Month: May 2021

“The big insight we were seeing is that as travel was coming back we were noticing that the audience that was most anxious to travel and the audience we were hearing the best stories from were the boomers,” said Bowman. “They were the one who’d been cooped up the longest, under the most stringent rules and getting vaccinated first.” 

With that in mind, the airline is looking to celebrate boomers’ ability to return to travel with a “boomer spring break” mindset, explained Rachel Carlson, creative director at Mekanism, the agency behind the boomer influencer strategy. 

The airline is modeling the strategy after other influencers’ affinity to live with other influencers, oftentimes appearing in each other’s videos. A gaggle of teens who have gone viral on TikTok popularized the phrase The Hype House, the name of the space they cohabitate.

“Hype houses are this Gen-Z, TikTok arena,” said Carlson, when asked why the brand wanted to create a hype house. “In keeping with the merging of a young person’s game with spring break, hype houses are also a young person’s game so [we decided] let’s just put these two things together.”

Overall, the airline is looking to find 8-10 boomer influencers for the AK Boomer House — which will actually be a hotel in California — to create content that would appear on their social channels as well as on the airline’s feeds. The airline will provide video equipment at the house as well as the help of a choreographer to help the boomers with their content — which will mostly appear on Instagram and TikTok. They will live there for two days to work together and film content. Influencer payment will be dependent on the influencers reach and rate card so it’s unclear how much they will be paid but “they will be compensated,” explained Bowman.  

Currently, the airline is spending roughly 60% of its media budget for the campaign on digital and social channels including Instagram and TikTok with ads aiming to not only get boomers to travel via Alaska Airlines but enter to become a boomer influencer and stay at the house. Out-of-home spots make up the other 40% of the media budget. 

According to Kantar, Alaska Airlines spent $10.8 million on media in 2019 and $9.1 million on media in 2020; those figures exclude media spending on social platforms as Kantar doesn’t track that. 

So far, the biggest difficulty has been finding boomer influencers for the airline as “there are not a lot of boomer influencers,” said Bowman. 

That’s a common problem for brands looking for boomer influencers, according to Danielle Wiley, CEO of influencer marketing shop Sway Group. “We get so many requests for boomer programs and the biggest issue we have is finding enough boomers to populate it,” said Wiley, adding that of the 35,000 influencers in the agency’s network just under 3% of them are boomers. 

That being said, most of the brands seeking boomer influencers are in “unfun” categories like healthcare issues looking for pitchmen to tout products to help with health issues that come with getting older. Tapping boomer influencers for more fun campaigns like Alaska Airlines’ makes sense to Wiley as “the reality is boomers have so much money and they’re spending a lot of their time online so recognizing them as an audience and not pigeonholing them into [healthcare issues will benefit brands.]” 

Aside from the hype house campaign and the boomer influencer program, Alaska Airlines is among the travel brands returning to advertising after a difficult year. Typically during the summer, the brand wouldn’t be spending its media dollars in a significant way. That’s not the case this year as the airline will spend roughly 25% more during the summer than it did in 2019, per Bowman. 

“The summer is typically when an airline wouldn’t spend as much because people are traveling and the trips have already been planned,” said Bowman. “It’s different this year.”

• BuzzFeed returned to the NewFronts, bigger and more diversified than the last time it presented in 2016.
• Snap announced the launch of a Creator Marketplace to connect brands directly with its creators.
• Vice doubled down on contextual targeting, calling demographic targeting “shallow and diminishing,” and announced an expanded partnership with Google Web Stories.
• Twitter ran through a long list of content partnerships with publishers and sports leagues.

Snap

Peter Naylor, Snap’s vp of sales for the Americas, nailed down the buzzword of the NewFronts (in air quotes): “incremental.” Snap — as well as the other platforms and publishers that presented — emphasized that digital media companies can get advertisers to reach incremental audiences via online video content and CTV that they can’t reach via linear TV. Citing Nielsen data, Snap claimed that nearly 60% of Snapchat’s audience over 18-years-old watch less TV or no TV compared to non-Snapchat users.

