Month: May 2021

Sherman spoke at Digiday U’s event on May 12 that explored how brands found enough success in experimental channels to make it part of their permanent strategies.

Sticky’s Finger Joint Mission: find new channels to reach fans

In deciding where to take its social experiment, Sherman and the team came back to the concept that consumers enjoyed interacting with shots that looked like “food porn.” “People love to eat with their eyes,” he said.

A notable turn of phrase when it comes to the company’s social strategy — which the team expanded to experiment with OnlyFans, a subscription-based platform that usually dabbles in exclusive content for mature audiences only.

Sticky’s (correct), saw it as a way to promote new menu items and offer promotions to keep fans interested. “When you see something that looks over the top and delicious because that food porn nature has always been part of our social media strategy, we thought we could take it a step further. OnlyFans felt like the right platform to do that and engage the next level of die-hard fans,” Sherman said.

The company had already established channels, from Instagram (with over 50K fans) and Facebook, which the company sees as a “great way to reach people,” but weren’t pages considered “personable.”

“We really felt this was a really cool way that not only aligns with what we’ve been about but a way to reach a much more diehard fan base,” Sherman said. “We want a way to engage with them.”

The company’s small social team knew that it couldn’t be “great on every platform” and recognized that each channel deserved its own tone and voice. In thinking about experimenting, the team considered using TikTok and Clubhouse as experimental channels but thought there was a new space to carve out with OnlyFans.

“As we looked at the different platforms that are out there, we really felt like selecting OnlyFans aligned with our brand and wasn’t something that had been done,” Sherman said.

Sticky’s took to its Instagram page to tease its OnlyFans account — which has already netted in 100 followers on OnlyFans — where fans have already been offered special promotions and tip-offs that some menu items were making a comeback for a limited time. It is “behind the scenes access,” Sherman said.

Sherman pointed to the engagement the brand has had with consumers on the channel — even with the few pieces of content that have already been put on its page. And the fact that users were willing to make OnlyFans accounts to meet them there.

“We’re really excited to see if those sorts of diehard fans take advantage of the things we’re putting on there,” Sherman said.

While users could subscribe to the page for free, they can also leave a “tip” to unlock secret menu items, with all proceeds are going to ROAR, a relief fund benefitting restaurants affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. The company, so far, has kept the page as a brand marketing tool and a place to offer unique specials for customers there, rather than drive back traffic to its own website.

Sherman teased that there will be more from the brand on OnlyFans in the coming weeks and months. The brand saw the private page as an opportunity to “raise money for a restaurant industry that needs help right now.” Tangentially, the company sees e-commerce potential. “We’re going to see where it goes,” Sherman said.

The brand plans on rolling out more videos on the page, from chicken-eating contests to others showcasing menu items, to keep fans engaged.

“We’re really just trying to try new things and push the envelope and see where it goes,” Sherman said. “We don’t know everything, we’re trying to learn.”

“A proposal to make more transparent how ads in general — not just political ads — are deployed in online platforms is a step forward and a big one,” said Papakyriakopoulos, who conducts research at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy to help inform government policy addressing how digital technologies affect society. He would not comment on why he is still waiting for information he expects to receive from Facebook detailing political ads served on the site leading up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The company is making that information available to approved academic researchers through its Facebook Open Research and Transparency platform, or FORT.

Here’s what the Social Media Disclosure and Transparency of Advertisements Act would do:

• It would require platforms to supply data about ads served on their sites, including a description of an ad’s targeted audience, the date and time the ad was first and last served, how much money an advertiser budgeted for ads, and how much they ultimately paid.
• It would direct the FTC to hire two or three privacy and tech experts to lead a series of stakeholder engagements, public workshops and open comment periods to inform ad library best practices and a code of conduct for researchers with access to the data.
• It would direct the FTC to make policy recommendations for Congress regarding what types of information firms should allow researchers to access.
• It would direct the FTC to create guidance on penalties for researchers who misuse data.

