Month: May 2021

Provinciali has been pushing the use of attention with his media agencies Dentsu and Code 3 for the last two years. “We’re working with the networks and all our media partners to figure out ways we can collaborate together and make attention a guarantee the same way I’m guaranteed in-demo reach,” said Provinciali. “And then making sure what I’m buying commands a certain level of viewable or attentive impression.”

A-B tested out attention in its planning with a fourth-quarter 2020 pilot flight on A&E, which Provinciali deemed “successful.” He said he and his agencies are in discussions with Warner Bros. and other major media companies about implementing it, and he’s working with the ANA and other advertisers to generate a snowball effect of adoption to make it an essential part of negotiations in the 2022 NewFronts/upfront marketplace. “If it proves successful this summer, people are going to start demanding it in 2022. At least that’s my hope,” he added.

James Donner, partner and head of media and strategy at Decoded, a digital-forward media agency recently acquired by S4 Capital, appreciates the fact that attention helps compare effectiveness across more media. “When you start to join that [attention] data with cost per impression, you have a new POV on what’s the cost-per-impression of what’s actually seen or looked at,” said Donner. “That wasn’t possible a year ago. Since we started doing it, we’ve been seeing 2X higher brand lift on campaigns we’re running.”

Attention metrics tend to help brands that have latent sales cycles (such as CPG) and less effective data feedback loops that aren’t closed. “It’s almost like another step beyond viewability, but it’s bigger than that,” explained Max Kalehoff, vp of marketing and growth at RealEyes. Attention helps answer “not just ‘Did the ad show up for two seconds on your page?’, but ‘Did your brand message create attention? Did it reach an attentive audience? Did it create a desire?’”

More importantly, said Donner, it will clean up dubious inventory and practices in the digital space. “If buyers are buying off attention, publishers are incentivized to create ad formats that might be more interruptive (as in, more video), but they’ll create fundamental value as opposed to right now where viewability” has the wrong incentives, he said. “You have video units that run in the bottom corner of a page with the sound off — they’re totally viewable and they pass as brand safe, but they’re complete garbage. Often people don’t even know they’re buying that. And attention optimization will start to get rid of that and make digital more effective.”

Though attention’s value seems indisputable, other media agencies are looking to move beyond it to get to lower-funnel activation. “Because over the last year there’s been such a shift in how people are using media, moving heavily into commerce, we’re creating rich, localized commerce products that more directly link media into buying,” said Stephanie Stopulos, chief client officer at Starcom U.S. “We can tie into lower-funnel metrics that deliver persistent and consistent results for our clients. You can’t talk brand or performance anymore — it’s really an ‘and’ situation, and we’re hungry for more metrics that can complement that approach.”   

Color by numbers

Despite the fact that the major walled garden platforms have come under greater scrutiny from media buyers — from legislators and others who could negatively impact their ad revenue — it seems they’re doing just fine in aggregate in 2021. Ad insights and tech firm Mediaocean tracked 300 advertisers’ spend across Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snap and Twitter month by month since before the COVID lockdown in 2020.

Tracking the collective percentage media growth or shrinkage showed a significant dip well into the lockdown but a massive recovery this year. (Digiday looked at three-month intervals for space and clarity reasons, starting January 2020 running through April 2021.)

•             January 2020: +39%
•             April 2020: -22%
•             July 2020: -17%
•             November 2020: +22%
•             January 2021: +9%
•             April 2021: +42%

Takeoff and landing

• IPG Mediabrands said it plans to commit a minimum 5 percent of its clients’ media spend on Black-owned media by 2023, citing $1.4 trillion in buying power by the 48 million Black population in the U.S., as estimated by its MAGNA unit.
• Along a similar theme, Havas Media Group last week launched Meaningful Marketplaces, which aims to invest in “trusted news sources and minority-owned and operated media,” and will offer reduced fees and greater transparency to media partners that fit its criteria, which will be determined “by humans and never machines.”
• VaynerMedia launched a Latin American arm, led by Gabriela Fenton, who was most recently CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi Mexico. Initial clients include TikTok and Grupo Modelo, and the firm will be based in Mexico City.
• You & Mr. Jones Media hired its first partner: Will Heins, the COO of Media by Mother (another recent startup).

Direct quote

“One, we’re going to get away from focusing on short-term ROI, which is where the industry has pivoted over the past two years, and we’re going to plant a flag in a much more sustainable approach to grow over the short-, mid- and long term. We’ve made sure that the data infrastructure and the analytics [approach] allowed every single market in the world to deliver on some version of that promise. Two, we are taking a full-funnel approach, as opposed to focusing maniacally on the bottom of the funnel, which is where the industry has over-rotated in the past couple of years and bringing definition to what full funnel means. As we think about 2021 on, we’re thinking about the full consumer experience, and we’re getting into content.”

