Month: April 2021

“2021 has been like a rocketship,” said David Kohl, TrustX’s CEO. TrustX is projecting revenues to grow 60-70% this year, after finishing 2020 slightly up from 2019. 

In theory, advertiser alliances confer lots of advantages to members, particularly on the verge of a massive change to the digital ad market. An alliance’s combined scale makes it more attractive to advertisers, which makes their technology, whether it’s a wrapper or a single sign-on, more worthwhile to use. From the buy-side, the alliance offers something close to one-stop shopping, an attractive prospect in an era where third-party targeting will no longer be possible. 

In practice, alliances still have challenges though. They still have to get advertisers to compare the performance of cookie-based segments to segments built using disparate publishers’ data. They also have to convince buyers that second-party data partnerships are worth the time and effort. And while a publisher consortium might be able to accumulate more authenticated users than an individual publisher, there are still problems of scale; most publishers have only managed to get small percentages of their readers to give up their email addresses.

They also have to ensure they are delivering value more than confusion. 

“The tech’s made it easier to activate [as part of an alliance],” said Scott Bender, partner and head of publisher partnerships for Prohaska Consulting. “But it’s never been the tech that’s been the challenge. It’s been the business rules, the rules of engagement … the biggest thing is, ‘How do we not bump into each other?’” 

Advertising alliances have piqued publisher interest before, notably when programmatic advertising began to take off about a decade ago. But they have a spotty track record of success. quadrantONE, which news publishers including Gannett and The New York Times built to pool their programmatic inventory, shut down in 2013 amid participant in-fighting; Symmachia, a U.K.-focused effort from the Association of Online Publishers, couldn’t even manage to launch before the trade group sold it off in 2015; in Portugal, an alliance called Project Nonio featuring the country’s largest media companies was still having trouble getting substantial numbers of readers to sign in two years after its announcement. 

“[These alliances] required a lot of time and effort from each publisher to participate,” said Fran Wills, the CEO of the Local Media Consortium. 

Worse than that: A lot of them left publishers feeling like they were leaving money on the table. “[Participants] had to reserve inventory and some of that inventory didn’t end up getting filled,” Wills added. 

But with the old ways of doing business being turned upside down, many ad buyers are looking at alliances with fresh eyes. 

“This inflection point we have right now in the ecosystem is causing everybody, advertisers and publishers alike, to reevaluate the way that it works for them,” Wills said. 

This Chrome-induced momentum did not start building right away. Even though Google announced its cookie changes at the beginning of 2020, many publishers had bigger fish to fry for most of last year. The Pangaea Alliance, a five year old advertising alliance that most recently included CNN, Reuters, Dennis Publishing and Mansueto Ventures, formally unwound in 2020, citing its members’ challenges with COVID-19. 

But with less than nine months to go, advertiser experimentation has begun to pick up. 

“A lot of it is pent-up demand that wasn’t able to do the kinds of experiments and the kinds of trying new things you do in a healthier economy,” Kohl said.

Moving upstream

Historically, these alliances focused on mostly being able to act like ad networks. But with several technical changes looming, some have leaned more into the opportunity to act like technology providers, doing things like designing sign-on solutions. 

“We do a lot more operational support and R&D on behalf of our members,” said The Ozone Project’s Reeve. “We have ten publishers in our main products, but there’s another five or six that are not visible that we provide data or technology to.”

It is still too early to tell which direction the digital ad ecosystem will move in, but Reeve said it’s possible the Ozone Project could wind up offering its data and tools to bigger swaths of the ecosystem. 

Let the right ones in

Reeve may be open to that possibility partly because it spares him and members the challenge of turning potential alliance members away because they’re not premium enough. Historically, many of these alliances have used the high quality of their members as a selling point. 

“We’ve been super cautious, to retain that super-premium branding, Kohl said. 

But as interest has picked up, particularly in the past few months, TrustX has begun weighing applications from non-DCN publications. 

Balancing Act

While the coming changes to the programmatic ecosystem have put alliances in an advantageous position again, they will have to make sure they balance the possible with the pragmatic. “I see the single sign-on collaborations as possibly not as long-term effective as something that’s based on a more collaborative approach in business objectives,” said Charles Ping, managing director of EMEA for Winterberry Group, which has been analyzing how the coming cookie changes may affect the digital identity ecosystem. 

“If you’re sharing inventory, you’re sharing objectives toward a common goal. I’m not sure that trying to create scale when, in the consumers’ eyes there’s no shared end goal, [makes as much sense].”

“I wanted to become an entrepreneur and build something like they built,” said Fantle, adding working from home amid the pandemic made her reevaluate her goals. “No matter when you start a business, there’s a type of risk associated with it. In my case, it was during a pandemic … people thought I was crazy.” 