Risks for advertisers

Many digital platforms are extremely protective of their intellectual property and trade secrets, while the companies that buy their ad inventory don’t want information about their campaigns or ad targeting revealed to competitors.

Even academic researchers that might benefit from the legislation recognize the potentially negative impact for advertisers. “If someone unscrupulous were to sell [that] data or share [it] with the public, companies that use platforms like Facebook and Google to reach consumers could lose their competitive edge, as their strategies would be revealed for all to see,” said Brian Britt, associate director of Data Analytics for the Public Opinion Lab at the University of Alabama, which uses data from platforms including Twitter and Reddit.

Advertisers themselves might be jealous of the data researchers could access if the bill were to pass. For instance, it calls for platforms to provide data showing audience interests and demographics such as age, gender, location, race and political affiliation, along with any other information that might have been collected via ad system algorithms, or “any other description of the targeted audience determined to be reasonable by the Commission.”

Already, advertisers that run campaigns on Facebook and Instagram have limited information about their own ad campaigns on the platforms, said Ty Martin, founder of Audience Kitchen, which helps advertisers uncover targetable audiences on Facebook and Instagram. For instance, he said there are gaps in data showing how those platforms build audiences that advertisers target.

“There are slightly different motivations in terms of why Facebook is not providing greater transparency in this area,” he said. Martin believes Facebook errs on the side of simplicity in its limits on data provided to advertisers about campaign exposure, how audience segments are determined and so on. For academics, however, platforms might limit data for other reasons, such as privacy concerns, according to Martin. “It’s probably just a lack of incentive; for every piece of data that gets exposed, there’s a risk,” he said.

Cambridge Analytica and the privacy ‘excuse‘

Indeed, data privacy is inherent in discussions around data access. Any legislation commanding greater data access must balance the desire to help researchers analyze how ad targeting on digital platforms affects elections and society with privacy considerations. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which involved the use of Facebook data scraped by academic researchers, Facebook is particularly sensitive to any potential for privacy breaches. An FTC settlement not only slapped a record-high fine of $5 billion on the company, but also required it to overhaul its data privacy compliance approach. 

Papakyriakopoulos and other academic researchers reliant on data from social media platforms say the Cambridge Analytica affair had a drastic effect on their ability to access some of the data that is the lifeblood of their work. Papakyriakopoulos also said the scandal gives firms like Facebook a cover for turning off the data supply spigot. When digital and social media companies don’t provide detailed data, he told Digiday, “Privacy is the main argument that companies give in general, and this became more intense after Cambridge Analytica, and it makes sense because it was a privacy scandal. Cambridge Analytica is an excuse in a lot of cases.”

If the bill passes, said Britt, “It will be important for the FTC to keep anyone with access to these ad targeting data from misusing them for their own benefit. No one wants to see another Cambridge Analytica scandal, after all.”

Who is GARM and what’s its connection to brand safety on the platforms?

GARM stands for Global Alliance for Responsible Media. It’s a partnership among the social media platforms — YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Snap and Pinterest — big global ad trade groups like Interactive Advertising Bureau and the 4As and brands from P&G and Unilever to Dell and Chanel. Formed in 2019 under the auspices of the World Federation of Advertisers, the goal of the organization is to address brand safety-related problems that emerge when advertising is adjacent to and financially supports, if indirectly, harmful content involving topics like violent imagery, child sexual exploitation, disinformation and hate speech or weapons and drugs. In April, GARM published its first report showing what’s happening according to brand safety measures across those platforms. For instance, the report — which showed more than 5.3 billion pieces of content were removed by the participating platforms during the year prior to publication — includes data based on two new measurements devised by GARM partners, Violative View Rate and Advertising Safety Error Rate.

Who is MRC?

Media Rating Council, or MRC, was created back in the early 1960s in the early days of broadcast TV. An industry-funded group with a lot of the same sorts of members as GARM, it has its roots in verifying media measurement metrics and processes from companies including independent measurement providers as well as digital platforms. Over time MRC’s verification has ranged from old-school Nielsen TV ratings to content-level brand safety processes for video ads as well as display ad impression metrics that have nothing to do with brand safety.

