Month: April 2021

As part of its brand push, the WSJ is planning to hold an “open house” on May 20 in which it will drop the paywall on its site to let all content be accessible for free for the day, said Suzi Watford, evp, consumer at the WSJ’s parent company Dow Jones.

The tactic serves as an “extremely good way to market and sample content, which is the best way to grow that [brand] consideration,” and also “should help to turn ‘colder’ audiences into future subscribers,” she said. However, readers will need to register with their email, which allows the WSJ to continue to market subscriptions to them after the open house. The WSJ last dropped its paywall on Election Day in 2020.

“We see an opportunity to attract new members, drive further consideration for the brand and demonstrate how useful the Journal can be,” said Watford. 

The WSJ declined to say how many subscriptions have come from its brand campaigns in the past. Watford noted that previous campaigns have shown “strong results on brand-building metrics particularly around consideration and trust.”

The WSJ has 3.2 million subscribers. Dow Jones, which also owns brands like Barron’s and MarketWatch, has about 4 million total subscribers. The parent company set a goal in the fall of 2020 to double its paying membership, but the company declined to say when it hopes to reach that goal. According to News Corp’s Q2 2021 earnings report, Dow Jones’ circulation and subscription revenues increased $23 million, or 8%, compared to the year prior.

For its latest campaign, the WSJ is running ads in print publications, online, on social platforms and in physical locations, such as ads in New York City’s Times Square. The campaign is global, but the out-of-home ads are starting in New York City before rolling out to other markets. Creative agency The&Partnership developed the campaign with the WSJ, and the agency’s media arm m/SIX is managing its ad buys. 

Watford declined to say how much money the news brand was spending on the new campaign. She said that the company is “investing more in our marketing efforts than ever before” and the campaign is a “big push” towards the company’s brand and subscription growth goals as it nears the end of its fiscal year at the end of June and the start of its next fiscal year. Watford anticipates this campaign will be one of The Journal’s longest running.

Melissa Chowning, founder and CEO of audience development and marketing firm Twenty-First Digital, said the Journal’s multi-channel campaign strategy was a solid play to fight through a challenging business climate for publishers in which many are seeing a drop in direct traffic. “We’re thinking some of this has to do with the decline in the print distribution,” which is usually “one of their biggest branding plays,” Chowning said.

Getting the brand out there via digital and OOH advertising, for example, puts it “in front of people who might have otherwise seen it in a physical location in the past,” she added.

The WSJ will also send merchandise with the word “Decision Maker” emblazoned on mugs and T-shirts to media and marketing influencers and Journal members, before making it available to others as the campaign continues to roll out. The phrase will also be integrated into the Journal’s events and across its business, such as at the “WSJ CEO Council” event taking place on May 4, and its largest consumer-facing event, “The Future of Everything Festival,” on May 11-13 (both will be held virtually).

“Trust Your Decisions” was influenced by research from the WSJ’s customer intelligence team, which found that 60% of WSJ prospective readers have postponed major decisions (in finance, investing, career and health) until the pandemic is over, but also that WSJ members were more likely to see opportunity in making those big decisions, according to the company.

The Journal’s inclusion of the word “trust” in the campaign’s name is meant to give the campaign’s subscription push a boost. The term is “connected to the willingness to pay,” Watford said.

While plenty of publishers, ranging from the New York Post to Vox Media, are finding multiple uses for their first-party data systems, Gannett in particular is adapting to this sea change in advertising at a moment when it would prefer to be focused on something else: Hitting CEO Mike Reed’s goal of amassing 10 million digital subscribers by 2025, up from 1 million digital subscribers today. 

“We want to continue to draft behind the success and growth we’re seeing from a consumer perspective,” said Michael Kuntz, the chief operating officer of national sales at USA Today. “Everything we are building today is meant to support both our various B2B and B2C initiatives.” 

Like other publishers, USA Today is advancing on this problem from multiple fronts. Kuntz said Gannett is participating in trials of FLoC — Google’s increasingly scrutinized targeting product — and it is busy building out more audience segments to make it easier to do contextual targeting. It plans to examine and experiment with several third-party identifiers, including NewsPass ID and Verizon Media’s ConnectID, which would effectively take the place of cookies. 

But its main focus is on its own first-party data, and amassing more of it. At the moment, not all of Gannett’s sites have paywalls or registration gates, and not all of its data sources have been tied together. Across its local news sites, authenticated users account for about 15% of pageviews, Kuntz said. “We are very much an identity-focused organization,” Kuntz said. 