Maes Face now has four employees and sells four colorful vegan face masks; Fantle is intentionally starting small with one type of product, but hopes to grow into a larger wellness beauty brand in the coming years and aims to produce a new product within the next six months.

Fantle is one of a number of agency execs looking to go from working with brands to become a brand founder. Former DTC creative shop Gin Lane famously pivoted to become Pattern, a DTC brand holding company. As previously reported by Digiday, former Huge CEO Aaron Shapiro is using his agency chops to bolster a DTC life insurance start-up, Dayforward. And performance marketing shops have also been wading into the DTC space, building their own brands while continuing to work with them. 

“We have all learned how precious and short our lives can be and that’s part of why I believe there is going to be a talent drain this summer and into fall,” said Christie Cordes, a talent recruiter for ad agencies, of the impact of the pandemic and why agency talent may be eyeing creating their own brands. “The agencies who drive mass content work and productivity based on lowest price are fighting their way in a race to the bottom.”  

The pivot from DTC agency to DTC founder may also be due to agency employees’ close ties with those brands. “I’ve observed that DTC brands have a more intimate relationship dynamic with their agencies than, say, Fortune 500 brands have with their AORs,” said Michael Miraflor,  independent consultant at Third City Advisory. “There’s more of an understanding of the business model, the levers to pull from a performance media perspective, and how it all works together with brand building.” 

Miraflor continued: “Also it’s known that some DTC agencies have retainer/ equity relationships with the brands they help launch and grow, so there’s more of an entrepreneurial bent in general that I think gives DTC [agency] executives a base of knowledge and confidence to launch their own brands.” 

While Fantle had a passion for skin care — her college roommates made fun of her use of avocado and manuka honey on her face — she took a data-driven approach to brand creation. “The truth is I thought of the consumer first, and then I compared it with things I do like,” said Fantle, adding that the popularity of self-care and selfies with Gen-Z and millennials led her to create Maes Face. “You can have interests, but that doesn’t always translate to a business.” 

As for marketing, Fantle spent the first month building up an audience for the brand on Facebook and Instagram organically. Since then, the brand has started to use paid advertising — Fantle declined to share marketing budget figures — primarily on Facebook and Instagram. However, with the privacy changes and iOS 14 update looming, Fantle plans to diversify that spending to other channels like TikTok shortly. 

“We’re still in our learning period,” said Fantle, adding that the brand is only in month three of existence.

As the origin trial gets underway, data ethics researchers, privacy advocates and even some in ad tech themselves fear that FLoC data could be combined with personally identifiable information to expose information about people’s webpage visits and interests to nefarious actors, (and yes, advertisers). And they worry cohort-based targeting could be used to deliberately harm or discriminate against particular groups of people and that FLoC will only exacerbate problems inherent in algorithmic categorizations of people, rather than achieving the ethically-sound mission the method is intended to.

It’s worth noting ad tech firms and others in the digital ad industry that have fought Google’s dominance for years have an incentive to sabotage its efforts in devising replacements for tracking and targeting once enabled through the very third-party cookies Google plans to render obsolete.

When Digiday asked Google about its internal efforts to assess the potentially harmful impacts of FLoC algorithms, the company said it has worked on the issue for the past several months. To ensure that sensitive categories are blocked, the company said it has been extensively testing cohort algorithms, reconfiguring them to remove correlations with sensitive issues. Multiple teams inside Google are involved including Google research and machine learning modeling teams.

Scrutiny from academics and government

U.S. Rep. Yvette Clarke asked Google CEO Sundar Pichai specifically about FLoC and how the company has addressed potential bias and disparate impact of its machine learning algorithms during a joint House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on disinformation held in late March. “The longer we delay in this, the more these systems that you’ve created bake discrimination into these algorithms,” said the Democrat from New York. When questioned by Rep. Clarke, Pichai said Google will apply its artificial intelligence principles, which prohibit categorization based on sensitive categories, in developing FLoC.

The FLoC method is one of many ad targeting and measurement approaches Google has pushed through its Privacy Sandbox initiative. It relies on an algorithmic process inside the browser to generate cohorts composed of thousands of people based on the sites they have visited in recent days, the content of pages they viewed and other factors. In an effort to preserve privacy, Chrome assigns FLoC IDs to a cohort, or group of people, without including any individual-level data.  For example, if there is a FLoC for people interested in home design, then everyone in that cohort would be given the same FLoC ID, and those people can also be given IDs for other cohorts into which they have been grouped.

Because FLoC IDs will be assigned to reflect people’s interests based on web pages they have visited during a period of a few days, the IDs will change regularly. Google will allow advertisers to use their own data, machine learning models or predictive analytics to evaluate what cohorts of people they are interested in based on what FLoC IDs imply; however, it is not clear how advertisers will be able to access IDs.