So, why does GARM want to work with MRC when it comes to brand safety?

Think of GARM and MRC as partners in a delicate diplomatic mission to gently encourage — and pressure with the force that only ad dollars can apply — the platforms into agreeing to outside oversight of their brand safety and transparency reporting.

First, a bit of background: Right now, the data that the platforms provide for GARM’s reports showing what’s happening according to brand safety measures across their sites is not verified by an independent entity. Instead, the platforms self-reported the information for that inaugural GARM report. And in the cases of some platforms such as Facebook, which already puts out its own content standards and enforcement reports, much of the same data provided to GARM actually comes from transparency reports companies already publish.

GARM wants that data supplied by the platforms for GARM reports to be verified by an independent organization. Because the MRC already oversees this sort of stuff, they’re the natural choice.

But GARM’s concerns are about more than data from the platforms, right?

Yep. GARM is pushing for all its platform partners to commit to three levels of brand safety audits:

1. Brand safety controls and operations: This audit level would assess whether there are sufficient internal controls and processes in place for measuring against brand safety guidelines.
2. Brand safety integrations with outside vendors: This audit would look at the processes that platforms have in place for areas like proper data transfer when integrating third-party ad measurement firms such as DoubleVerify, Moat or IAS
3. Brand safety transparency reporting: This audit level addresses the brand safety data supplied by the platforms used in GARM reports

It’s worth noting that MRC incorporates controls and operations as integral components of all its audits, brand safety and otherwise, while GARM considers the internal controls at platform firms to be separate brand safety audit components from the other two categories. So sometimes MRC and GARM use different terms for various aspects of audits which can add to the complexity of these issues.

So, where are the platforms at in this GARM-MRC process?

Most of the platforms participating in GARM have yet to agree to any outside audit of any GARM or MRC brand safety measures. But here’s where there is some movement as it relates to GARM:

Facebook: So far, no MRC brand safety auditing has been done at Facebook, although the company is the only one of the platforms that has agreed to MRC conducting an audit of it brand safety transparency reporting for GARM. Meanwhile, Facebook is preparing to start a separate audit for brand safety-related metrics with MRC in June.

And another process is underway as it relates to the more consumer- and media-facing Content Enforcement Standards Reports that Facebook already puts out. On May 19, Facebook said it had selected EY (Ernst & Young) to conduct an audit to validate its assessment of the metrics used for its self-published CESR reports. That matters because EY handles most of the audits of platform ad metrics that MRC oversees. Indeed, MRC actually hires other auditing firms including Deloitte and EY to conduct the nuts and bolts of its auditing.

YouTube: YouTube is also more engaged in the brand safety measurement process than other platforms, but has yet to commit to an audit of the brand safety transparency reporting it supplies for GARM. The company has, however, been accredited by MRC for Content Level YouTube Brand Safety Processes for Video Ad Serving through Google and YouTube ad systems. Last year the video platform began working on updating its brand safety processes to align with GARM’s standards.

In general, it’s a piecemeal process and these two platforms are at different stages and approaching it differently. Meanwhile, no other platforms have committed publicly to any form of independent verification for brand safety measures related to GARM or MRC.

So is anything else holding up the process?

General reluctance to participate in independently-led audits that require inspection of data processing and tech is a major obstacle for all the platforms. But bureaucracy could be slowing things down a bit, too. Until GARM’s reporting requirements are finalized and then incorporated into MRC’s brand safety standards and audits, MRC cannot begin any audits to verify data supplied by platforms for GARM reporting.

That has yet to happen according to the MRC.

Many employers haven’t yet solidified long-term plans for the return, and it’s likely that in the coming months there will be multiple iterations as businesses figure out what structures work best in a post-pandemic working environment. That may mean there are many more months of uncertainty ahead before businesses fix on their ideal model. Feelings of uncertainty were a prime cause of psychological strain over the last year, according to Dr. Marcos Iglesias, vp and chief medical officer at business insurance firm Travelers. “The pandemic has likely affected the many psychosocial factors that can complicate the healing process,” he added.

