketing teams at studios, there can be tension between theatrical and streaming groups, according to a media buyer who works with major studios, when asked about how the dual marketing of streaming and theatrical releases will work this year. 

“People who work in theatrical marketing get a box office target,” said the buyer. “It’s high risk, lots of pressure. They know how much money they have to generate. Then you’ve got this new team, basically doing the same thing online and they’re allowed to lose money [to grow subscribers]. If you’re someone who can lose money, you’re a different person than someone who has to make money all of the time.” 

As for messaging, Covid-safety guidelines will likely come from theater chains and local marketing rather than major studios. 

“A lot of [the return to the theater] marketing will be done at the exhibitor level, essentially more at the local level,” said Peggy Einnehmer, evp of research and communications company Material, adding that chains like Regal and AMC could offer movie-goers branded theater chain masks as part of a promotion to return to theaters. 

“When you think about what goes into a movie trailer or a 30-second spot, so much of the focus is about the film itself and telling you why you need to see it,” Einnehmer added. “With a lot of these tentpole films, consumers understand that the theatrical experience will be the best way to see this movie.”

CarsonDoyle, based out of Denver and London, is made up of eight full-time Gen Zers: all digital natives under 25 years old. CarsonDoyle’s pitch to brands is that it can connect them to younger audiences simply because they are the youngest generation brands are seeking, said creative director Thomas Brazier.

During the pandemic, agencies and brands pivoted, doubling down on their digital media and marketing efforts to keep up with consumers’ changing online shopping habits. Platforms like TikTok, where there’s a heavy Gen Z presence, rose in popularity and marketers sought to add it to their strategies.

But at CarsonDoyle, the internal infrastructure was already there, giving them an edge over the competitor and ultimately winning the agency work with Tinder. “We were able to sink our teeth into it,” said managing director Charlie Naus. “We learned what we were pretty good at and in that, driving that authenticity and cultural understanding.”

“It almost eliminates the learning curve,” Brazier said, of being part of the Gen Z target that many marketers are aiming to capture. “We’ve saved [brands] a lot of time and energy and focus of trying to figure it out. It’s like no, we have it figured out.”

Currently, the agency focuses on digital, paid media, creative and of course, offering first-hand research and insights. One day, they hope to the next Wieden+Kennedy with an in-house accounts team, planners and media buyers.

The agency is positioning itself to bridge the gap between traditional, legacy brands and Gen Z, advocating for younger consumers who they say feel taken advantage of and untrusting of brand authenticity, per Brazier.

Surveys and Google searches can only provide so much insight into Gen Z, Brazier said. But as Gen Zers, the CarsonDoyle staff has access to the daily life of a Gen Zer, participating in the peer to peer text conversations and ever-changing TikTok trends, marrying insight and consultancy for brands hoping to connect to Gen Z. 

“We’re trying to change the tone. How can we be an advocate for [younger consumers] as opposed to try to sell them something that might screw them over,” Brazier said.

Recently, CarsonDoyle caught the attention of the U.S.’s most popular dating app Tinder. Last September, the team led Tinder’s paid media creative, supported brand campaigns and worked with the dating app to lead the production of its National Snap Lens, which launched earlier this year.

Most notably, the Gen Z agency supported Tinder in their viral “Put Yourself Out There” campaign featuring rapper Megan Thee Stallion. Work included supporting paid media creative to be delivered across digital and streaming platforms like Hulu, Roku and Twitch.

“That was a very gratifying feeling just knowing that some new guns to this industry could still take on a client and convince them of trying something new or going with the younger approach might be best,” Brazier said. 

It’s no secret that the advertising industry has been scrambling to connect with Gen Z, tomorrow’s consumers. Brands like Chobani are using TikTok to reach younger audiences. Others are focusing on commerce to stay relevant with those consumers. 

“These kids are pretty authentic in the sense that they want to connect with people, content and brands that share their value,” said Frank Simonetti, CEO of Gen Z online community Sweety High. “And they want to be entertained.”

Sweety High dates back to 2011, where a team of over 20 people has studied upcoming generations, including Gen Z, to deliver relevant content. Sweety High has a heavy presence on TikTok with more than 10 million followers and manages a couple hundred million video views per month on their platform, Simonetti said.

Traditional brands sometimes struggle to be nimble enough to keep up with Gen Z’s changing sentiments, he said. It’s hard to stay in the zeitgeist for longer than a week or two and this is a generation that expects more of its brands.

“The rules of engagement have changed. Brands need to be proactive. They need to be transparent. It’s a pivot for them,” said Stacy Greco, vice president of brand strategy at Sweety High. 

CarsonDoyle won’t be Gen Z-focused forever; the team has started to consider how that will evolve its business.