Academic researchers at universities including Princeton University and University of Southern California have begun digging into FLoC to understand how the system works and its potential for discrimination and unintended privacy breaches. Privacy advocates have also criticized FLoC.

“What Google gets to say now is we do not have any individual data, but it’s an ephemera,” said Pam Dixon, executive director of nonprofit research group World Privacy Forum. One of the concerns is that it is not clear how people will be able to opt out from FLoC targeting – unless they simply do not use the Chrome browser. “We can’t un-FLoC ourselves from those categories,” said Dixon, who suggested the method is in some ways more “unfair” than the third-party cookie-based targeting it’s intended to replace because, as others also warn, it could be employed to categorize and target people in discriminatory ways.

The nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation has been particularly vocal in its criticism of FLoC, arguing that cohort-based categorization makes existing tracking methods more powerful. “A FLoC identifier is just going to be a new chunk of information that can be appended to what [advertisers] already have,” Bennett Cyphers, a staff technologist at EFF, told Digiday.

Ad tech firms or other entities employing fingerprinting techniques, which Google Chrome itself prohibits, could actually benefit from FLoC IDs, according to Cyphers. Put simply, fingerprinting uses a variety of individual pieces of data about someone’s device to decipher their identity. “The FLoC ID just becomes another data point in their profile and a very powerful one,” he said. In a March EFF post, Cyphers wrote, “If a tracker starts with your FLoC cohort, it only has to distinguish your browser from a few thousand others (rather than a few hundred million).”

Under consideration at the W3C

As Google’s origin trials give researchers more insight into how FLoCs work, their findings will be taken into consideration if the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) moves in the direction of creating standards for FLoC, Wendy Seltzer, strategy lead and counsel at the W3C told Digiday. “I think that’s important research, and I would like it to help inform the W3C considerations and questions as work moves to standards work, because we are concerned with the social impact of our technologies,” she said. Seltzer declined to provide further detail, in part because the Privacy Sandbox process hosted by the W3C remains in the early stages.

Not only are researchers concerned that FLoC will supercharge existing identifiable profiles on people, some worry people with malicious intent could use FLoC targeting to attack vulnerable groups.

Basile Leparmentier, a senior machine learning engineer at ad tech firm Criteo referenced an extreme scenario in which LGBTQ youth in Ireland were assaulted by people posing as LGBTQ in dating apps in a January W3C post about FLoC. “The attacker can easily emulate the internet browsing history of a member of the group he is willing to harm and see the FLoC he/she has been added to,” he wrote, noting that bad actors could combine personally-identifiable information about someone who has the same FLoC ID. “The ‘attacker’ can then target this FLoC ID in any specific way they wish, even though they don’t have access to any specific user.”

Google details approach to blocking sensitive categories

The week of March 28, Google submitted a paper to the W3C group focused on development and testing of its Privacy Sandbox ad technologies detailing the company’s approach to ensuring that cohorts produced by FLoC cannot be correlated with any sensitive attribute. For example, the paper explained how it plans to use a sensitivity threshold to block the smallest number of sensitive cohorts while providing strong privacy protections.

Google’s definition of what web pages are too sensitive to be used to create cohorts is based on the company’s existing ad policies, which prohibit ad targeting related to race or ethnicity, religious belief, political affiliation, sexual interest, or to categories reflecting personal hardship such as health or medical issues or criminal record.

Google’s own approaches to AI ethics have been fraught with controversy over the years. Following outcries over certain people it chose to sit on its artificial intelligence ethics board in 2019, Google shut it down. More recently, Google sparked a backlash when the company fired AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru after demanding she withdraw a research paper critical of Google’s AI technologies.

Google’s paper describing its approach to sensitive categories “sidesteps the most pressing issues,” Cyphers wrote in a March 30 post on the EFF site. “It’s highly likely that certain demographics are going to visit a different subset of the web than other demographics are, and that such behavior will not be captured by Google’s ‘sensitive sites’ framing,” he said.

“Meanwhile, tracking companies are well-equipped to gather traffic from millions of users, link it to data about demographics or behavior, and decode which cohorts are linked to which sensitive traits. Google’s website-based system, as proposed, has no way of stopping that.”

“It’s not enough to have said this at the 11th hour. It’s not even the 11th hour, it’s the 13th,” said Philipp Tsipman, founder of Creatives for Georgia, an advocacy collective, who noted that voting rights should not be a partisan issue. “This thing passed and then you said something.”

Last week, Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law Republican-sponsored legislation that places new restrictions on voting by mail and how elections are run, catching the name Jim Crow 2.0. It’s a swift follow to the historic voter turnout the state saw in the November general election and January runoff, in which two Democrats defeated incumbent Republican senators. 

