Month: April 2021

There’s also the looming depreciation of third-party cookies, stifling programmatic efforts, and social media’s pay to play environment isn’t conducive to the tightened media budgets that lay in the pandemic’s wake, according to marketers. 

“What used to be a more linear customer journey is now all over the place,” said Jill John, chief customer officer at direct-to-consumer furniture company Interior Define. “So we want to make sure we’re messaging in a relevant way across multiple stages in the funnel across multiple target audiences.”

In addition to doubling their total digital marketing budget this year, Interior Define has grown its experimental budget from 5% to 15%, according to a company spokesperson. The majority of the DTC brand’s ad dollars go toward performance marketing tactics. But in a recent effort to diversify media spend and reach more consumers, John said the team has launched SMS marketing efforts, podcasts, direct mail, CTV and influencer-focused marketing. 

“A lot of this testing budget and reason for diversifying is just reading where our customers are going,” John said. “We have found through COVID that there’s all these different platforms where our customers are now joining.” 

Several other brands have also upped their experimental budgets and moved to diversify their media spend over the last year. Media buyers say flexible media channels like CTV are gaining traction, while cable television ads are less attractive in today’s volatile business and fragmented viewer environment. 

For example, footwear brand Reef dedicated 5% of its digital media budget toward experimental channels such as text-based marketing and CTV last year. Meanwhile, DTC men’s soap brand Dr. Squatch dedicated 10% of its digital ad budget to Snapchat after finding success in experimenting with the platform. 

It’s a similar story on the agency side, per Chelsea Cannon, associate media director at full-service digital marketing agency Chemistry.

Cannon said Chemistry has all but made it mandatory for 5% to 15% of client campaign budget to go toward experimental channels in light of the pandemic “because you just never knew.” It’s a budget that was non-existent before the onset of the coronavirus crisis, she said. 

“We almost started redoing budgets on a monthly and weekly basis because everything was going to hell in a hand basket,” she said. 

Prior to the pandemic, the majority of Chemistry’s marketing tactics were in line with paid social media and search, Cannon said. But with the pandemic tightening budgets, social media’s pay to play environment made the agency look toward alternative channels such as direct mail and sms marketing. 

“We got used to pivoting quickly and thinking outside of the box,” Cannon said. “Nothing else could surprise us at this point.”

“The biggest trend is that there is no trend right now,” said Gordon Zellner, CEO of Evergreen Trading agency. “The notion of set it and forget it, it sounds good, but the business climate is not conducive to [that] right now.

As a media trading firm that buys clients out of media assets that aren’t showing a return on investment, Evergreen has seen a good year, per Zellner. During the pandemic, the firm had a number of cases in which clients needed to cancel media quickly, but couldn’t because of contracts and financial commitments. Evergreen fulfills those commitments on behalf of with the promise that the client buying media from Evergreen in the future, offering the industry flexibility in media buying.

Even as vaccine rollout continues and consumers return to the outside world and normalizing behavior, Zellner thinks experimental budgets are here to stay. In fact, he says they should be integrated into core marketing strategies because “you’re throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks, but it’s a moving wall.”

“I think it has to be a constant testing process where you’re kind of dialing in and adjusting,” he added. “Breaking things into smaller pieces and constantly adjusting and revising I think is the way to go.”

The struggle for women’s sports coverage to inspire more investment from publishers and advertisers is a chicken-or-egg construct: Publishers blame advertisers for not putting more money into women’s sports content, while advertisers say publishers aren’t producing enough content to advertise against.

“Publishers need to step up their coverage of women’s sports” to attract more advertiser investment, said Kristi Wagner, director of Content+ at media agency Mindshare. “The ad industry has a long way to go before we see women’s sports receive even close to the interest that men’s does,” she said.

But Lauren Reynolds, executive editor of ESPN Digital, assures that women’s sports coverage is “an area of growth for us, and for a lot of media organizations,” adding their audience is demanding it and that “there’s enthusiasm for it. Media companies would be foolish to look past it.”

But media companies too often are looking past women’s sports. A USC/Purdue study published on March 24 found that women’s sports was severely underrepresented in television news and online media coverage. The study found that 95% of TV coverage focused on men’s sports in 2019. Coverage devoted to women’s sports in the study’s sample of daily online newsletters and social posts from publishers on Twitter was 8.7% and 10.2%, respectively. Of the 93 newsletters analyzed, eight led with a story about women’s sports in 2019.

