Month: April 2021

Masks, camera, action

Following last spring’s physical production hiatus, film and TV projects have largely returned to shooting in studio and on location. The productions themselves may not fully resemble pre-COVID sets — with cast and crew members in masks and keeping their distance — but the finished projects should bear little semblance with the Zoom-shot shows that sprung up in the early days of the pandemic.

“Most of our clients don’t want the production to feel like, when you watch it five years from now, that that was made during the pandemic,” said Eric Tomosunas, CEO of Swirl Films, which has produced shows and movies for TV networks and streaming services including BET and Netflix.

The key hits:

• TV and film producers have had to adapt to protect cast and crew members without compromising what ends up on screen.
• They have scheduled the timing of productions to lower their risks and the pandemic’s impact.
• They have also relocated shoots to places like South Korea that have better managed the pandemic.
• Some projects, like those involving large, in-person audiences, have been slower to return.
• Despite the resumption of production and availability of vaccines, COVID remains a concern.

Managing the pandemic’s continued impact on physical production is no easy feat, however. TV and film producers are having to strike a balance between protecting people’s health and safety and not compromising the quality of their projects. For example, to shoot scenes with a large number of people in the background — which are standard in many scripted shows and movies — Swirl Films has been framing shots in ways to make it seem like more people are in a scene than were actually on set as well as using technology to insert crowds during the editing process, Tomosunas said.

TV and film producers have had to consider not only what types of projects can be pulled off without the pandemic’s impact creeping into the frame but also where those projects can be shot with minimal risk of interruption. 

On March 1, AGBO — which produces movies and TV shows for the likes of Apple, Amazon and Netflix — started shooting a series called “Citadel” for Amazon, starring Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Richard Madden. So far the U.K.-based production has gone off without a hitch. “It’s running like a functioning, typical, high-production-value TV show,” said Mike Larocca, co-founder and vice chairman of AGBO. 

However, the shoot’s stable start was not simply a matter of luck. Its production “would have gone considerably sooner were it not for COVID. But we were just waiting for an opportunity to feel like the protocols were manageable, that the risk of repeated shutdowns were tolerable or lower than it was at the height of things,” Larocca said.

The “height of things” in some places has been much lower than others. South Korea, for example, was quick to manage the coronavirus crisis, and as a result, physical production has rebounded more quickly in that country. “Unlike the U.S. or even Europe where everything was put to a halt, there were still productions going on in Korea,” said Samuel Ha, founder and CEO of Bound Entertainment, which is currently producing a series called “Dr. Brain” for Apple TV+ in South Korea. 

Not only were locations like restaurants open to TV and film shoots in South Korea, but the lower restrictions —including not being required to have COVID-specific insurance policies — made it easier to receive financing for productions and offset COVID-related costs, such as testing. That has led some projects that had been slated to be set and shot elsewhere to be moved to South Korea. “We sort of shifted the strategy of developing material and even changing the story to be shot in Korea,” Ha said.

Some types of production, however, have been particularly difficult to pull off at a time when many people have yet to receive vaccines and everyone is still being asked to wear masks and socially distance themselves. 

Since last spring, RadicalMedia, which has made films and series for Netflix, Hulu and A&E Networks, has been able to resume its full scope of projects, from a large-scale production that involved more than 100 people to more pandemic-friendly projects like documentaries that are more easily produced remotely. But the company behind the filmed version of “Hamilton” that premiered on Disney+ last July is only now beginning to gear up for filming Broadway productions. 

“We have one beginning in less than a month, in which we’re employing somewhat the equivalent of an NBA bubble for the talent on stage as well as the entire crew and anyone working on the project to be effectively quarantined for a period of time,” said Jon Kamen, chairman and CEO of RadicalMedia.

Or take a show such as “American Idol,” which pre-pandemic had been shot on stage before an in-person audience of hundreds of people. “Even with COVID protocols, those programs are incredibly challenging to produce,” said Aaron Saidman, president of Industrial Media, which co-produces the singing competition series. Industrial Media and its production partner Fremantle have been able to adapt to produce a season of “American Idol” during the pandemic, but it had to be shot sans a studio audience. As COVID restrictions have lifted, the show has begun to open up its studio, albeit to a smaller in-person audience of roughly 50 people who are wearing masks, being tested and asked to sit apart from people outside their households. 

However, while TV and film productions are returning to form, producers recognize they are not yet out of the woods. Vaccinations may be becoming more widely available, but the executives interviewed for this article largely expect to continue to adhere to the health and safety guidelines they have adopted through at least the summer. “In the short and mid-term range, I still think we’re going to need and should have a robust set of safety protocols, irrespective of vaccine availability and actual vaccinations,” said Saidman.