The Digiday research showed that not everyone feels fully secure about office health and safety: 43% of respondents said they were confident their offices would be safe, but 37% said they didn’t feel confident, with the remainder undecided. A total 44% said they still feel unsafe commuting on public transport, and 55% said they are concerned that colleagues won’t follow safety precautions outlined in the office like wearing masks where necessary, sanitizing hands and refraining from physical contact. 

Despite the eagerness of many to return to the office and establish a firm boundary between home and work life, some believe the effects of the last year will linger, and shouldn’t be quashed. “We have gone through this one-way door, meaning we couldn’t go back to the way the world was before,” said David Cancel, CEO and cofounder of tech firm Drift, which has adopted a remote-first approach. “You study history and look at mass traumas that have happened at local or global scale — that population is never the same. We’ve gone through a global trauma, it will continue to effect people in ways we can’t predict.” 

Most businesses haven’t mandated that employees are vaccinated when they return, for fear of being discriminatory. But 50% of the Digiday research respondents said they feel nervous about returning to the office with colleagues that aren’t vaccinated, while 33% said they were unconcerned and 18% said they were undecided. However, 90% of respondents said they were looking forward to seeing their coworkers in person and 70% said they were looking forward to re-establishing in-person meetings. 

Although offices have begun phased returns to the office, many are exploring hybrid working models in recognition of the significant changes that have occurred after a year of enforced remote working. Employee expectations have shifted, with many now requesting more flexible hours.

When Digiday respondents were asked what was most important to them — being able to work from anywhere and having a desk in an office — 83% picked the former. Similarly, when asked what they’d prefer between working to a set schedule during regular business hours and being able to adjust their hours to suit their schedule, 86% picked the latter. 

“You’d be crazy not to build in flexiblity now,” said Brian Dolan, CEO of talent management firm WorkReduce, which has opted to go remote-first. “If you’re mandating a 100% return to the office you’re really out of touch. The horse is out of the barn — you will limit who you can attract. And you will compete with people who are offering it, so it will make you look old-school, old fashioned and unappealing.” 

Whether to wear masks indoors or outside also remains an area of confusion with 36% of respondents saying they will only attend meetings if everyone wears a mask, and 33% saying they wound’t be bothered if people didn’t wear masks in meetings, with 30% undecided. 

CNN, which has about two dozen newsletters, declined to share its total newsletter subscribers. Launched in 2015 as a weekday newsletter, 5 Things began also publishing on Sundays in July 2018 and now has a team of about eight writers and editors working on the newsletter.

As a result of the newsletter’s popularity, CNN rebranded its twice-daily Daily News Briefing audio news briefing in March 2021 to pull it under the 5 Things umbrella. The 5 Things podcast now accounts for 43% of CNN’s total podcast downloads, according to Courtney Coupe, svp of CNN Digital Productions. CNN declined to provide its total podcast downloads or say how much revenue 5 Things generates for the company.

Both the newsletter and podcast make money via ad sales. CNN produces custom ads for audio advertisers that are not host-read. While CNN does not offer a programmatic audio product, they are currently running a limited programmatic test.

“We saw 5 Things as a brand that already had such a strong value proposition [and] voice, so we want to grow and build upon that,” said Coupe. The rebrand gave the podcast a name that was recognizable to CNN’s audience, Coupe said. In under five minutes, the audio show goes over the five top stories of the day in a format that is “short, right to the point and easily digestible,” Coupe said.

Now, the 5 Things podcast — which already has morning and evening editions — wants to dip into the weekends and air more episodes throughout the day “over the coming months,” said Coupe. CNN is hiring a dedicated team of 10 people for the 5 Things podcast.

CNN’s morning program “New Day” began running a 5 Things segment last week. It will be a regular part of the show’s programming. Other potential products and extensions the CNN Digital team is experimenting with include an evening version of the 5 Things newsletter that could cover other regions of the world in different time zones, such as news from CNN’s newsroom in Hong Kong, Segal said. The podcast could also have early morning editions for other time zones that are ahead of the U.S., Coupe said. 