During its presentation, Snap announced the launch of the Creator Marketplace, which allows brands to connect with top talent on the platform. The Creator Marketplace will open later this month to all brands, which can work with a select group of AR Creators through 2021 (200 million Snapchat users engage with augmented reality daily, according to the company). In early 2022, it will expand to an open marketplace that includes all Snap creators.

Snap also introduced a slate of nine new original shows. Vanessa Guthrie, head of Snap Originals, name-dropped celebrities who have shows on the platform like Jaden Smith, Kevin Hart and Ryan Reynolds, as well as Snapchat stars like Loren Gray, Nikita Dragun and Swae Lee. A new show called “The Me and You Show” lets Snapchats users use AR to take part in their own sketch comedy show with friends. Rapper Megan Thee Stallion will be a part of a new show about pets. A few new docu-series were also called out, like “Meme Mom” and “Lago Vista,” about a new mom, and the life of seven Texas high school seniors and recent grads, respectively. Unscripted series like “Coming Out” and “Charli vs. Dixie,” and scripted series that touch on social issues, mental health and climate change were also mentioned.

According to the presentation, Snap has 280 million users every day, an increase of 51 million, or 22%, year-over-year. In the first quarter of 2021, Snap grew revenue 66% year-over-year to $770 million, with over 50% of revenue from direct response advertising. Sean Mills, head of original content at Snap, said that over 400 million people watched shows on Snapchat last year, including over 90% of the Gen Z population in the US. 

Vice Media Group

Demographic ad targeting is a “shallow and diminishing way to group human beings,” Vice Media Group’s chief people officer, Daisy Auger-Dominguez, said during Vice’s presentation. It was a strong message for the NewFronts: “end data discrimination.” Auger-Dominguez argued that advertisers should define audiences the way they would define themselves, “through values and passions, not age, ethnicity or sexual identity.”

With the cookie crumbling, Vice took the opportunity to announce a new contextual targeting solution as well, arguing that contextual data helped clients make more return on ad-supported goals by 289%. Advertisers can reach audiences with the solution based on sub-topics, sentiment, emotion and predictive models.

Vice also announced it will bring Google’s Web Stories product to all of VMG’s platforms, so that vertical, tappable video stories format will be featured across Vice, Vice News, Refinery29 and i-D’s web platforms. Publishers can decide where and how long content lives via Web Stories (an upgrade of Google’s AMP Stories format) and are in control of monetization: Advertisers can buy directly for a full screen custom format, programmatically or with branded content, according to Cory Haik, chief digital officer at VMG.

A focus for VMG this year is on Black and emerging creators, according to the presentation, which ran through a slew of programming on topics such as music, travel, food and relationships. Refinery29 will relaunch a sex education initiative for young people and invest more into the site Unbothered, aimed at Black millennial women.

Vice is also looking ahead to bring back in-person events. The theme for R29’s popular 29Rooms event franchise this year is “Make Contact.” It’ll be a party, with a “strategically shorter run time,” and performances and programming, according to Monica Herman, creative director at VMG. Unbothered will also host a gathering of young Black women. Music brand Noisey announced “Noisey Residency,” a fan experience that will include intimate live performances, and digital audience reach via video, merchandise and collaborations across Noisey’s channels. 

VMG also launched its new brand identity — with a circular logo — alongside its new tagline, “What Happens Now.”

BuzzFeed

BuzzFeed returned to the NewFronts this year, its first time back since 2016. But this time, along with its robust verticals BuzzFeed News, Tasty and HuffPost, the publisher sported a diversified business that spans commerce, affiliate, products, licensing and a branded content studio to show off to advertisers. 

CEO Jonah Peretti opened the short, 10-minute presentation by announcing that BuzzFeed is “looking at digital media acquisitions,” after buying HuffPost last November. As young consumers begin to re-emerge into the real world with the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine, BuzzFeed can serve as “a guide” and “an inspiration engine for the modern consumer,” Peretti said.