Ahead of the law’s passage, business executives at two of Atlanta’s biggest brands, Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola, issued lightly-worded statements prior to the legislation being signed into law. Similarly, The Home Depot, also based in Atlanta, released a statement in support of “broad voter participation,” but without mentioning the legislation itself or an official stance.

Those statements were quickly followed by calls on social media with hashtags to #BoycottCocaCola, #BoycottDelta and #BoycottDeltaAirlines. They’ve since made stronger statements, with Delta CEO Ed Bastian penning a memo calling the bill “unacceptable.” 

Coca-Cola CEO and chairman James Quincey released a similar statement, saying the brand was “disappointed in the outcome of the Georgia voting legislation.” Other companies, such as Apple and Microsoft, have also released statements criticizing the new measure.

Major League Baseball has also vowed to pull its All-Star game out of Atlanta, with MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred making the announcement Friday. Meanwhile, much of Hollywood has remained quiet on the matter, according to The Los Angeles Times.

Delta and other Atlanta-based companies said they worked closely with elected officials to “try and remove some of the most egregious measures,” according to Bastian’s memo.

However, activists say the brands’ efforts were too little, too late. 

Since the general election last November, creatives, marketers and advertising professionals with Creatives for Georgia have been working to support nonprofit organizations on the ground, providing marketing materials to get Democratic officials elected. That work continued into the January runoffs in Georgia and has now steamrolled to fight the latest legislation with the new voting restrictions. 

Georgia flipped from predominately Republican to a battleground state, making close calls with elections between Democrats and Republicans. Most recently, Georgia helped usher in Joe Biden’s presidency and elected two Democratic officials to the U.S. Senate, handing the Democrats control. Much of the effort was lead by grassroots organizations with politician and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams, who has called specifically on companies to take measures ensuring voting rights for all Americans.

In the midst of this, brands have found themselves in a public relations quandary as consumers press them to take a stand against doing business in a state with restrictive voting laws.

“Ideally it won’t take boycotts and extreme pressure to get [brands] to stand with voters in America and denounce racism,” said Lynne Jansons, a marketer who works with Creatives for Georgia.

After the protests following the death of George Floyd, many brands took to social media to denounce racism, committing to donate to Black Lives Matter and other organizations and launch more comprehensive and measurable diversity and inclusions initiatives. Similar comments have been made in the wake of the Atlanta spa shootings, which sparked a conversation about the growing number of hate crimes targeting Asian communities. 

The worst thing a brand can do is “be a leaf in the wind,” Tsipman said.

And research backs that up. According to insights company Piplsay, 69% of Americans continue to expect brands to take a stand on social issues. 

The new measure worries Colleen Jones, founder and president of Atlanta-based content strategy and intelligence firm, Content Science. Jones said the Republican-backed measure is built on voter fraud misinformation and her company has taken a stance against it.

The response from Delta, Coca-Cola and Microsoft is a new muscle brands are flexing as consumers push for transparency pertaining to social justice. It’s one thing to post a press release lamenting a measure, it’s another to condemn it and “live up to the promises that they’re making publicly around these issues,” Jones said.

Brands have tremendous power and influence in the community and should use their voice to speak out against inequity, said Joe Johnston, group creative director and co-head of Atlanta Studio for YML agency.

“They have the voice and the name recognition to push tough and important issues to the center of the cultural conversation,” Johnston said. “Today standing on the sidelines is not an option for any modern brand.”

But by entering the political arena, brands may be entering a fight they’re not prepared for, especially if they have a close relationship with lawmakers and enjoy favorable government treatment, said King Williams, Atlanta-area activist and filmmaker. 

“Brands aren’t prepared for what real life is. Brands are able to produce an image,” Williams said. “Now we’re seeing over the course of the last 18 months that image and reality are two different things.”

The bottom line is activists have been in the fight for social justice with Georgia lawmakers for a while, given the protests and prior elections. And if brands want to get involved, they’ll need to take an official stance, Williams said.

This November, Atlanta will vote for a new mayor and looking ahead, there’s the Georgia gubernatorial election.

“You’re going to see activism really start to press against brands of all types, especially on political donations in Atlanta and Georgia for the next 24 months,” Williams said. “It’s not going to stop.”

It’s not an exact like-for-like: Platforms don’t make or change policy on how publishers collect or use data directly from their users. Google’s decision to not build alternate identifiers to track individuals relates to its own products. But Google and Apple’s dominant market positions do mean when they make changes, they cause tidal waves across the rest of the digital advertising supply chain. 

And so unlike GDPR or CCPA, which involve compliance with legal, rather than just technical frameworks, the moves Google and Apple are about to make will cause immediate shockwaves the day they are implemented.  