The challenges — often the case for multi-format digital products — are how to bring the newsletter audience to audio and how to get audio listeners to subscribe to the newsletter, Coupe said. Biweekly focus groups with listeners help. The focus groups showed that listeners “wanted credible, trusted information” that can “easily fit into their lives,” not “something long, that they had to carve out time for,” Coupe said. 

CNN’s core business model “is in danger” due to cord-cutters who are moving to streaming TV services, said Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University. “It makes sense for the network to experiment with different kinds of news products that aren’t dependent on cable,” he said.

Livestream shopping is slowly but surely gaining popularity among major retailers — Walmart, Amazon, Nordstrom, and Petco have all turned to the medium this year — but LG is one of the first major consumer electronics brands to try it. As Americans upgraded their appliances and TVs while stuck at home, LG saw an uptick in site traffic and direct sales. The new livestream series is another portal to interact with consumers.

“The pandemic showed us that consumers want a direct relationship with brands,” said Peggy Ang, head of U.S. marketing at LG. “They were clearly okay going to our website to learn more about our products. So we asked ourselves, ‘How could we make that experience more human?’”

Part of answering that question was building an in-house production studio in the fall of last year. Ang said the studio was a way to safely produce marketing content. “The fact we now have this asset, we’re being more bold in what we’re doing with it.”

Consumer electronics are usually big ticket items and often have a long consideration process. Buyers traditionally wanted to physically see a new refrigerator or washing machine before putting down a credit card. But Ang says that the pandemic forced consumers to get more comfortable making large purchases online, especially if they needed items immediately. 

For Gabe Feldman, senior business development lead at influencer marketing agency Viral Nation, LG’s endeavor is a logical step. “This is a category with high-intent search and watch, especially on YouTube,” he said, pointing to traditional unboxing videos where influencers review a new tablet or smart watch. “By producing that kind of content on their own, that gives a brand a better voice in explaining their product.”

LG’s home appliance division did $6 billion in global sales, up 24% year over year, according to first quarter 2021 earnings. Its home entertainment products generated $3.6 billion in sales, an increase of 35% year over year.

TVs, refrigerators and laundry units are among the products to be showcased in today’s episode of The Upgrade. 

The Markhams have 7.13 million subscribers on their YouTube channel and are known for cutting, chopping, and sawing through various items, including a World Cup soccer ball, an iPhone 12 and a Tesla tire. The channel started in January 2014 as a second grade science project cutting open sports balls. 

The duo has featured (read cut in half) LG’s items on their YouTube Channel, which was one reason why LG approached them about hosting. “Dan and Lincoln help hit that organic and authentic note,” said Ang. “And they already have an established following that engages with them.”

“Platform consideration comes down to the target audience,” said Lindsay Jerutis, general manager of ShopStyle Collective. “If I’m selling electronics, I’d focus on an older audience, which is usually Instagram or Facebook, as they have the purchasing power.”

According to a survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers by the Harris Poll and Sprout Social, 78% of consumers are more willing to buy after a positive experience with a brand on social media, 77% will choose that brand over the competition, and 72% will increase their spending.

“Content that connects and converts — that’s our goal,” said Ang.

Flexibility in flux

Flexibility remains a focal point in this year’s annual upfront negotiations between TV networks and advertisers. Next year it may be an even bigger area of interest.

Potentially in time for the 2022-23 upfront cycle, the digital advertising industry may have a new flexibility standard in place. The Interactive Advertising Bureau plans to release an updated version of its terms and conditions “sometime next year,” IAB CEO David Cohen said at the Digiday Business of TV Forum LIVE on May 20. The revised document could include changes to the IAB’s cancelation terms that have historically served as the flexibility baseline for streaming and digital video commitments but have started to be bent by TV networks.