— UM global CEO Eileen Kiernan, on two central pillars to the IPG agency’s “Futureproof” model of growth.

Speed reading

• Digiday media reporter Sara Guaglione diligently covered the just-concluded NewFronts last week, noting the touting of first-party data and the mashing up of traditional, streaming and social video.   
• Kristina Monllos, Digiday’s senior marketing editor, talked with 1-800 Contacts CMO Phil Bienert about how the DTC company can maintain the significant gains it made during the pandemic, now that consumers are venturing out into the world again.
• And Kate Kaye, Digiday’s platforms, data and privacy reporter, explains the factors that ultimately led Verizon to sell its Media unit to Apollo Holdings last week.

It spent the next year making encouraging, and humbling progress. While BBC Future Planet managed to nearly wipe out the carbon emissions normally created through travel, significantly increase the diversity of its workforce, it is still searching for satisfactory ways to accurately quantify the impact of things like the buildings its reporters work and live in and to measure the footprint of its advertising infrastructure; it partnered with an outside firm to conduct an audit of its website’s emissions.

As it continues the work, the hope is that BBC Future Planet’s learnings can be spread throughout the rest of the news organization as it pursues a climate target of its own. 

“It’s about holding ourselves accountable,” said Martha Henriques, BBC Future Planet’s editor. “That was always going to be what we wanted to do.” 

As a percentage of BBC News’s 115 million monthly unique users, Future Planet is tiny: Henriques is the only full-time employee dedicated solely to it, with content supplied by a combination of freelancers, as well as a five-person video team that works across BBC Future. It produced 25 million pageviews in its first year, across some 82 stories.  (It also managed to secure a sponsor, Standard Chartered Bank)

Yet its effect on the BBC as a whole could be outsized. The broadcaster is part of a growing number of companies aiming to achieve net zero carbon emissions, a term for entities that do not emit any carbon; the BBC aims to do so by 2030. In 2020, it laid out some near-term targets, including a 24% reduction in CO2 emissions from buildings and technology and plans to recycle 75% of the company’s waste by 2022. 

The BBC is also participating in DIMPACT, an initiative designed to help media companies better understand the carbon footprint of their operations, including streaming video, ad-serving and maintaining their websites.

Henriques sits on a committee that is dedicated to helping the BBC reach those goals, and has been sharing information from Future Planet’s operations and its coverage with other parts of the BBC. “I’ve had lots of conversations around sharing best practices,” Henriques said. 

Some of those changes BBC Future Planet made solved for multiple problems at once. While it does not have a hard and fast rule banning travel outright, Future Planet managed to cut its travel emissions by 98% by embracing a strategy of hiring reporters on the ground in the countries they were covering. In 2020, the site produced stories from 30 nations across six continents. 

Hiring locally delivered some cost-savings as well, with most of the savings coming from reducing or eliminating travel; Henriques said the BBC pays a flat rate for freelance work, irrespective of where the freelancer is located. 

Committing to eliminating or reducing travel emissions forced Henriques to look for more reporters located on the ground in the various parts of the world where she wanted to commission stories. In its first year, more than half of Future Planet’s content was produced by Black, indigenous or people of color, and more than a third of them hail from the global South. 

“It’s massively helped with diversity and representation,” Henriques said. “It sort of makes you a little more creative and resourceful.” 

Precisely calculating the total footprint proved difficult. While some facets of global reporting, such as travel, or the carbon footprint of the website, are easy to track, determining the carbon footprint of the buildings each reporter lives or works in proved too challenging to incorporate. “It gets amazingly complicated very quickly,” Henriques said. 

Coming out of last year’s deal-making cycle, TV network owners felt like they left money on the table by catering to advertisers’ flexibility demands without pushing too aggressively for more money in return, agency and TV network executives said at the time. Advertisers’ businesses were grappling with the pandemic, and the networks wanted to be considerate. 

But that was last year.

This year agency executives expect the TV networks will look to be repaid for their manners and may not be so polite in pushing back on advertisers’ demands and making their own demands that more closely resemble the traditional back-and-forth between businesses.

Some TV networks are already discussing up to 20% price hikes for their linear inventory, according to two agency executives. “Last year there were rollbacks [for linear ad prices in some cases], and it took a global pandemic to cause that. That’s not to say that the plus-20% [increases] being thrown around are remotely acceptable,” said one of the executives.