Thanks to an effort launched years ago, USA Today offers advertisers more than 1,000 audience segments, most of them designed to mimic third-party segments sought after by advertisers. It’s looking to build more of them, using not just its news and personal finance content but also its lifestyle coverage of topics including food and entertainment. 

And it has affiliate commerce data and intent signals from Reviewed, a product reviews title whose content is syndicated across its network. It also has consumer data from USA Today Ventures, a separate events business that it began ramping up in 2017, which Kuntz said now has a database of 10 million consumer profiles. 

It’s been busy adding more sources to that list. In the fourth quarter of 2020, Gannett rolled out a live-polling tool, which gathers information from readers it then uses to advance both its advertising and subscription efforts. For example, earlier this year Gannett polled readers across its titles about their coming travel plans, asking them questions such as where they were likely to stay (in a hotel versus an Airbnb, for example). 

The poll’s responses gave USA Today information about how attitudes toward travel differed by geographical area, and also helped inform subsequent marketing and advertising plans — people who answered the questions in one way were served offers to subscribe to a travel newsletter, while those who responded differently were served ads for hotels. 

Gannett cannot currently tie all of those sources together. It plans to upgrade to a “next gen CDP” later this year, Kuntz said, though it has not yet decided whether that means upgrading from current vendors or migrating to a new one. 

All of those moves should help Gannett navigate a tough balance. One of the key factors in Gannett’s ability to hit its 10 million subscriber number will be how many it can harvest from USA Today, Gannett’s largest title and one whose site has historically been monetized solely through advertising; USA Today Network claims to reach over 150 million people every month across its network of sites; USA Today reaches more than 90 million. Earlier this week, Poynter’s Rick Edmonds noticed that Gannett has begun testing a kind of paywall on USA Today’s website.

“Going slow while phasing in digital paid helps preserve that selling point to advertising clients,” Edmonds wrote in an analysis published this week. “Beta testing makes all kinds of sense for a change of this scale — the company will be harvesting data on which approaches yield the most paid subscribers and whether readers are ready or resistant.”

eBay’s 2020 momentum is holding on into its first-quarter earnings, but the company is already advising that revenue will probably remain the same or fall slightly in Q2.

The key details: 

• eBay announced first-quarter revenues of $3 billion, up 42% from the same quarter last year.
• Marketplace Gross Merchandise Volume came in at $27.5 billion, up 29% from the first quarter of last year.
• The company also reported 187 million annual active buyers, an increase of 7% year over year, and 20 million annual global active sellers, up 8% year over year.
• In the U.S., sneakers selling above $100 grew at a triple-digit rate year-over-year, and growth in luxury watches grew 38%.

Software updates

In an effort to modernize, eBay rolled out managed payments last fall, which deposit payments directly into sellers’ bank accounts. Before, sellers would have to pay eBay fees and PayPal fees. For the first quarter, over half of global on-platform volume was processed through managed payments.

eBay’s Promoted Listing ad product generated $224 million in revenue for the first quarter. Last year, the company’s total ad revenue passed $1 billion for the year, just a mere 1% of GMV. In Wednesday’s call, Iannone said the company is experimenting with ad placements for auctions, CPC capabilities, and off-site ads.

eBay has also focused on app updates, including streamlined layout and SEO tweaks, as well as a dark mode. For 2020, almost half of global gross merchandise volume was transacted in the app.

Timely Investments in Shoes

In the fourth quarter 2020 earnings call, Iannone said investing in eBay’s core marketplace with a focus on enthusiasts was a priority this year. In the U.S., sneakers selling above $100 grew at a triple-digit rate year-over-year this quarter, and luxury watches grew 38%.

In the fall of 2020, eBay launched its “Authenticity Guarantee” for watches sold over $2,000 and for sneakers sold for $100. Under that program, eBay dropped seller fees on big sneaker purchases but increased seller fees in early April on watches to fund advertising for the luxury items.

Last year, eBay sold more than 200,000 luxury watches, as well as 7.69 million sneakers in North America, up from 6 million in 2019, according to company data. 

Of course, eBay faces stiff competition from StockX and GOAT, which are both more focused platforms, as well as shoe providers like Nike, which launched a resale program. On the other hand, Amazon, Walmart and others are looking to attract mass-market consumers who are hunting for value and deals.

But eBay is betting big on its authentication services to entice buyers.

In 2020 the average customer who purchased a pair of sneakers over $100 spent a total of $2,500 on eBay. Approximately 80% of that spend was in categories outside of sneakers.