Audiences’ interest in women’s sports is increasing, though, despite the coverage imbalance.

• The 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup generated record viewership (993 million people watched on TV, 482 million on digital platforms), and the final was more popular than the 2018 men’s final, with a 22% larger audience.
• Viewership for the women’s US Open tennis tournaments have been greater than for the men’s as well — but media coverage was lacking. According to a report published by accounting firm Deloitte in 2020, an analysis of 250,000 news articles found women’s tennis grand slam events received 41% less coverage than the men’s events.
• The number of people who participated in ESPN Women’s Tournament Challenge brackets this year doubled from the 2019 number, according to a spokesperson.
• ESPN Digital’s reach last year was up 4% year-over-year among women and girls — an ESPN spokesperson did not respond to a question asking what “reach” referred to by press time — and total unique visitors to the 2021 NCAA Women’s Tournament are up 43% compared to the 2019 tournament, across ESPN’s digital platforms.
• Bleacher Report’s audience is 30% female, according to House of Highlights gm Doug Bernstein.
• In Q1 2021, the team that drew the LA Times’ sports section’s largest audience was the UCLA women’s gymnastics team, according to sports editor Chris Stone. “They attract great attention, and it demands that we pay attention,” he said.

Despite the increasing popularity of women’s sports, a revenue disparity persists. Deloitte has said it expects TV rights and sponsorship revenue for women’s sports to hit over $1 billion globally at some point, but it has not put a timeline on that projection. In fact, the company declared in its report that women’s sports revenue in 2021 “will be well under a billion dollars — a fraction of the global value of all sports (men’s, women’s, and mixed), which in 2018 reached $481 billion, an increase of 45% over 2011.”

“The [audience] demand is there, and investment could be there if people are willing to believe that women can be profitable,” said Ari Chambers, who founded HighlightHER in 2019. Advertising dollars were historically being “funneled” into men’s sports, but not women’s, according to Larry Mann, evp of media and business development at sports marketing agency rEvolution. Women’s sports just wasn’t a priority for advertisers, he said. 

The attention being paid to the financial disparity is making women’s sports into more of a priority for advertisers. Brands are showing “more interest in women’s sports” beyond advertising around big events like the Olympics or the Women’s World Cup, Mindshare’s Wagner said. This shift, according to Wagner, comes from media coverage of the disparity between male and female sports, including the U.S. Women’s National Soccer team and their recent fight for equal pay, as well as a surge of sports media startups founded by female athletes with the goal of lifting up women’s sports. Wagner is currently working with more clients for potential media partnerships and deals in this space and expects to see this continue to grow, but she did not provide more details.

But ultimately what will pry advertisers’ pocketbooks all the way open to women’s sports is publishers continuing to prove a sizable audience for women’s sports exists.

Although B/R’s HighlightHER has been around since 2019, the publisher felt the need to wait until it received 100,000 followers before pitching it to advertisers, Bernstein said. The property’s Instagram account crossed that mark in January and surpassed 110,000 followers in March, up from 30,000 in March 2020, according to B/R data shared with Digiday. The publisher is now pitching HighlightHER’s content to advertisers for branded and sponsored opportunities on social and is looking for brands willing to commit to longer-term deals.

“Full platform for a full calendar year — not just dip in and out for Women’s History Month or a particular event,” Bernstein said. This comes after interest from inbound advertisers like Nike, which co-created with HighlightHER a video campaign for the 2021 NBA All-Star game that was posted on social and aired before the game on TNT on March 7. 

Publishers are also addressing the systemic issues that have contributed to the incongruities between men’s and women’s sports. Those span the scope of their coverage as well as the personnel behind their coverage.

A big difference in men’s and women’s sports is the “transactional nature of men’s sports,” according to Jena Janovy, senior deputy editor of Enterprise & espnW Features at ESPN Digital. The hype around the pre-draft, draft and trade of athletes “doesn’t exist at scale in women’s sports at the same pace and level.” The ESPN Digital team is working on growing its coverage of recruiting in women’s sports, so that female athletes are just as recognizable as men before they go professional. For example, the team has increased its daily coverage of women’s college basketball and soccer and its ranking of high school girls basketball players.