Stephen David knows firsthand that the coronavirus remains a concern. Last fall his company Stephen David Entertainment, which has produced shows for AMC Networks, History and Netflix, produced a show called “The Titans That Built America” in Ireland that had 150 people on set. The production followed all proper precautions, such as requiring everyone to wear masks, wrapped without a single person contracting COVID and will premiere on History on May 31. But six months after that show completed production, David found out on April 5 that one of his company’s editors — a person who has been working remotely in post-production — had tested positive for coronavirus. 

“We film and everyone wears masks and takes all the precautions, and you get the feeling like everything is fine. To have something like this happen in post — which is actually being done remotely — you realize it’s still here,” David said.

Confessional

“It’s a constant challenge to stay on top of the networks to get the [make-good inventory for missed viewership guarantees] we need and not three months after the fact but in as real-time as possible. It’s been a constant issue.”

— Agency executive

Stay tuned: Pay-TV providers ease up on streaming restrictions

If the flood of TV network owners standing up standalone streaming properties weren’t indication already, pay-TV providers are loosening their grips over TV networks’ distribution footprints.

Historically, pay-TV providers put restrictions on TV networks’ ability to make the programming they premiered on their linear networks available to people who didn’t pay for TV. The providers pay the networks to carry their channels, so they understandably wanted to make sure people were incentivized to pay the providers to access that programming. But with the pay-TV subscriber base continuing to shrink, the pay-TV providers have wizened up and are permitting TV network owners to open up their shows to streaming-only audiences.

“They can’t justifiably restrict us today from getting into this business because it is part of the business now,” said one TV network executive.

Of course, there’s a catch. A couple in fact. For starters, the pay-TV providers are not easing up out of the graciousness of their hearts. As much as they accept that streaming is part of the TV business today, the providers are also angling for the shift to benefit them financially. For example, a pay-TV provider may demand a network make its subscription-based streamer available to the provider’s subscribers at no additional cost or call for the network to redistribute a portion of the affiliate revenue received from the provider by committing to spend that money on promotion via the provider’s internal marketing agency.

“There’s an acknowledgement that there’s been a sea change in the industry,” the TV network executive said.

Numbers don’t lie

3.4%: Percentage increase in national TV ad sales forecast for 2021 compared to 2020.

$786.7 million: How much U.S. ad revenue ViacomCBS’s Pluto TV is estimated to rake in this year.

35%: Share of 35 TV network owners’ ad impressions in on-demand videos that Google’s ad tech served on connected TV devices in the fourth quarter, compared to 40%-plus for mobile devices.

140%: Percentage increase in the number of complaints filed with the FCC between November 2020 and February 2021 over overly loud TV commercials.

Trend watch: The resurgence of brand-produced programming

Brand-sponsored programming has been a part of the TV business since its inception, but it seems to be on the verge of becoming a bigger aspect of the streaming industry.

Marketers including Shopify and Nike are pushing into paying for their own shows to run on services like Disney+ and HBO Max. The dominant ad-supported streamer, Hulu, has even started to build a business around brand-produced programming, with a reality competition debuting on April 26 that was created by Samsung.

Marketers’ reason for producing their own shows to sell to streamers is pretty clear. Not as many people are watching ad-supported programming, as people turn away from traditional TV and tune into ad-free streaming services like Netflix and Disney+. In January, ad-supported programming only represented 34% of the time people spent watching TV and streaming, according to Nielsen.

However, for as much sense as it may make for a marketer to give people something they actually want to watch rather than interrupting them, brand-produced programming still has to prove it makes cents. These companies are spending thousands and millions of dollars on shows that are effectively offshoots of their marketing campaigns, so they need to show these shows are delivering are return on that investment. Considering how close to the vest Netflix has kept its viewership figures, the types of information that marketers are accustomed to using to evaluate their campaigns have been hard, if not impossible, to come by in streaming. “That’s the big rut and probably why the industry hasn’t grown,” said one agency executive.

For brand-produced programming to become a central part of the streaming business, marketers will either have to surrender their KPIs and accept their checks like every other producer, or the streaming industry will have to come up with a way to measure these shows, that are emphatically billed as not being ads, as if they were ads — with all the metrics like brand consideration lifts, view-through rates and conversion measurements that entails.

What we’ve covered

Roku plans to debut Roku Recommends:

• Roku will have a host highlight shows and movies available from streaming services across its connected TV platform.
• The company has been pitching advertisers on sponsoring the videos.

Read more about Roku here.