The key hits:

• The IAB’s updated terms and conditions could reinforce its flexibility standard for upfront deals’ streaming and digital video commitments.
• The IAB’s cancelation standard has been more favorable to advertisers than linear TV’s cancelation terms that are being applied to some networks’ digital deals.
• Agency executives would like more flexibility, but also like the flexibility of being able to negotiate their own cancelation options.

The IAB’s cancelation terms currently require that advertisers be allowed to cancel 100% of their commitments up to 14 days before a guaranteed deal was slated to start running. That’s more amenable to advertisers than traditional TV’s cancelation options for upfront deals, which generally limit cancelation amounts to no more than 50% of the spend commitment and require advertisers to request the cancelation 30 to 60 days before the ads roll out. 

However, the IAB’s cancelation standard is becoming less of an upfront mainstay. Last year some TV network owners pushed advertisers to adopt the more rigid linear cancelation terms for the networks’ streaming and digital video inventory that had previously adhered to the IAB’s terms, and agency executives expect more TV networks to follow suit this year. Meanwhile, Roku has gone in the other direction. A year ago, the connected TV platform owner used the IAB’s cancelation terms, but now Roku is offering even greater flexibility by allowing advertisers to fully exit their commitments up to two days before a campaign goes live.

All the flexibility fluctuations make a ripe time for the IAB to consider changing its cancelation terms. But they also make it hard to discern what updates may be made to the industry organization’s flexibility standard. To that end, the IAB is “just on the cusp of issuing a survey to the industry” for feedback on potential changes to its terms and conditions, Cohen said. 

During last week’s Business of TV Forum, Digiday ran its own informal survey, asking agency executives speaking in the two-day event to weigh in on how they’d like the IAB to update its flexibility standard. Unsurprisingly, ad buyers would largely like more flexibility.

“Our goal is always to have the utmost flexibility for our clients to be able to have dollars they can use, especially within the video space,” said Nicole Whitesel, evp of advanced TV and client success at Publicis Media.

“I’d love IAB standards [to be] one-week cancelation across all digital deals. Let’s see that happen,” said Samantha Rose, svp of advanced TV and video solutions at Horizon Media.

However, there was not a total consensus on standardizing cancelation terms across the board. Amplifi evp and U.S. head of video investment Dave Sederbaum said that a unilateral flexibility standard would help advertisers to implement a consistent strategy across the various ad sellers and “to keep everyone on a level playing field.” 

But other agency executives, while sharing a desire for greater flexibility, noted that a level playing field could preclude advertisers and agencies from parlaying flexibility into securing other, more favorable terms. For example, an advertiser may want to surrender some flexibility in exchange for lower ad prices or other benefits. Additionally, they acknowledged that media companies often need commitments to be secure so they can invest in the programming, such as live sports, most likely to attract big audiences for advertisers to reach.

“Olympics, for example, that cancelation clause — no matter what we would want — is never going to be 14 days or cancelable in general. But for our clients, we really would want flexibility and to create those terms on our own in order to ensure the best opportunity for our clients to be in the space and feel comfortable in it,” said Nadia Pesina, brand media team supervisor at PMG.

“Letting the media partners figure out where they can have firm dollars and where they can’t, I think that benefits everybody. And that may change year over year,” said Lisa Herdman, svp and executive director of strategic investment at RPA.

To strike a balance, instead of a single, unilateral flexibility standard, the IAB could implement a tiered system by which advertisers receive different cancelation options based on how much money they spend. But even then the flexibility standard could become so fluid that the situation in a year is as fuzzy as the present.

“At the end of the day, it should all be a negotiation. But we would like as much flexibility as possible at this point,” Herdman said.

What we’ve heard

“I hope the industry doesn’t go in the way where ‘video is video’ because it’s not all the same. You still have your pre-roll video, you still have your out-stream video. So you’re still gonna have video that is a different media channel, but it’s still video.”

— Agency executive in a closed-door session during the Digiday Business of TV Forum LIVE

Stay tuned: The upfront gets underway

TV advertising’s annual upfront marketplace has officially opened for business.