Hollister has been running a month-long Fortnite tournament to promote a new range of clothing for gamers. This new collection is available at Hollister stores globally and online and includes graphic tees, shorts, loungewear, windbreakers and socks.

The tournament itself sees participants partner with one another to form a duo that goes on to compete for a range of prizes including Hollister gift cards, Fortnite V-bucks and a personalized gaming hoodie from the retailer’s collection. 

Hollister is running the competition from an app that will allow players to create their teams and then compete for the prizes. Mobile app for gamers Mission Control is providing the platform for the competition, where the duos are able to communicate with one another as well as check out their standings in the tournament.

“It’s relatively easy as a brand to put your name on something and let it live and continue to fuel it with paid media,” said Jacee Scoular, director of brand marketing strategy at Hollister. “We wanted to do something different. This isn’t an activation where you have to come out on top to ‘win’. It’s about doing something that you already enjoy doing and having a shot at being rewarded, whether you’re the best player inside the game or the worst.”

In many ways, the title has reinvigorated casual gaming for a wide range of audiences, not just hardcore gamers. Indeed, people boot up the game for a variety of reasons, from hanging out with friends to building their own maps, so it attracts more types of players than a typical game. Plus, having up to 100 players in real-time creates for a much larger live experience than most games, and that has fueled that actual spectating of the game. This is why it is so unique for advertisers. If done right, they can reach both players and spectators, which is not something typical of many other games.

“Fortnite is one of the largest, most accessible games out there and it ranks among the top five games most loved games among our generation z target demographic,” said Scoular. “This is our first foray into thinking about competitive gaming in a way that makes sense to us and with a brand like Fortnite. 

Given the campaign is still going, Hollister was unable to share any stats. Still, early signs suggest it has been well received by fans, said Scoular. Needless to say, there are already ideas for a follow-up, especially now that there’s a community around the tournament. 

There’s a lot of heavy lifting that went into encouraging players to take part in the tournament. So it’s unlikely this will be a one-and-done campaign. Now, it has a community on the app that’s engaged in its event, Hollister is thinking about other ways it could create programming around it. 

“Until now gaming campaigns have been difficult to activate, with bespoke formats, limited targeting, brand suitability concerns and lack of measurement,” said Samuel Huber, CEO of gaming ad tech vendor Admix. “This is changing fast, with several disruptive innovators working on the infrastructure to turn gaming into a scalable and profitable media channel i.e. programmatic delivery from existing DSPs, brand safety categorization, and third party measurement.”

Brand-led events around gaming are becoming increasingly commonplace from advertisers, particularly those that aren’t endemic to the world of gamers. Budweiser Light did this last September when it launched the “Battle of the Best” tournament where some of Twitch’s top streamers and personalities competed against each other in a medley of games. 

The latest example of the heightened scrutiny around the use of dark patterns was a Federal Trade Commission workshop yesterday during which researchers called for regulation of the controversial tactics. Meanwhile, at least one digital ad trade group — the Network Advertising Initiative — is already gearing for a fight against any new laws or regulations addressing dark patterns.

Speaking during a panel discussion about how dark patterns affect consumers at the FTC’s Bringing Dark Patterns to Light workshop, Ryan Calo, a University of Washington School of Law professor, suggested that the agency should regulate dark patterns because they amount to the sort of unfair and deceptive practices the agency was established to protect consumers against. 

“A hundred years ago, that is what Congress told the FTC to do: figure out which practices that companies are doing that are just too unfair to let go. They spoke in very overt, moralistic language about it. And so my hope is that dark patterns is a place that we can begin to reclaim that role for this great commission,” he said.

The issue is especially timely in relation to the ways digital media and ad tech firms provide people with notice and solicit their permission to collect and use their personal information. 

Right now in response to privacy laws, including Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), people are presented with notices about use of cookies or other tech for data tracking, often referred to as consent notices. Many of these notices highlight options to agree to accept third-party cookies or other forms of tracking more prominently than links to opt out from data collection and use, practices that privacy researchers consider to be examples of dark patterns. 

Digital ad industry braces for a battle on dark patterns

Already, in California, regulations approved in March to enforce the CCPA specifically ban the use of dark patterns that delay or obscure the process for opting out of the sale of personal information or bombard people with confusing information or excessive steps. Considering the recent California ban and increased interest from the FTC, the digital ad industry sees the writing on the wall and is bracing for a battle with regulators on the dark patterns issue.

In an op-ed published in Morning Consult the morning of the agency’s workshop, the Network Advertising Initiative’s vp of policy David LeDuc wrote that, while it’s important for state and federal law enforcers to understand the use of dark patterns in protecting against marketing scams, “policymakers should resist the urge to legislate around the concept of dark patterns — it’s not necessary, given existing authorities. In addition, new laws could undermine legitimate companies’ best intentions to educate their customers,” he wrote. 