There isn’t much choice but to fall in line.  

“We’re barnacles on the whale,” said Bob Regular, CEO of Infolinks. “If you measure us all relative to Google or Apple — sometimes they aren’t even aware we’re there. They may be happy to let us feed from them, but if they make a move and then we fall off, they’re indifferent.”

In the U.S. the lack of federal privacy law has left the door wide open for Google and Apple to call the shots, according to Regular. “Currently we’re moving toward states-rights-level privacy. It’s untenable — you can’t build plumbing at a state level, we need a federal version. And at the moment the first [federal attempt] is Apple and Google. They’ve taken the lead on what they say is the right solution — for right or wrong,” he said. 

Traditional regulators’ methods aren’t perfect either. When regulatory change is announced businesses are left to interpret the new legal requirements and adapt their business models as they see fit. The result can be messy, confusing, and lead to numerous attempts to flout or circumvent the rules — as seen with the response to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation which went into effect in 2018 after a two-year grace period.

What’s more, the intent of GDPR — to give users back more control over their personal data and ensure it’s not misused by hidden players in the digital advertising ecosystem — has resulted in a horribly confusing, annoying user experience in Europe, with every website featuring their own pop-up messages requesting consent for collecting data. Privacy activists believe regulators have failed to properly enforce the law at scale. “One of the issues around regulations is the incredible lack of active and at-scale enforcement,” said Ruben Schruers, group chief product officer at media investment analysis firm Ebiquity. “Essentially so far, the regulations are all bark and no bite.”

The privacy-led changes driven by platforms Apple and Google are all bite. Plus, they are binary — not open to interpretation. Naturally, that results in people questioning whether this biting behavior is fair and the underlying reasons are honest or have a double agenda, added Schruers. 

Preparing for GDPR was a legal nightmare. Publishers, agencies and ad tech vendors in particular squandered time procrastinating, spent months rewriting legal contracts to shift liability for fines to other partners in the digital ad supply chain, and argued over who was a data controller (and therefore on the hook for eye-watering fines) and who was a processor (not on the hook for fines). But in hindsight, at least there was wiggle room.

The platforms allow no wiggle room. And the changes required are all technical rather than legal. “The grace period was far longer with regulators — businesses were told by local authorities to try their best to respect GDPR and they, in turn, wouldn’t fine them for a given period of time,” said Remi Cackel, chief data officer, Teads. “But with Google, there will be a hard unplug once [third-party] cookies are pulled. Technically speaking you have no choice; it will happen overnight.”

And yet, for some, the changes are a long time coming and — for tech platforms pushing the privacy agenda — are welcome. “The spirit of GDPR and CCPA [California Consumer Privacy Act] is at the heart of what the browsers are doing,” said Amit Kotecha, global marketing director, Permutive. “The ad industry has prioritized this hyper-targeting over data ethics for a long time.”

Yet when it comes to global enforcement, even the platforms may hit roadblocks. Case in point: Apple’s anti-tracking drive is currently being challenged in China, where the state-backed trade group The China Advertising Association has reportedly begun its own ID workaround, which lets apps track users for advertising purposes even if the users haven’t opted in. China is a crucial market for Apple, so the tech player’s response will be the ultimate stress test of how seriously Apple plans to prioritize privacy over its commercial road map. Meanwhile, Google has also hit a snag with the planned rollout of Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) in Europe, thanks to GDPR.

It may be that countries can’t curb the dominance of the tech platforms, but they can at least slow them down.

At media agency Essence, the pandemic is part of the conversation in the creative process, but the topic does not necessarily appear in ad messaging which instead focuses on the effect the pandemic has on parents’ lives and how a brand can help, according to Amber Benson, vp of client services at Essence.

“We can talk about what parents are going through, without naming COVID-19,” she said. “There’s a little bit of exhaustion around the pandemic.”

Over the past few months, advertisers have started “updating their messaging to reflect the sentiments and behaviors of the past year,” said Leah Meranus, U.S. chief media officer at Dentsu X and 360i, in an emailed statement. “Advertisers are embracing the realities of parenting during a pandemic, with themes like mealtime prep, parenting while working and stress at the “front and center in recent ads,” she said.

However, as the world finds its way to a new normal with kids going back to school and vaccinations making group gatherings possible again, parenting publishers will have to adjust to address their audiences’ evolving stresses and need for entertainment outlets.

Traffic is down year-over-year for some parenting publishers, after a surge in readership when families sought information at the onset of the pandemic last year. Meredith’s Parents’ total unique visitors is down 18% year-over-year, to 5 million in February 2021, according to Comscore. Some Spider Studios, which focuses on social distribution, had their unique viewers drop from nearly 20 million in March 2020 to 8.3 million in February 2021 across Facebook and YouTube, according to Tubular Labs data.