That means working more closely with college students to ensure they’re always abreast of emerging trends and “keep that bridge from us to the younger ones,” Naus said.

“We’re not doing anything crazy different from any other agency in terms of what we produce,” Naus said. “But what we are doing different[ly] is our practice of how we got there.”

The companies and consortiums developing these alternatives all say that their solutions are more privacy-safe than cookies were, but many of them require tools like email addresses, IP addresses or other assets that are even more invasive than cookies. Digiday produced a video that explains at a basic level how this emerging economy will likely function:

“I can’t just throw a bunch of identifiers on a page and hope that some work and don’t work,” said Sara Badler, svp advertising and partnerships at Dotdash, which owns publications like Verywell and The Spruce. Badler told Digiday that identity tech vendors tell her, “If you put the tags on the page, there’s very minimal impact… but that’s just not the case.” The potential for any new piece of tech to increase page load time is “the biggest hurdle” to adopting any cookieless identifier, said Badler.

Page load time is a major consideration because of its impact on publishers’ search-driven traffic, Badler said. Dotdash generates around 85% of its visitor traffic through search, and site latency is a factor in search rankings. Google announced in May 2020 that it plans to incorporate a set of user experience metrics called Core Web Vitals, which include page load speed measurements, to determine search rankings. That is leading publishers to take a close look at how IDs may affect their site speeds and, by extension, their traffic and resulting ad revenue.

“We test every ID solution not just for revenue, so we know that it’s helping publishers make more money, but also for performance, using Core Web Vitals and other metrics,” said Don Marti, vp of ecosystem innovation at CafeMedia, which manages ads for small publishers.

Avoiding clunky tech

Ultimately, identity tech providers demand that publishers add another piece of code to their sites — “client-side,” in tech parlance, and it is more than a mere imposition, Badler said. “When you put them client-side, you’re essentially giving them the keys to your house,” she said. As an example of her protective approach, she added, “We didn’t roll out a consent management platform till this year because we were so concerned with how clunky it would be.”

Other execs from publishers including BuzzFeed and Maven, which publishes Sports Illustrated and TheStreet, agreed latency is a factor when evaluating the new crop of ID tech from companies including LiveRamp, The Trade Desk, BritePool and ID5. “[Latency] is absolutely something that has to be considered,” said Maven COO Andrew Kraft, who said he’s interested in testing several identifiers.

Page load time is “a concern for advertisers; it’s a concern for publishers,” said Ric Elert, president and COO of Publicis Groupe’s data marketing firm Epsilon, which said on April 8 it will partner with The Trade Desk to hinge its ten-year-old Core ID product to Unified ID 2.0, the industry-wide identity offering developed by the Trade Desk. Because publishers want more demand, he said, “they get into that trap where they want to sync with so many places.” Each attempt to sync an ID can slow down a page.

However, Elert argued Epsilon’s identifier doesn’t create site latency because of the company’s massive scale. One of the largest data brokers in the world, Epsilon connects with enough partners to see 400 billion interactions among people, brands and site publishers each day, Elert said. That frequent connectivity enables the company to confirm people’s identities on a regular basis through its access to logins happening across the web, he said. “We can connect the dots so [publishers] don’t have to do 17 calls to get the reach they need,” he said.

Cookie syncs took longer

In general, Marti said the publishers that CafeMedia works with haven’t experienced lag time from ID technologies. “As with any code, we sometimes see performance issues in the testing process,” he said, “but we have been able to report issues to the [ID] companies and get any needed improvements before deploying at scale.”

Of course, many identity tech products have been developed as a way of replacing third-party cookie tracking. While the IDs may add to publishers’ page loads, their sites could potentially net out to be faster when adding the IDs but removing the cookie. Syncing third-party cookies had the potential to significantly affect page load time, or PLT, said Brendan Riordan-Butterworth, a tech consultant for HIJ Consulting who has been evaluating identity technology for publishers, advertisers and tech clients. While he suggested publishers should consider the impacts of identity tech code on page load time — as well as sluggishness brought on by processes some ID technologies employ involving redirects before page requests are made — he said, “Most [ID] solutions I’ve looked at decrease PLT.”

Test, test, test

Like Marti, Maven’s Kraft said there are ways to test identity tech without placing burdens on site performance that could affect things like search ranking. “I’m signing all the ID providers, but I’m not going to call them all on every page,” Kraft said. Rather than calling every identity partner on every pre-bid call, he said he will test identity tech performance by doing dynamic insertion of each provider’s code based on attributes such as region, domain, browser and whether ads are running on mobile or desktop. “The key is testing, looking at the data, and understanding the specialty and focus of each identifier, as they are all different, even if they do have overlap,” he said.