BuzzFeed touted its first-party data suite Lighthouse, which launched in March, as a solution to the upcoming cookieless future, as well as the myriad data signals across its portfolio that can connect brands to its 104 million monthly users (and 3.2 billion monthly content views in the U.S.) via strategic segmentation, targeting and ad distribution. For example, the company determined from its data that someone reading food content is five times more likely to also search for parenting content. BuzzFeed emphasized its audience of shoppers — people who click on wishlists and shop certain categories of content that match their interests.

BuzzFeed also put a spotlight on its cast of BuzzFeed creators as well as verticals created for people’s hobbies and identities, such as Black-focused Cocoa Butter and Latinx-focused Pero Like. The presentation ended with a sizzle video, showing a couple engaging with BuzzFeed’s content in real life, from looking up recipes, taking on a DIY project, watching a suggested TV show and planning a road trip. 

Twitter

Twitter ran through a number of new and expanded content partnerships across a variety verticals like music and sports. Partners included Billboard, Genius, Refinery29, Tastemade, MLB, NBCUniversal, NHL and the WNBA. A deal with Tastemade, for example, will produce a new franchise called “Holiday Hotline,” where food influencers will answer Twitter users’ questions and issues around holiday meals in real time.

Linda Yaccarino, chairman of global advertising & partnerships at ‎NBCUniversal, made an appearance during Twitter’s presentation to discuss the two companies’ partnership; a big part of it will revolve around the Tokyo Olympics this July. Exclusive coverage, live highlights and a daily live show called “Talking Tokyo” (hosted by former Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon) will all be distributed on the platform.

Jen Prince, head of global partnerships at Twitter, spotlighted Twitter Amplify (which serves ads around free videos on Twitter) and Twitter ArtHouse (which provides brands with resources to help them produce content for the platform).

Twitter also announced a new real-time chart created in partnership with Billboard, called “The Billboard Hot Trending powered by Twitter.” It will track music trends and songs talked about on the platform and will inform a daily video series highlighting those trends. Advertisers can sponsor the chart or content created around it.

“The road I’m traveling gives me a perspective that separates me from anyone else in the business,” said Sullivan. As a result, she’s intimately familiar with the buying and selling extravaganzas of the NewFronts and Upfronts. Here are some of her thoughts, lightly edited for brevity and clarity, on agency transformation, multicultural needs and being screen-agnostic:  

How much of a contrast is there going from buying to selling, then oversight?

As CEO, it’s a balance of making sure my team is stacked well enough to ensure they’re providing thought leadership. This past year, it’s been a decade of transformation in one year. At the beginning of last year we were talking about commerce as this distant future, but if it isn’t part of your practice now, you better get moving because it’s here. We saw 20 percent growth in streaming year after year, and then suddenly it became 73 percent growth. Video is video and it doesn’t matter whether it’s in your living room or on your phone. If you don’t take that massive leap forward, you can be left 10 years behind. I truly believe this is not a year that you can take incremental or baby steps to how you’re going to spend your money in media.

How are your clients handling the change?

I take a look at our FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) clients from a commerce perspective, they’re further down the funnel than other brands. What I see is that commerce could be almost half of their media spend by 2023. Not all of them, but there’s an opportunity based on the growth we’re seeing now and the maturation of how they’re using it. Those relationships are getting very interesting because all those e-tailers and retailers are creating their own media channels. Everyone’s a frenemy now, and everyone’s in everyone else’s business.

DE&I-focused media spending is being talked about a lot this year. How is PHD involved?   

The fact that multicultural budgets are still separate makes absolutely no sense, if we look at the complexion of the U.S. I had one client who I asked ‘Why are you only putting 5 percent of your audience against multicultural?’ They said that’s the number. But I told them that 30 percent of that specific brand’s consumer is Hispanic. Why wouldn’t you realize that’s where the growth is? That’s where the growth is in our population. When [the industry] moves away from demographics and starts looking at audiences, multicultural should be a layer on top of the audiences you’re building and shouldn’t be a separate conversation. The brand needs to stand for something and stand consistently. You can’t just show up for Black History Month and think you’ve done your job.

You say video is video — how do you approach the market that way?