Most recently, Parents’ partnered with MyLife, Meredith’s meditation app, to provide short activities to support busy moms with stress and anxiety. The seven-part program offers exercises, meditations and yoga. According to a recent Meredith study released in February on the “Post-Normal Consumer,” 39% of moms said their mental health declined during the pandemic.

The volume of requests for proposals from Parents’ clients both new and existing are up year-over-year, according to Marla Newman, evp of digital sales at Meredith, due to “extra attention” on addressing the needs of parents during this time through service content such as resources to support parental mental health and finances as well as keeping children entertained.

For The Dad, the focus this year will be on creating more “interactive, experiential communities” to bring people together virtually, according to editor-in-chief Joel Willis. This comes after editorial initiatives around pets and gaming content resonated with The Dad’s audience in the last year, according to Willis. Specifically, The Dad will create more initiatives like Facebook groups to engage communities around home/DIY, food and sports topics.

As the world opens back up, parents’ lives “will continue to be complicated, but in ways that used to stress parents out before,” like issues of work-life balance, commutes and the burden of social occasions, Benson said. Those shifts will inform publishers’ coverage.

When Fatherly noticed more readers were heading to its health & science section last year, editor-in-chief Tyghe Trimble hired another reporter for the vertical. Now, coverage is shifting away from topics like epidemiology and virology and to more core areas of science coverage, like other flu vaccines and the impact of the anti-vaxxer movement on parents and their children. 

As consumers’ travel habits change, Some Spider Studios expects more ad revenue from categories including travel, food and finance to increase this year compared to last year, according to Janine Krause, svp of advertising sales at Some Spider Studios.

At Some Spider Studios, direct sales revenue was up 35% in 2020 compared to 2019 — primarily due to a multi-million dollar increase in spending from the CPG category, according to a spokesperson. Overall revenue was $35 million, up 27% in 2020 compared to 2019, the spokesperson said, and the company is on track to get $50 million in revenue in 2021.

Despite those expected spending increases, not all advertisers are moving more money to parenting publications. According to PMG and Essence, the agencies’ clients spending on parenting publications has remained flat. “When we communicate with parents we’re also thinking about content and places that feed them as individuals,” Benson said. As a result, parenting publishers are pressed to keep a finger on the pulse of their audiences’ interests and to parlay those insights to advertisers.

Some Spider Studios ramped up the volume of surveys it conducted on consumer sentiments and purchase behavior, primarily on Facebook, to understand its audience. The surveys receive anywhere up to 2,000 responses within 24 hours.

The research publishers are conducting and sharing with advertisers is valuable to “get a full picture of the seismic shifts in what is important to people and their lives,” Benson said. Transitioning back to life in person will be challenging for parents, and publishers and brands “need to be thoughtful to stay in sync” with this audience, she said.

These are among the joys of attending a conference in virtual reality. There’s no walking to the venue in the rain, no queuing for a crowded lift, and no missing a keynote because the room was full. More pertinently in a pandemic that has forced conferences from CES to Davos to go digital, VR offers a more engaging experience than the outside-looking-in feel of being one of hundreds of faces in a video link.

After years of largely failing to deliver on its promise, VR’s time might have come. VR is being used in podcast production because it captures “subtleties, gestures and warmth” that are lost in distanced interaction, says Karolina Komarnicka, of The Leadership Network’s The Real Place podcast. The technology is bringing “a sense of material presence” to art installations during lockdown, says Louis Jebb, arts commentator and CEO of VR company Immersivly.

“When you put on a headset you have complete attention,” says Andrew Hawken, CEO of Mesmerise, a technology company which creates conferences in VR. “It’s like physically going to an event, you dedicate time and go, as opposed to vaguely paying attention to a screen while doing your emails or shopping.”

I’m speaking to Hawken’s avatar as he takes me on a virtual tour. It’s like Obi-Wan Kenobi training a Jedi apprentice as we flit around the venue by firing beams at the floor. The intention is not to create an otherworldly experience but “an immediate sense of co-presence,” something that’s missing from the remote working culture of 2021. “VR offers a unique way to be in the same environment together,” he says.

We use our lasers to “snap on” to armchairs, turning to face each other as you would at real life conferences. Spacial audio ensures you only hear voices of delegates nearby. Avatars come with names so that delegates can connect with people they know but also make new contacts, including sponsors and speakers.

Early in the pandemic, Mesmerise produced a VR-based investment conference for Morningstar, the financial services giant. It replicated the McCormick Place Convention Center in Morningstar’s hometown, Chicago, and delegates were able to take part in “Morningstar Sustainable City”, a VR game that demonstrated the impact of ethical investment choices on the world around them.