Another topic on the negotiating table is flexibility. Ad buyers are not looking to request further cancelation options, but they do intend on keeping the ones arranged last year, according to agency executives. The TV network owners may have something to say about that, though.

“This year we’re seeing the networks say [2020] was an anomaly year and they want to go back to historical terms. There’s not going to be a single buyer in the market that will agree to that unless [the networks agree to lower their ad prices], which probably won’t be the case,” said a second agency executive.

Moreover, TV networks may press advertisers to accept less flexible terms for the networks’ streaming inventory.

Historically, the network’s streaming inventory was more pliable because it was digital and therefore subject to the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s standard that allows an advertiser to cancel 100% of a deal up to 14 days before a campaign was set to begin. But last year, as networks eased their linear cancelation options — lowering windows from 45 or 60 days to 30 or 45 days and raising percentages to up to 50% — at least one network owner imposed stricter flexibility terms on its streaming inventory by having the linear options apply to the streaming inventory as well, and agency executives expect more to follow suit in this year’s negotiations. 

“We used to get flexibility in streaming because it was quote-unquote digital. Now they’re like, ‘Digital? I’m sorry, wait, did we call that digital before? No, sorry. That’s linear. That’s TV. We’re going to need legacy TV flexibility terms,’” said a third agency executive. “That’s going to be the worst conversation.”

“There are parallels between preparation for the GDPR prompts and what’s happening now with App Tracking Transparency (ATT),” said Mark Kellogg, head of technical partnerships at mobile analytics company Kochava. “A key difference is if someone doesn’t consent to an app sharing their data the ATT framework’s prevention mechanisms are technical ones and it cannot happen whereas with the GDPR, though irresponsible, is possible even if the permission to do so wasn’t granted.”

When someone sees the ATT notification on their device they will essentially see a message with subtle variations depending on the app. First, there’s the obligatory prompt every app owner has to show: “Allow ‘app x’ to track your activity across other companies and websites.” Second, there’s a prompt just below this message where app owners are allowed a bit more leeway in what they say.

In just a few lines, app owners must be clear about why someone should share their data but have to avoid sounding too desperate for it.

Then there’s the matter of where to place the notification. Place the prompt too early in the app and it could annoy people who haven’t yet sampled its content — let alone decided they want it to share their data with other apps and sites.

Needless to say, there are few hard and fast rules when it comes to ATT prompts. 

“Marketers should value pre-permission messaging just as highly as ad creative itself,” said Bruce Tissington, paid social lead at media agency Space & Time. “It could prove possibly one of the strongest calls-to-action that advertisers can manufacture at the moment, because of the knock-on effects of having very low opt-in rates for advertisers, from reduced audience sizes to less informed optimization strategies.”

Some app owners like that of retailer Asos have put a more sanguine spin on their ATT prompts. The latter half of the company’s notification reads: “We’ll use your data to give you a more personalized ASOS experience and to make our app even more amazing.”

Where possible, some app developers are testing out different prompt messages across their portfolio of apps in an attempt to expedite the search for messages that work best. 

Take game publisher Tilting Point. It has different prompt strategies for different games and naturally has seen opt-in rates vary. 

“The speed at which our non-IDFA users increases inside our games varies depending on the policy taken for the ATT notification,” said Jean-Sebastien Laverge, SVP of Growth at mobile game publisher Tilting Point. “For some games, we’ve been running these prompts for months, others started around two months ago and then there are the ones that are only seen by those iOS 14.5 users.”

For all this testing, sometimes simple is better.

“The more straightforward the messaging the more we’re seeing people say ‘I understand the value exchange here that if I didn’t buy the product then I am the product and I want that relationship to remain viable’,” said Kellogg.

And on the occasions where the ATT prompt isn’t enough, there’s always the pre-prompt. Companies can use a pre-prompt message to try and convince users to share their data from the app as long as they don’t threaten to withhold services and content if they don’t.

Before someone sees the main ATT prompt in either the Facebook or Instagram apps, for example, they’re presented with a pre-prompt that explains the list of benefits they get if they allow the apps to share their data, one of those being keeping them free. The implication being that if they don’t agree then they may have to pay to use Facebook or Instagram someday.

“The multiple approaches we’re seeing to the ATT prompts were to be expected as Apple did not work with app developers in the almost one year leading up to roll out,” said Offer Yehudai, president at app monetization firm Fyber.