TikTok’s Karton Weiss wants brands to stop overthinking:

• In the latest Digiday Podcast episode, the TikTok executive discussed its recent agency holding company deals.
• Weiss also fielded questions about how TikTok’s ad platform is developing.

Listen to the interview with Weiss here.

Electronic Arts produces shows to expand reach:

• The video game developer concluded a two-part series on YouTube in March.
• Electronic Arts is using shows to bridge the gap between gaming and mainstream culture.

Read more about Electronic Arts here.

What we’re reading

Facebook shortchanged creators:
Facebook failed to pay some creators the full amounts owed to them for ads the platform sold against their videos, according to The Verge. The episode marks yet another example of creators finding fault with Facebook’s creator tools and a lack of support from the platform. The Verge spoke with creators who said they had contacted Facebook about the issue but were not given any feedback.

AMC Networks isn’t Netflix:
Rather than roll out an omnibus streaming service to rival Netflix, AMC Networks has opted to put together a portfolio of specialty streamers, according to The Hollywood Reporter. It’s a smart strategy considering how the saturation of major subscription-based streamers and free, ad-supported streaming TV platforms seems to leave little room for a middle class of streaming outlets. But while AMC Networks operates specialty streamers like Acorn TV and Shudder, its seemingly flagship AMC+ seems like it risks becoming stuck in that middling middle ground.

Disney pushes for streaming audience diversity:
Disney has set specific goals to ensure it attracts Black subscribers to its streaming services, according to IGN. The company has already been achieved parity when it comes to retaining Black and white subscribers for Hulu, and it is looking to ensure Disney+’s and ESPN+’s Black subscriber bases grow at a pace that mirrors streaming and TV viewership.

Put together, companies are coming for people’s most intimate form of communication, amidst a slew of digital marketing changes. Because people still use it to primarily communicate with friends and family, text messaging is one of the last methods of digital communication that hasn’t been completely overrun by brands. But since it’s still not primarily used as a marketing channel, marketers are still trying to figure out just how many texts from a brand customers will tolerate. Bombard customers with too many text messages, and companies risk alienating with them altogether.

“In many ways, I think SMS is the final frontier of marketing and brand communications,” said Kinfield CEO Nichole Powell, whose startup sells skincare essentials for the outdoors like bug repellent and moisturizer. “As a consumer, I can see why — I gave up on my personal inbox years ago, and now even social media oftentimes feels quite saturated. There are brands that I’ve followed on Instagram for years, but I couldn’t tell you the last time I saw one of their posts.”

Investor and marketing strategist Nik Sharma said that part of what is fueling the SMS boom is brands in search of more ways to “somehow keep [customers] engaged and get them on the path to purchasing something.” According to marketing platform Omnisend, the number of SMS messages sent by the more than 50,000 companies that use Omnisend’s software increased by 378% between 2019 and 2020, while email campaigns were up 108%.

The new SMS playbook

In speaking with marketers at e-commerce startups, they say they try to only text customers sparingly — often only a couple times a month. But they’re still trying to figure out what kind of texts — and how many of them — someone will tolerate from a brand. In one of the most criticized brand texts from last year, Fashion Nova, sent SMS messages to customers encouraging them to spend their stimulus checks on Fashion Nova products.

One of the most common ways that marketers are using the channel is texting customers alerting them to sales, as they’re betting that people won’t mind getting a text from a brand if it’s alerting them to a good deal. Brendan Hastings, director of engineering at DTC underwear brand Thinx, previously told Modern Retail that the company used SMS to promote its August sale. He said that Thinx has found that SMS messages receive open rates close to 100%, where email open rates are 15-30%.

Powell said Kinfield hasn’t yet used SMS to promote any sales — her company has primarily used it to poll customers about what type of packaging they’d like to see for future products — but hasn’t ruled it out in the future. “We’d prefer to take the time to get to know our audience and see firsthand what kind of things they like to use SMS [for],” she said.

Eli Weiss, director of CX and Retention at direct-to-consumer brand Olipop, said that his company has found success with using text messages to alert customers to new flavors. On Instagram, Olipop will encourage customers to sign up for its SMS list in order to get first dibs when the new flavor drops.

In December, when Olipop released a limited-time blackberry vanilla flavor, the company received $15,000 worth of sales in 15 minutes from people on its SMS list. Olipop’s email list still drove slightly more sales — but the company has ten times more email subscribers than it does SMS subscribers.

Weiss said that he doesn’t see SMS entirely replacing email — that rather, Olipop will only use it to “communicate with our most engaged group of people.” Weiss said that he plans to stick to sending Olipop customers one or two texts a month.  Going forward, Olipop is considering using SMS to sell company merchandise, or to send customers more personalized messages from different members of Olipop’s customer service team.