And sports publishers need to hire more women to help evolve sports coverage. Last year, the Los Angeles Times had 24 sports writers — just four of them were women. That has to change, Stone said. In February, Iliana Romero left the Orlando Sentinel, where she said she was the only Latina sports editor at a U.S. newspaper, to become deputy sports editor at the Los Angeles Times. She is the highest ranking female sports editor in the publication’s history, according to Stone.

Romero is “leading the vision for the LA Times’ future,” Stone said. The week of April 5, the Los Angeles Times launched a twice-weekly high school sports newsletter called Prep Rally. Stone says girl’s sports will be a central part of the newsletter. Sports editors, according to Romero, are still figuring out how to allocate resources to coverage of women’s sports, due to “a fight right now for subscriptions and page views.”

“Gender and diversity inclusion and varied backgrounds contribute to coverage,” Romero said. The lack of this within newsrooms “is a significant hurdle” to the issue of women’s sports coverage, she added. Romero is also board chair of the Association for Women in Sports Media, president of National Association of Hispanic Journalists’s Central Florida chapter and leader of its Sports Task Force.

“It’s not that people are not wanting to do it, but the system is not built to always make this possible… Ignoring this is such a huge risk for any entity,” she said. Spot coverage of women’s sports isn’t enough to draw a dedicated audience or advertiser investment, and a real effort needs to be made by publishers to put more resources into this topic, Romero said.

This year’s Tokyo Olympics might provide an opportunity for more media coverage of women’s sports, and bring a “heightened awareness” to successful female athletes, according to Wagner.  “My hope, and what I think we could see coming out of this year, is a more sustained interest and commitment” from advertisers supporting women’s sports coverage, Wagner said.

This demand for tech-based jobs is partly due to those roles’ ability to be performed remotely “without skipping a beat — or missing a line of code,” as LinkedIn noted. It’s not a surprise, considering data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which revealed an unemployment rate in February of just 2.4% for computer and math occupations. This, as the overall unemployment rate in the U.S., continues to decline from its historic highs in the thick of the pandemic.

The hot job market has also been a boon to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. The DE&I-focused recruitment platform WayUp, which has worked with companies like L’Oréal and Unilever to diversify their ranks, reported that its customer base grew 62% in 2020 versus the prior year. Last year, WayUp reached 6 million users, 71% of whom self-identify as underrepresented minorities, and hit record sales goals for two consecutive quarters, the company said.

Those seeking these jobs now have greater expectations for their bosses — and companies have responded in kind by instituting policies aimed at ensuring employees’ wellbeing. This intensified focus on people amid the pandemic has made the human resources director one of the most important roles in an organization, according to a future workforce report by Accenture. 

“Modern [chief human resources officers] recognize that trust is the new currency at work,” according to the researchers. “That’s because trust enables them to architect or help create a culture that supports workers, grows the business and helps the broader community. The current crisis will pass, and people will choose whom to work for and where to do business. Organizations that answer the call to take better care of their people will win in the market of the future.” 

Prior to the pandemic, Accenture reported, 35% of CEOs fully embraced the responsibility to support the holistic needs of their people; after the pandemic hit, that number rose to 50%.

Ad agencies are among the companies in serious acceleration mode and looking to hire.

Portland, Oregon-based CMD, whose clients include Microsoft and the live streaming platform Mixer and which employs around 100 people, is currently seeking to fill about a dozen positions, among them a senior digital strategist, SEO/SEM manager and writer in the tech sector.

President Darren Rankin said pushing through the pandemic had the agency evaluating how to best serve its clients and best use of employees — “getting the best people in the right places to bring our renewed momentum to life,” he said.

While traditionally his firm focused on hires in Portland and Seattle, where it also has an office, the pandemic and remote working arrangements changed its approach toward recruiting. “We’re finding a vast ocean of talent out there and are working to add a fun mix of positions, from up-and-coming, excited and energetic junior hires to seasoned, change-focused leaders,” he said. 

Cleveland-based integrated marketing agency Thunder Tech, which has worked with clients like the Pro Football Hall of Fame and National Food Group and employs about 50 people, is looking to fill about a dozen positions in its hometown and in the Chicago and Detroit areas, including a CMS developer, .NET application developer and account managers. It recently recruited a senior digital marketing director from a top 100 retailer, which the firm saw as a get for a shop its size.