While some publishers are taking a more risk-averse approach, others push the boundaries to save as much revenue as possible — and because this is still very open to interpretation, these boundaries are unclear. In fact, Apple just recently updated guidelines around dos and don’ts regarding ATT prompts, which will likely continue to update as we move forward.

“There will be a lot of trial and error around how these notifications drive opt-ins because, despite knowing about ATT for months, many companies have been slow to prepare for it,” said Rob Webster, chief strategy officer at media consultancy Canton.

From opt-in rates so far many marketers have a lot to learn.

A little more than a third (36%) of people are opting in to share their data at the ATT pop-up prompt while the other 64% of users who see the notification either opt-out or are using other apps that have not been updated to support Apple’s privacy plan, according to Blis’ analysis on day seven of its arrival. 

As ever, these early numbers are only part of the story. 

Yes, there seem to be many apps that aren’t even triggering an ATT notification so those rates are likely to rise notably. But the real issue will be whether there’s enough overlap between the app the ad appears in and the one it links to for granular targeting and measurement to work.

Effective attribution and user-level targeting only work if the person who sees it has agreed to be tracked not just from the app where they saw the ad, but also the one it promotes. Otherwise, there’s no way to link what happens in one app to another. That’s an issue when every time someone sees that ATT prompt there could be a dropoff in terms of whether they say “yes” or “no” to sharing their data. 

“Effectively tracking at scale won’t be possible,” said Yehudai. “The solution is not trying to find creative workarounds and optimizing opt-in rates — but to adopt the new framework and adopt alternative privacy-friendly advertising capabilities.”

No matter who’s running the show, few companies have had to deal with such a major project where there are so many unknowns. 

Kristi Woolsey, associate director and lead of Boston Consulting Group’s Smart Environments Group, suggested that under the best scenario, everyone plays a part. CEOs ultimately decide the rules around hybrid and remote working and the reimagined office space, while HR manages job descriptions. Office managers will figure out what the physical workspace looks like, while IT has oversight for the technology that makes this new world happen.

“After more than a year of largely remote work, the transition back to the office is going to be a massive undertaking,” she said. “We’ve never had to do this at this scale before, so leaders will need to be fluid in their policies and approach this as test and learn.” 

Woolsey predicts it will take most employees about 90 days to make the shift. 

At the digital marketing agency WebSpero Solutions, a team of five from across the company – including the CEO, two HR managers and two senior members of staff – are leading the return, according to CEO Rahul Vij, who has developed a three-step plan for bringing employees back: communicating with them, to gauge their views on the return; providing them with mental health resources, to help assuage their anxieties about going back; and giving them time to adjust. “Returning to the office and leaving their flexible work hours is a little challenging for them,” Vij said. “Although we have been reopening our office doors, employees have been asked to take their time and schedule their return when they are ready.” 

Those managing the return at companies are in the process of devising a variety of plans – with the commonality of keeping employees safe and helping them to feel secure, according to businesses spoken to for this article. When precisely offices are planning to swing open their doors also varies from firm to firm. 

With the continued lifting of restrictions around the pandemic, IT company Netrix is reopening its office under firm safety guidelines and offering remote working as a flexible option, according to Don Penland, VP of corporate development, who is managing the reopening. Its plan calls for company leadership to return three days a week beginning May 1, the scheduling of office days by teams (Monday and Wednesday for sales and marketing, for example, and Tuesday and Thursday for engineering), and “incentivizing” all employees to get vaccinated. 

Like other companies, the agency Madwell found itself moving into a whole new HQ mid-pandemic. Since it set up its new digs, its Culture and People team has run point on employees’ return. They manage everything from hygiene and safety protocols to controlling capacity and ensuring staff are vaccinated, said Chris Sojka, cofounder and CCO.

Meanwhile, Sojka is working directly with the design team and the company’s fabrication provider on work stations, while the CFO has teamed with the firm’s production team, architect and general contractor to bring it all home. “It’s taking a whole village to plan our return to our village,” said Sojka, who is eyeing a mid-June reopening. “Our office was always part of our secret sauce and I’m excited to see it humming again.” 

While there’s much conversation around the great return and many companies have set their target dates, others remain cautious. 

“Our priority is keeping our team safe, so we are not in a rush to go back,” said Jenny Dearborn, who, as chief people officer at Klaviyo, an email marketing and automation company based in Boston, is supervising its return. The company recently sent a 15-question survey to its employees, asking for their input. Dearborn and her team continue to keep a close eye on infection and hospitalization rates. Business goals, team efficacy and logistical considerations are also being taken into account. “We see our approach as the data-driven, unemotional way to proceed,” she said. 