“SMS is like any fun new marketing thing where right away it can kind of get abused…some brands are now sending three messages a week,” Weiss said. “I think the future is exclusivity and intentionality.”

“There’s a lot of [data] providers that we have spoken to that haven’t made the shift yet,” said Harris. “They don’t have answers to our questions when we ask if they’re enabling opt-outs or elimination of data from third-party cookies.” The result is simple, said Harris: “If they don’t have that [opt-out] ability, they won’t become a long-term partner for us,” he said.

When asked which types of data providers are at-risk, agency execs interviewed for this story were reluctant to name names. However, they suggest third-party data providers, or those concocting products from so-called data exhaust — that is the firms without direct connections to the point at which data is gathered — are skating on thin ice. That includes location-data aggregators, credit card transaction data providers and firms that build audience profiles based on third-party cookie data swirling around programmatic ad exchanges.

“If you are two to three layers away from actual ingestion of that data, the actual consent of that data, you’re going to have challenges,” said Nii Ahene, chief strategy officer at Tinuiti, which primarily handles ad buys on platforms including Google, Facebook and Amazon.

Not passing security check-points

Agencies including Goodway Group and Rapp are subjecting data providers to tougher data privacy and security inspections. Goodway already has given some suppliers the boot, said Amanda Martin, vp of enterprise partnerships. “We’re taking a far more granular look at where we’re spending and how we’re spending [on data],” she said. Already in 2021 and going forward, the agency is limiting or ending relationships with “third-party data providers that we just feel don’t meet the consent requirements or outsource so much of their data.”

Goodway is working this year to set more formal standards pertaining to data providers that entail evaluating their methodologies, determining how their data is sourced, inspecting how they garner consent from people for data use and conducting performance reviews. The agency also aims to grade data providers based on their approach to navigating the deprecation of third-party cookies and device IDs, said Martin.

Some smaller or medium-sized data brokers are not passing muster when it comes to security evaluations, said Laura Aldridge, vp and data privacy officer at Rapp. “We’re seeing it more in the data broker area where they’re just not up to scratch at all in terms of how they’re handling data,” she said, noting that two in ten data brokers the agency inspected this quarter did not meet security criteria. In general, she said these data firms are falling short when they don’t have the proper data processing security certifications in place required by the agency.

For instance, because responsibility for data use under GDPR and CCPA falls on the agency’s advertiser clients, they must ensure that the companies processing personal data on their behalf operate according to the appropriate protocols, such as by getting consent for collection and use of email addresses. “Sometimes you’ll hear data brokers say, ‘But it’s just an email address,’ but it’s [personally-identifiable information],” said Aldridge.

Shedding light on a black box

Companies supplying data for advertising, media and marketing purposes have always been reluctant to reveal details of where they get their information. And as more and more advertisers look under the hood, that opacity stubbornly remains, despite regulatory pressures, said Tyler Pietz, evp of global data at data-centric agency MightyHive. He said some clients are concerned about the business-related or legal ramifications of sourcing data from third-party providers; however, they typically do not get details about how data is sourced or how providers garner and manage consent for that data use. “Most of these providers won’t expose [that information],” he said. “They consider it to be proprietary.”

Martin backed up his assessment, noting, “Previously data providers comfortably operated in a black box when it came to methodology and sourcing.” She suggested that the Interactive Advertising Bureau Tech Lab’s self-reported data labels and data quality evaluations from independent firms such as Neutronian are helping data buyers require more rigorous standards. 

Sometimes agencies and brands don’t have direct data licensing agreements with providers. Instead, they buy data to enhance ad targeting capabilities when managing ad campaigns through demand-side platforms, by choosing from a menu of providers inside the DSP environment. And, in some cases in the past, agencies like Goodway may have looked to brand clients to determine which data suppliers they want to work with, Martin said.

The GDPR effect

Europe’s GDPR already had some agencies re-evaluating partnerships with data suppliers, said James Coulson, strategy director at London-based media agency Infectious Media. “In Europe, our relationship changed with data providers with the implementation of GDPR, so we’re a bit ahead of the curve in these matters,” he said.

Agencies, of course, build their brands on being ahead of the curve. Others interviewed for this story suggested that third-party providers have been data non grata for some time. MightyHive has advised clients for the past few years to “prepare for a world in which third-party data starts to basically go away entirely,” said Pietz.

State privacy laws in the U.S., particularly in California, have only heightened concerns around using data that is not closely attached to a direct relationship with people it’s gathered from or collected in conjunction with some form of notice or opt-out capability.