Instead, in addition to supporting a federal privacy law, LeDuc said he wants a continuation of reliance on industry self-regulations. He urged lawmakers “to provide the FTC with more resources to enforce the law under its existing unfairness and deception authorities and educate consumers and businesses, not to enact legislation specific to regulating the use of digital user interfaces.”

Changing coercive privacy opt-out notices to human-centered ones

During the FTC panel discussion, Jennifer King, privacy and data policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, identified how dark patterns exist within data collection mechanisms. Default opt-ins to data tracking and requests to gather information that is not necessary for a system to operate — such as asking to track location data in a mobile app or requesting someone’s phone number — are intended to “coerce or manipulate individuals into consenting to the collection or disclosure of their personal information either at all or more than they would actually prefer to disclose,” she said. 

“One area that I’m concerned with in general is that of online consent — and so, those existing mechanisms by which we ask for consent. I think they’re pretty much a complete failure at this point,” King said. For instance, she added, “One of the things we look at is whether the accept button is highlighted in advance; you can argue that’s a dark pattern.” 

Companies within the digital ad industry seem to be incentivized to adopt dark patterns to protect their targeted advertising businesses against regulatory restrictions. Some publishers and ad tech execs have suggested the impact of CCPA-related opt-outs on ad revenues has been minimal in part because consent mechanisms make it easier for people to agree to data tracking enabling targeted ads that deliver higher ad revenues.

However, while data tracking has enabled ad targeting that allows advertisers to aim ads to audiences based on their interactions across the web and apps, King and other researchers are calling for the ad industry to completely revamp its approach to how it tells people about those practices and how it gets the OK from them to continue gathering data.

Instead of employing the current approach of translating legal contract language into a digital interface, she called for a shift to notice-and-consent mechanisms that incorporate “human-centered” approaches that more clearly communicate the terms of the transaction when a person is asked for their data.

“The present mechanism of hitting ‘I accept’ with no attempt to actually inform you in a user-friendly way of what you’re consenting to is potentially inherently manipulative, and I’d really like to see solutions that go further than just giving us kind of new looks on existing interfaces,” she said. 

King added that Apple’s new requirement that app publishers directly ask people whether they want to be tracked across other apps alters this standard framework for notice-and-consent design in a positive way. “This is going to be a very interesting kind of live experiment to see how well this works,” she said of the Apple changes.

“I just kept saying to myself, just keep working and if I can imagine myself in the next role — in my boss’ role — I’ll keep going. 20-plus years later, that’s what happened,” she said.

Earlier this month, Reyes was promoted to CEO at TBWAChiatDay New York, replacing former CEO of six years Rob Schwartz, who also stepped into a new role as chair of the newly-formed TBWA New York Group. 

A Latinx, Queens-bred, Harvard graduate, Reyes has steadily climbed the ranks at the agency since joining in 2016, serving as managing director before becoming president in the summer of 2018. Reyes has been an integral part of client partnerships like Hilton, TD Bank, Facebook and PepsiCo throughout her tenure. Through a tumultuous 2020, when budgets were shrinking and clients were putting work on hold, agency staff said Reyes spent hours on end working to ensure everyone kept their job.

“She’ll do the impossible and she won’t even announce it to anybody,” said Chris Beresford-Hill, chief creative officer at TBWAChiatDay New York.

Before landing at TBWAChiatDay New York, Reyes spent 12 years at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners before moving to Verizon to serve as vice president of brand creative. 

Reyes has been about the silent hustle her entire life and her upbringing has a lot to do with that, she said. As the daughter of immigrant parents from El Salvador and Puerto Rico, money was hard to come by with her parents working as a housekeeper and taxi driver. Her upbringing in New York City was a difficult one.

“My sister and I would collect bottles from the neighborhood and turn them into cash to help out at a really young age,” she said. “There was no shame in that.”

It was a lesson in hard work, Reyes said. The mission was to get food on the table each day, which didn’t leave much room to daydream about a career in advertising. That changed when a New York-based youth program called Prep for Prep tapped Reyes to enroll. Prep for Prep was working to empower inner-city students of color to compete with more privileged students. It was here, more than 20 years ago, that Reyes learned about advertising and fell in love with it. It inspired her to land her first job as an account executive in 1997.