Ronan Yemini, founder and CEO of the SaaS firm Eyedo, said his company plans to return to the office “in the next few months, at least on a hybrid basis at first.” A task force is managing its return. 

Meanwhile, Kweli Washington, COO at the analytics firm Piano, said that even though there’s no timeline in place for a full return, many employees are already working hybrid schedules where it is safe to do so. 

Steffen Schebesta, CEO of Sendinblue, a digital marketing platform, noted that with multiple offices across the world, a single return-to-the-office plan is simply not possible. That said, he does expect offices in North America to return “relatively soon.” 

“The general plan for the return to work is to prioritize the safety of all of our employees,” he added. “With that being said, we’ll proceed slowly and carefully.”

3 Questions with Tasso Argyros, CEO of customer data platform ActionIQ

Now that vaccinations are accelerating in the U.S., what’s your plan for a return to the office?
We’re trying to make data accessible to people who aren’t data specialists so we need a collaborative environment where people in different teams, from engineering to design, come together to create and evolve products. We need those diverse viewpoints and experiences from people to inform the whole process. It would be hard for us to say you can only be collaborative in the office twice a week because that’s just not a great way to build products. Typically, we come together to brainstorm ideas and then go away and work through them. As you’re working on those ideas, though, you usually realize there are more issues and so have to come back together and discuss. You either work through those issues through a process of iteration or it’s back to the whiteboard. It’s hard to consolidate that process in a fast-paced environment like ours where things are so unpredictable.

What’s the policy for how often people will need to be in the office?
We’re taking a more incremental approach to what the balance will look like. Ultimately, we are planning for people to be in the office at the same time together for at least a few days of the week. So it’s not two days a week in the office for us, but it’s definitely not five either. We’re signing up for a new office on Madison Avenue that’s 40,000 square feet so can accommodate the whole business. Like many companies, we found remote working great for some things but not so great for others. We lost a lot of those moments of serendipitous discussion because the bar for those quick, but sometimes vital, catch-up moments is so high when you have to arrange a Zoom meeting or find space in someone’s calendar. So with the new office, we’ve tried to think through how we can encourage smaller, ad hoc meetings while also thinking through how we turn the workspace into one that people can use for socializing, whether that’s through events we can run or having smaller spaces near desks that people can gather rather round for impromptu discussions.

Are you thinking about how those policies influence where people are able to live?
If people don’t have to be in the office five days a week there’s a chance they get comfortable with longer commutes if it means they can live less locally to the office, whether that’s moving further into Brooklyn or even to New Jersey. We still want to be office-centric so we’re not going to be a company that hires someone in Boston and then asks them to do one or two days in the office. Collaboration doesn’t happen twice a week. It does, however, point to a wider issue about the supply and demand of great people who could potentially work here. There’s a chance that hiring local talent to work in an office won’t be as hard as some studies anticipate. Yes, there will be fewer people willing to work in an office but there will be fewer companies locally and willing to pay big salaries so there’s potentially an opportunity for us. — Seb Joseph, senior news editor

By the numbers

• 67% of 32,000 workers from across 17 countries, feel empowered to take advantage of flexible working arrangements, up from 26% before the pandemic.
  [Source of data: ADP’s People at Work 2021: A Global Workforce View.]

• 91% of 233 U.K. government decision makers believe working from home will become an expected norm post-pandemic. Only 4% expect work to return to permanent office working in the future.
  [Source of data: SAP Concur.]
• 56% of 1,000 U.K. adults said New Zealand’s PM Jacinda Ardern has been the most effective leader to handle the pandemic, followed by Germany’s Angela Merkel with 23% of votes.
  [Source of data: The Hub Events.]

What else we’ve covered

• While in hospital for a suspected miscarriage, Christine Wetzler said her employer sent her a text saying her pregnancy was causing “significant disruption.” Two weeks later she was fired. The recent move by New Zealand to make miscarriage bereavement and recovery leave mandatory has prompted women to come forward to talk about the stigma of being open and honest about miscarriages and recovery time needed at work.
• In the aftermath of the pandemic, a range of elite education institutions have created online offerings and slashed tuition fees. But they face a new challenge in the form of cohort courses created by online influencers, which are selling like hot cakes.
  
• Pet adoption boomed last year as people realized their need for additional companionship during lockdowns. But now the return to the office is back on the horizon, many are getting anxious about being separated from their four-legged friends. In recognition of the benefits pets have on people’s mental health, many employers have decided to create pet-friendly office policies, to help transition employees.