“We noticed attendees were highly engaged and appreciated the added flexibility VR gave them when it came to choosing which talks and presentations to attend,” says Leslie Marshall, Morningstar’s head of experiential marketing. Mesmerise is organizing a 500-delegate Morningstar conference in VR later this year.

Logistical issues, however, present a barrier to VR’s growth in events. If “Zoom anxiety” is already a source of stress for some workers, the thought of using a VR headset could be even more intimidating. Mesmerise offers to train delegates in using the technology, which Hawken says has gone from “a big cumbersome thing”, costing thousands of dollars, to a lightweight wireless headset, priced $299 for Facebook’s Oculus Quest model. 

A former BBC producer, Hawken joined Microsoft (he was editor-in-chief of MSN U.S.) in 1996 at “the birth of the consumer Internet.” He sees similar potential in VR. “I’m seeing a lot of the same things play out; the power of the device is going up, the price is dropping, it’s becoming portable.”

Mesmerise is planning a VR conference for a global accountancy firm and Hawken says the technology can be used for more regular engagements, such as business meetings, board meetings and one-on-ones. 

VR’s success in business depends not on novelty, but on creating the best environments for conference delegates to absorb information and for business meetings to achieve desired outcomes. Avatar data can gauge the success of a presentation by identifying delegate emotions, from happiness to surprise, and measuring signals of affirmation and attentiveness made by VR audiences. “We are picking up nodding heads,” says Michael Fagan, Mesmerise chief data scientist.

We teleport to a boardroom — with panoramic views of a city or natural wonder of your choice — and onto a vast aircraft hangar of an exhibition hall (with minimal infrastructure costs). “There are absolutely no constraints on what you can do in VR,” says Hawken.

I take off my headset and am left with the strong impression that we have spent the past hour in the same building.

3 Questions with Paddy Affleck, Havas Media U.K. CEO

How are you preparing for hybrid working after the pandemic?
We’re exploring what the ideal hybrid working set up might look like, which includes how we reimagine our current office space so that it’s a more free-flowing environment designed for better collaboration and team working. And so it’s inspiring and productive for those moments when we are together in the office.

We’re are also thinking about individual circumstances and how we can prioritize workloads in a different way, so that instead of someone being involved throughout a project, for example, they’re only brought in when they’re needed, creating more fluid taskforces of sorts. Companies need to take people’s personal circumstances much more into account. The challenge is how do you scale that across an entire organization? This is the right time to be thinking about all those things. 

How easy was it to join a new business remotely? 
During my first few months, I met with my leadership team regularly to discuss various strategic imperatives, and trust was quickly established. I also made a concerted effort to meet with all of the client leaders and capability heads during my first few weeks to understand more about the work of their teams and to make myself more accessible to them. 

A significant challenge has been new business. The process of running pitches has remained the same but the circumstances in which you have had to do it have fundamentally changed. Trying to build chemistry with prospective clients hasn’t been easy — particularly when you’re met with a person’s initials vs. a friendly face —but we’ve found some great new ways to engage with prospects in a virtual setting.

How is the business adapting to keep pace with shifting advertiser needs?
We’re stripping away our own operating complexities to mobilize and enable teams that are smaller, faster and more diverse, to devise more creative and effective solutions to the challenges our clients face. Given the various headwinds businesses face coming out of the pandemic, their needs and requirements will undoubtedly continue to fluctuate. We therefore need a more fluid adaptation to the existing scope of work, where we constantly reassess things based on clients’ shifting needs. For example, we have a range of brand, digital transformation, comms and media strategists, but a client might need different strategists at different parts of a project. In this instance, a bank of strategy hours versus retained time of a named individual makes more sense. 

Most importantly is the need for all parties to be 100% aligned around the right KPIs to deliver against a client’s business goals. This will allow for more progressive fee models like value-based compensation, which will enable the agency to switch in and out different expertise along the way in the pursuit of better outcomes. — Seb Joseph, senior news editor, Digiday

Numbers don’t lie

• 49% of 1,000 U.S workers have said they are likely to leave their current job if they’re unhappy or frustrated with the technology they use at work.
  [Source of data: Adobe/Workfront State of Work 2021 study.]
• 62% of 2,000 U.S. remote workers said they want to relocate to another country, while two thirds of the 38% who want to remain in the U.S., plan to move to another city.
  [Source of data: Simform’s Remote Work Survey 2021.]
• The average working hours between January 2020 and January 2021 drifted from 8:24 a.m. to 5:31 p.m, to 7:46 a.m to 6:12 p.m. The busiest time was 11 a.m. to 12 p.m.
  [Source of data: Prodoscore Research Council’s Shifting Work Day Patterns report, which analyzed 900,000 data points from nearly 7,000 employees.]