“Every moment is a set up for something,” Reyes said, noting that even the most challenging parts of her career, including navigating 2020, have been learning opportunities. As was the toughest moment in her career, which Reyes points to as the ramifications associated with becoming a mom for the second time.

She was working harder than ever at Goodby with more than a decade of experience under her belt and had hoped to move her family back to New York from Goodby offices on the West Coast. At the time, Goodby’s East Coast offices didn’t exist and ultimately, her vision of retiring at the agency fell apart. 

“That was a devastating, devastating moment,” she said.

How Reyes has handled those challenges has inspired Bruna Bechelli, business lead at TBWAChiatDay. In Bechelli’s eyes, Reyes is a force to be reckoned with — a leader who is tough and potentially intimidating because she’s good at what she does.

“Once you know what you’re doing, she gives you a lot of freedom,” Bechelli said. “She’s there for you, to support you when you need it and that’s what I love about her.”

Bechelli joined the Chiat team two years ago and recalled Reyes’ challenge to manage the team at the start of the pandemic. 

“Everything was urgent because everything was a crisis,” she said. But instead of putting a rush on orders, Reyes put the team first, even pushing back on a client to give the team more time.

“She’s a very inspiring leader,” she said. “I’m very excited to see what the future holds for her as a leader.”

Stepping into the role as CEO, Reyes hopes stories of Latinx, women leaders rising among the ranks, like her own, become more commonplace.

“The idea is that more of this will happen more often,” she said. “We won’t have to call it out because that’s just the way the world is. That would be great and I hope that we can get to that, at least some semblance of that, in my lifetime.”

Shepherding the curation and dissemination of content has become a key role for today’s marketing chief with digitization and the explosion of content channels. And as the pandemic has shaped the future of work over the past year, the content role of CMOs has become even more urgent, as the narrative around daily business and how it is conducted has evolved so suddenly and dramatically. 

For Ian Barkin, chief strategy and marketing officer of Sykes Enterprises, the Tampa, Florida-based business outsourcing giant, a typical work week involves a load of content juggling including the production of four live streams, and his own podcast. He’s also responsible for producing the company’s various videos, newsletters and industry reports and managing its social media presence. 

Barkin said two things have struck him about messaging amid the coronavirus crisis. “The corporate narrative had to be more agile, and more human. Agile because we had to constantly pivot to recognize current events, and do so sensitively. Human because, like very few times in history, we were globally in the same boat. We all needed comforting. Enterprise messaging had to match that need by relating to and supporting us as humans, not as consumers. It was the CMO’s job to navigate this set of forces.”

How all that content resonates is increasingly tied to the very fortunes of the business, according to Barkin. “The onus is on marketing is to be able to show attribution and clear outcomes and the impact on the investment [the company] is making,” he said. “Through views, clicks and engagements, it’s clear the content we’re putting out there is getting the attention of the audience we created it for.”

Other CMOs agree that the fallout from Covid-19 has reshaped their roles. “The pandemic has intensified the CMO’s responsibilities, especially when it comes to the curation of the content ecosystem,” said Dominica Ribeiro, CMO of Breckinridge Capital Advisors, an asset management firm responsible for $44 billion in investments. As an example, in the early months of the pandemic, Breckinridge instituted a rapid response bond market volatility campaign to effectively inform clients during the Covid-19 crisis. The plan included more than 20 pieces of thought-leadership articles, high-touch client communications, live webinars and proactive media relations. 

“When you think about it from a CMO perspective, we are responsible for retention, client satisfaction, new business, brand awareness — and now, feeding the beast of the content marketing machine,” said Ribeiro. “It is a significant component of a CMO’s job.”

And as technology and data have flourished, they’ve come to inform these content decisions, Ribeiro added. Marketers are also using technology like AI to determine which topics resonate with clients and then create content around those conversations. At Breckinridge, Ribeiro has formed an editorial board, which meets every month to consider messaging and content ideas from across the company’s 84 employees. “It’s an opportunity to hear from everyone in the company, regardless of their role or level,” she said. 

Kirti Naik, CMO of BNY Mellon Wealth Management, which has $2.2 trillion in assets under management, agreed that data plays an ever more significant role in a CMO’s content duties. “Ultimately, data drives strategy,” she said. “Today, marketing has more access to intelligence and real-time engagement data that better inform our approach to content creation than ever before.” 

The pandemic has further underscored the vital content role of the marketing chief, she added. “CMOs have always needed to adapt quickly to changes in the environment, and taking on ownership of content is no different,” she said. “Gone are the days of pure product promotion and advertising. Marketing needs to drive the narrative as well as merchandize the content for multiple formats.”