President Jason Therrien said the agency is actively pursuing candidates from outside its Cleveland base, as it has embraced a remote working policy in the pandemic. “The labor market has gotten tighter, and strange, for those recruiting senior to executive-level talent in the mid-market space,” he said. “We are competing with enterprise-level organizations and reaching down into smaller businesses.” Remote working has created an opportunity to cast a wider net for highly qualified candidates, he said.

Meanwhile, the Columbia, Maryland-based software company SparkPost, which does business with companies like PayPal and Oracle and employs more than 200 people, is also in hiring mode, with dozens of open positions including software engineers and a sales director.

Like other companies, it is not limiting its search for employees to the cities where it does business. 

“Since we’re a strong supporter and provider of flexible work, candidates from across the country are invited to apply,” said chief commercial officer Hal Muchnick. “We don’t want to create a geographical fence around our ability to get great candidates.”

Now, the big platforms like Apple and Google as well as browsers like Firefox are all blocking or planning to block third-party cookies, the primary method that brands use to retarget customers. Those changes, coupled with cookie-curtailing legislation like Europe’s GDPR, mean third-party retargeting is about to get much more difficult.

That leaves brands that rely on retargeting in a bind. Without the traditional source of third-party data, brands will have to rely on alternatives like first-party data or data from retail partners. There’s also hope that Google’s alternatives to cookies will help pick up the slack, but there aren’t many details yet on how well those options will work. Right now, everyone is just trying to get their bearings, buyers told Digiday.

“Many brands are in the education phase, learning what it means to really build a privacy-first approach to marketing, and what is going to break when these new updates hit,” said Shelley Pinsonneault, vp of verified global technology at Publicis Media.

Brands can retarget using identifiers other than cookies, but doing so might require an upheaval to how that brand’s marketing apparatus is set up, said Carina Pologruto, chief information officer at Marketsmith.

“Retargeting is alive and well, but must now be driven from [a] different technology,” Pologruto said. “Rather than using a cookie, retargeting will require either a unique ID or device ID mapping in order to serve up the retargeted ad. Brands should evaluate their current retargeting efforts — are you using a DSP that provides device-level retargeting of an identity graph? If so, you should be in good shape. If not, it may be time to look at your retargeting mix between display and social.”

Google has announced it won’t build any alternative identifiers or build user-level profiles within its system. Instead, it has hyped a technology called Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC, which will place users of certain habits into “cohorts” that brands can target instead of individual users. Google claims FLoC gets brands 95% of the return on investment as retargeting through cookies, it hasn’t revealed how it got that number and some brands are skeptical.

Aaron Luo, founder and CEO of luxury bag brand Caraa, said he isn’t overly concerned about the difference between cookies and FLoC because he’s pivoted his brand to focus on first-party data collection. Since the pandemic began, Caraa has collected hundreds of new email addresses by refocusing the marketing team’s priorities. The trade-off of first-party data — that it’s harder to come by and is not as scalable — is worth it for the higher quality both Luo and buyers said.

“Marketers will have less scale [with first-party data], but much more impact,” said Shane McAndrew, chief data strategy officer, U.S., at Mindshare. “We gain more than we lose. First- party data is permissioned, of an incredibly high fidelity as it’s straight from the consumer, and therefore much more impactful in measuring business drivers and impact than third party data.”

There’s also data from partners. In the wake of third-party cookies waning, retailers like Target and Walmart have pitched themselves as data providers to brands, as well as places to sell products. A Target pitch deck from last year highlighted the data Target collects on customers and pitched access to its media platform Roundel as a selling point for data-hungry brands. 

(This also has the added benefit for retailers of luring back brands who have switched to a direct-to-consumer model in the last few years.)

“We expect to see brands start testing into tactics like commerce via retail media networks, variations of contextual, and buying against identity-based solutions, both ID and cohort-based solutions,” said Pinsonneault. “You may also see brands leaning in heavily to this concept of second-party data marketplaces in hopes of being able to access and join more high-value data with their own first-party data.”

Finally, some brands like Caraa are simply counting on the fact that some alternative to the third-party cookie will present itself. 

“I can’t speak for their strategy, but Google’s revenue comes from advertising and they wouldn’t remove this option if they didn’t have an alternative lined up,” Luo said.