What else we’ve covered

• A large proportion of businesses will return to the office with a hybrid model. But for those who have relocated, want or need to remain working remotely, how can employers ensure that unconscious proximity bias doesn’t creep in – and that talented people working remotely don’t get cut out of crucial conversations and projects?
• Ageism has long been an issue in the advertising sector, but for women hitting their mid 40s that can mean an additional layer of discrimination surrounding menopause symptoms. While some businesses are becoming more proactive with support policies, many women still feel there is a long way to go before the stigma is removed.
• While a healthy inventory of commercial real estate in many cities has made subleasing a nonstarter, companies have used their spare square footage to generally create a more utilitarian and employee-friendly environment.

A good read

• As reported by Liz Flora, of Digiday’s sister site Glossy, the gig economy touches a wide range of industries; Now the worlds of beauty, fashion marketing and PR are the latest to get their own platform for freelance work.

This newsletter is edited by Jessica Davies, managing editor, Future of Work, Digiday.

It is one thing to understand why SPO can be helpful, but it is another thing entirely to undergo an extensive and comprehensive SPO plan. This is especially the case in the in-app world, which is newer and sometimes more convoluted than the browser-based world that most U.S.-based digital advertisers are used to.

In a new InMobi guide, ‘Supply Path Optimization for In-App Advertising: An Advertiser’s Guide to SPO,’ there are some steering principles by which buyers can implement the strategy. The following sections highlight four of these, and each is essential to effective plans.

Prioritize direct path to supply

The fundamental core of SPO is the aim to have as few hops as possible between the advertiser and the final advertising destination, specifically where the ad is actually displayed. Whenever possible, advertisers should seek the most direct paths to supply possible. 

In the mobile app space, the best way to determine which supply-side platforms (SSPs) are offering direct supply is through leveraging the IAB Tech Lab initiatives app-ads.txt, sellers.json and the OpenRTB SupplyChain Object (schain object). When it comes to each initiative, there are some essential things to know. 

• App-ads.txt is the version of ads.txt specifically for mobile apps. App-ads.txt is a repository of authorized sellers that a publisher hosts in their developer website which spells out which SSPs, exchanges and ad networks have a direct advertising relationship and which ones, if any, are authorized resellers.
• Sellers.json is a file that enables buyers to look up the relationship between the publisher or seller through which the SSP is sourcing the inventory. Buyers are able to do so by using the publisher ID in the bid request and looking it up in the sellers.json file hosted on the SSP domain.
• SupplyChain Object is composed primarily of a set of nodes where each node represents a specific entity that participates in the selling of a bid request. Consequently, a complete chain represents all sellers that were paid for with an individual bid request.

Look for efficient paths

According to an old proverb, “There are many paths to the top of the mountain, but the view is always the same.” However, with in-app programmatic advertising, the opposite is true. 

For advertisers, there are often multiple avenues to reach users on specific apps. But some paths are likely to be more valuable than others. That means advertisers should work with their agency and demand-side platform (DSP) partners to look at which paths are providing the best return on investment.

For example, say an advertiser can reach a suite of apps directly through two SSPs. While the path may be just as direct with the first SSP as it is with the second SSP, the second platform may provide better creative performance, a better audience targeting product and greater transparency. In this instance, it is easy to see how the second SSP is the preferable option even though the number of hops is the same between both.

Header bidding access is preferred

While header bidding and more unified ad auctions have been the norm in browser-based advertising for many years, it has only recently become more commonplace in the programmatic in-app space. Whenever possible, advertisers should seek out supply that is accessible via header bidding. Compared to waterfall-based supply, header bidding helps buyers reduce costs by allowing them to reach the maximum possible audience with the minimum infrastructure overhead. Header bidding also creates more transparent auctions for the buyers as their bids are unaffected by competing bids in intermediate auctions common in waterfall setups.

Consider optimized reseller paths

In SPO discussions, reselling can easily be seen as a negative, especially considering that often the overarching goal of SPO is to simplify programmatic supply paths. But in the in-app world, especially, there are instances where resellers provide value.

For instance, in the mobile gaming space there are some platforms that allow ads to appear natively within a game. In these cases, advertisers can programmatically place ads on billboards in a virtual cityscape or in a stadium setting in a sports game.  

While there are specialist technology companies that make these kinds of ads possible, they have to work with mobile SSPs to make this available to programmatic buyers at scale. In this case, even though they are technically classified as resellers, intermediaries unlock ad buying opportunities for buyers that would otherwise not be possible. 

Examples like this in the in-app space demonstrate why advertisers need a holistic and nuanced understanding of reselling.