The biggest issue our industry is facing is, even with the 73 percent migration from linear to streaming video, [the latter] has two-thirds less inventory to actually buy. That’s why you’re still seeing the amount of money showing up in linear TV. There’s just not enough opportunity to buy that quality inventory clients want. We’re talking to some production companies [studios, digital content companies and independent producers] directly about [co-creating], trying to figure out ways to get creative and to bring opportunities to clients.

You’ve done partner summits, which are like reverse upfronts, for a few years. Why?

Two months after I came from the sales side, I couldn’t remember who brought me which idea. Was it NBC, was it Google? If I couldn’t put it all together after the NewFronts and Upfronts, how will our clients? After that first year [of the Partner Summit] with just the big media companies, I realized I need Google here, I need Facebook here, I need to see what Vevo’s doing, and look at all the streamers no one knew about at that time. And our clients loved it. We actually got a lot of first-looks and did a bunch of deals. When Condé Nast put together their Prime Video package [in 2019], we took that off the market in 24 hours.

By 2013, Verizon already had been itching to monetize its subscriber data for a long time, Stephanie Bauer Marshall, then-director of now-defunct Verizon Precision Market Insights told a crowd at an MIT Sloan conference.

“Once you get over the privacy hurdle, there is a huge opportunity,” she said. That opportunity? To create a new revenue stream from the data exhaust generated by the telco’s wireless and internet subscribers by packaging it into data products for advertisers. The privacy hurdles helped steer the company to buy AOL in 2015 and Yahoo the following year for a combined $8.9 billion. By owning the ad inventory, Verizon hoped it would be able to tap its subscriber data in ways that were palatable to customers and regulators.

Verizon’s goal of connecting that media inventory with its authenticated data showing locations and interests of its identified subscribers “was the dream,” said Brian Wieser, global president of business intelligence at media agency GroupM. But over the last six years, privacy pressures from consumers and federal regulators got in the way and led Verizon to impose its own data use restrictions, he said. 

Ad stack data limits and new privacy winds blowing

“Verizon data is one bucket and Verizon Media data is the other bucket,” Verizon Media Group CEO Guru Gowrappan said in a Digiday podcast interview in 2020, explaining the company’s internal restrictions against use of user-level Verizon mobile and ISP subscriber data for the media and ad tech side of the business. “So it’s not about taking [carrier data] and adding ads,” he said. Subscribers are “coming in for a different experience; it’s a subscription model, they’re paying for it.” Gowrappan continued, “So that’s a call we made upfront, saying that’s not something we want to put into our ad stack.” 

In some cases, Gowrappan said Verizon Media had used aggregated levels of data from the carrier side of the business. Verizon also states in its privacy policy that it uses data from subscribers to target ads to their mobile devices if they have opted into its personalized ads program Verizon Selects or have not opted out from its Relevant Mobile Advertising program. Verizon did not respond to a request to comment about use of subscriber data for Verizon Media advertising.

In his time as CTO of AOL Platforms from 2010 till 2017, Seth Demsey said he saw the data restrictions at work first-hand when helping integrate Verizon’s growing ad tech and getting related data products out the door. He told Digiday this week that, during his time with the company, Verizon did not employ user-level customer data without opt-in consent for use across AOL digital media inventory. There are distinctions, said Demsey, between “the promise of how easy it was to get your hands on the data, and the actual mechanics of actually getting your hands on the data.”  

Wieser speculated that recent moves by Apple and Google to shut down use of some tracking identifiers including third-party cookies — under the guise of data privacy protection — may have added urgency to Verizon’s decision to divest its media and ad tech business. “It became clear their business would be negatively impacted by the changes without further meaningful investment,” he said.

However, despite what Wieser called the “willfully optimistic idea that telcos could better monetize their data and grow their overall businesses when paired with media,” there were not enough efficiencies in combining the telco business with ad tech, he said. Whether that portends anything for AT&T’s ownership of ad tech outfit Xandr — already reportedly on shaky ground — he said, “I don’t think news of the sale of Verizon Media necessarily says anything for the former Xandr that wasn’t already set to happen.” 