A reckoning for location and credit card data suppliers

That move away from third-party data has put mobile location data providers in the crosshairs, many of which assemble location-data based products from the data they siphon off the bid stream in programmatic ad exchanges. When people give app publishers permission to collect their location information, publishers sometimes include that information when they auction off ad impressions in programmatic ad marketplaces, enabling other firms participating in those marketplaces to collect that location data. “Usually you’re getting a [latitude-longitude] off of the bidstream,” said Pietz. As Apple has limited location permissions by default, he added, “That in general has definitely started to have an impact on the scale or the veracity of the location data,” he added.

That lack of direct consent from people when location data is gathered has led agencies like Rapp to “steer away” from location data providers, said Aldridge. Data products built from credit card data also have a limited shelf life as a result of the California Consumer Privacy Act, said an agency exec who asked not to be named. “We’re seeing those partnerships [with credit card data providers] be fallouts of CCPA,” said the exec.

Now that Apple’s Safari, Mozilla’s Firefox and, by next year, Google’s Chrome browsers have restricted third-party cookies, they are reinforcing what regulators are signaling to advertisers about third-party data, agency execs said. The browser decisions have “pulled sharply into focus the need to speed up the conversations with the data providers about what their solutions are in this space, as well as talking to clients about the need to invest in their first-party data infrastructure and start using it more,” Coulson said.

Where there’s an audience, there’s an opportunity for brands to get their product in front of consumers. Brands like CarParts.com and Restaurant Brands International (holding company for Burger King, Popeyes and Tim Hortons) have hosted investor calls on the app. Meanwhile, dog food brand Pedigree recently hosted a Clubhouse room, with the help of creative agency BBDO NY, geared toward pet adoption.

“There’s been some novel use cases where brand mascots appear in discussions and some experimentation with sponsored chats,” said Nathan Young, head of strategy at Deloitte Digital’s Chicago studio, “but we have not yet seen brands make any major plays.”

Last month, dog food brand Pedigree partnered with three Clubhouse moderators for a conversation on the benefits of pet ownership as it relates to mental and physical health. Listeners could click on the dogs’ profile image to learn more and potentially adopt. The campaign landed four dogs a permanent home, per Craig Neely, vice president of marketing at Pedigree parent company, Mars Petcare.

However, the brand doesn’t currently have plans to do it again.

“We look forward to seeing how Clubhouse grows and will continue to look for new opportunities and platforms where we can further our mission of ending pet homelessness,” Neely said. 

Set Active, an activewear brand, also used Clubhouse earlier this year, to host rooms to offer consumers an inside look at the brand. Topics ranged from the inside scoop on influencer marketing to the creative process of developing a new line.

Clubhouse was another way to connect with the Set Active community where consumers could ask questions and Set Active could be “super raw and honest,” according to founder Lindsey Carter. The brand hosted five or six rooms that they considered successful before community feedback caused the team to pull back efforts.

“We’re moving away from it because it’s not something that is super conducive for people who can’t align it with their schedules,” Carter said, noting Clubhouse’s real-time audio feature and inability to save conversations.

Instead, the brand is pivoting to build out its brand podcast and researching a new Instagram feature that allows up to three people to go live at once with Instagram Live Rooms. 

“The infrastructure is there with these big applications that are out there like Twitter and Instagram,” she said. “They’re always going to have the ability to pivot based off of what the trend is because the infrastructure is there.”

Clubhouse is still in its early days with no clear monetization strategy or way to buy ad space. When Young talks to clients about new social platforms, he typically advises clients to take a wait-and-see approach. His advice for Clubhouse is no different. 

“I’m much more bullish on platforms that are multi-device and have a wide base to build on,” Young said, noting that Twitter Spaces supports Android and iOS users and will be available to all 192 million of its active users once it’s out of beta.

Data and ethics remain a brand’s responsibility when experimenting with new platforms. Transparency regarding data collection and any sponsored content is key, said Tiffany Johnson, director of data analytics and technology at Wunderman Thompson. Her advice to marketers is similar to Young’s.

“Listen first, get a feel for how the app is working,” she said. “It is well thought out. However, there are definitely gaps that need to be fixed.”

Live audio chat platforms boomed in the pandemic as consumers were looking for human connection, per Young. And post-pandemic, there may still be a space for them.

“In a world of screen fatigue, live audio has even more relevance,” Young said. “There’s an audience for this content for sure. The question is ‘how can brands effectively engage?’”

In this video interview, Tom Logan, co-founder and CEO at Cohley, speaks with Peacock Alley’s director of e-commerce about the evolving role of UGC in their marketing.