Demsey agreed that outside privacy-related forces such as privacy legislation in the EU and California, along with Apple’s recent tracking restrictions may have factored into Verizon’s decision to sell its ad tech and media properties. “It changes your strategy,” he said. “These were not blips on the radar back then — nobody knew that IDFA was going away four or five years ago.”

Privacy concerns and the zombie cookie influenced Verizon’s media goals

When Verizon bought AOL in May of 2015, and a few months later AOL swooped up mobile media firm Millennial Media, the expectations for putting Verizon’s Precision Market Insights data to work by combining it with AOL’s ad targeting, optimization and measurement tech were high. But the company was already putting the brakes on how that PMI data could be used. Sources told Digiday at the time that “Verizon [had] been notifying partners that they are cutting off agreements for their precision insights product” and would possibly only offer its targeting data on its own platform, where it had just invested millions to build up ad inventory.

External data privacy pressures may have frustrated Verizon’s attempt to erect its own walled garden, too. Already in 2014 Verizon Wireless had drawn negative attention when reports in Wired, Forbes and ProPublica spotlighted privacy concerns associated with Verizon’s PrecisionID technology, which identified Verizon subscribers for ad targeting using a hashed, anonymous identifier. Media outlets eventually deemed it a “zombie” cookie because, when deleted by people, it was built to revive itself like the undead. 

Privacy hurdles were too great for Precision Market Insights to work as a data product linked to media inventory outside Verizon’s walls, Ajitpal Pannu, chief business officer at Smaato told Digiday in 2015. “That’s why Verizon’s gone on a whole acquisition spree,” he said at the time. “They need AOL and Millennial Media, and obviously they’ll use this data but shy away from selling the data.”

Verizon’s need to control who touches its subscriber data and how “led them to buying AOL,” said Weiser. “I draw a straight line between Verizon’s efforts to monetize data with Precision Market Insights to the incidents that happened in the last decade around zombie cookies to Verizon’s recognition that they needed to own their own ad tech business.”

In the meantime, media intensity around zombie cookies prompted the Federal Communications Commission to launch an investigation into their use by Verizon. It ended in a March 2016 settlement agreement with the FCC, which fined Verizon $1.35 million while requiring the company to obtain opt-in consent from customers to share the ID with other companies for ad targeting. 

Telco ad targeting promises fall short for advertisers

Regulatory rules and Verizon Media’s own self-imposed restrictions on data use had a negative effect on whether marketers wanted to spend money on its growing platform.

Despite the large audiences it had accumulated through media acquisitions, the company’s reluctance to connect with demand-side platforms and open ad exchanges, or allow user-level Verizon data to be used to find matches to specific people for ad targeting, limited Verizon Media audience sizes and relevance for advertisers, said Jen Strojin, svp of account services at full-service marketing agency Aisle Rocket. “All of that PII [personally-identifiable information] data they have is really hard to leverage,” she said. In her experience testing the company’s offerings, she said, “Verizon’s first-party data would be off the table.”

In general, said Dan Larden, managing partner, product and partnerships at agency Infectious Media, data privacy-related limitations have prevented telcos from bringing the promise of employing subscriber data for ad targeting to fruition. “Especially for the telcos we’ve spoken to in Europe, where we’ve tried to activate that [carrier or ISP subscriber] data, they’re so cautious that by the time that the activation of that media is happening, it’s been aggregated in a way that means you’ve lost the benefit of that audience targeting,” he said.

Verizon’s data use limitations reportedly contributed to the departure in 2018 of one of the champions of its media-owning approach, Verizon’s head of media and advertising, Tim Armstrong. Before he left, the Wall Street Journal reported that, “Verizon and Oath executives have disagreed over what some employees within the digital ad unit see as an overly conservative approach to using wireless subscriber data to boost Oath’s advertising revenue.” The report also noted, “Senior executives within Verizon are wary of potentially alienating lucrative wireless customers in the name of adding incremental advertising revenue.”

That was true for Verizon’s important b-to-b customers, too, said Demsey, who these days helps run 300 Qubits, a tech incubator he co-founded. “Verizon is an enormous b-to-b IT service provider, so many people trust them,” he said, calling the company’s restrictions on using subscriber data “the right thing to have sacred.”