A day after ViacomCBS closed out this year’s upfront presentations on May 19, an agency executive marveled that negotiations had already started. “The market’s moving. Who knew it was going to move so fast?” the executive said.

Not all upfront ad sellers have come to the negotiating table yet, and the agency executive declined to say who has to maintain the executive’s own anonymity. In hindsight, the deal cycle had to be sped up considering the current market conditions.

The combination of a tight linear TV ad market and the likelihood that TV network owners are looking for ever-higher ad price increases put some urgency on advertisers to lock up inventory early. For starters, the heightened competition may take some prized programming off the table if an advertiser was to wait until late summer to secure it. Plus, since networks know the supply-demand balance is tipped in their favor, they can rush into the early stages of negotiations knowing they are unlikely to run out of potential buyers.

This increased urgency is already resulting in rising ad prices. Some cable TV networks are seeking 9% to 12% price hikes, while some broadcasters’ rates are going up by 16% to 19%, according to Variety. But those increases may end up being relatively mild. Two agency executives had previously said they were already encountering 20% price hikes, and the agency executive last week said that some networks are already exceeding that amount.

Numbers to know

$9 billion: Roughly the amount of money that Amazon will reportedly pay to acquire MGM.

1.9 million: Number of pay-TV subscribers lost by the top pay-TV providers in the U.S. lost during the first quarter of 2021.

$130 million: How much money Snapchat has shelled out to creators who posted to its Spotlight product.

13%: Increase in the number of installs for the top 30 streaming apps in the first quarter of 2021 compared to Q1 2020.

$9.99: The monthly subscription price of HBO Max’s ad-supported tier.

80 million: Number of monthly active devices that use Google’s Android TV operating system for connected TVs.

Trend watch: Linear TV’s lack of imagination

Must-see TV has given way to must have already been seen. For as much criticism as the movie industry receives for relying on franchises and recycling old films, the traditional TV industry might be even more of a broken record.

TV networks’ upfront presentations last week showed just how dependent they have become on plying their programming blocks with familiar fare. It’s a conservative strategy, to put it nicely, that attempts to conserve their audiences of people who have yet to cut the cord. But it also seems to cement linear TV’s downward audience trajectory. Outside of major live event programming, like sports and award shows, why would linear TV viewership ever grow if there’s nothing new to watch?

• NBC’s Wednesday night lineup will purely consist of “Chicago Fire” and its two spinoffs, and its Thursday night lineup is all “Law & Order” shows.
• ABC will only premiere two new shows in the fall, and one of those shows isn’t even new but a reboot of “The Wonder Years.”
• Dick Wolf — the creator of “Law & Order” and the “Chicago” shows — will be responsible for nine hours’ worth of primetime programming between CBS and NBC.
• In one of WarnerMedia’s biggest programming announcements for its cable TV networks, the company will syndicate some of HBO Max’s original shows on TBS and TNT. In other words, in the year 2021, streaming reruns qualify for fresh linear programming.

What we’ve covered

Vice Media Group now produces more Stories than text or video:

• VMG developed a mobile app for its employees to produce stories-style content for TikTok, Instagram and other platforms.
• More than 250 employees are using Stories Studio to generate over 3,000 piece of original content each month.

Read more about Vice Media Group here.

Why some brands are ‘prioritizing TikTok’ when it comes to influencer marketing:

• Some brands are starting to consider using TikTok creators over Instagram influencers.
• The change for seemingly anyone to go viral as well as TikTok’s increased usage has made the platform more alluring for marketers.

Read more about TikTok here.

What we’re reading

Netflix’s gaming play:
Netflix is looking to get into gaming, according to The Information. The dominant streaming service is in the process of hiring an executive to manage its move into video games, which could result in Netflix spinning up its own subscription-based platform for people to play video games. Considering how much video games have become like TV shows and movies — with developed characters, compelling storylines and high-quality visuals — the move isn’t such a stretch for an entertainment company, especially considering Netflix’s foray into interactive entertainment with programming like “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.” Maybe Netflix could even finally crack the code on adapting a popular video game into a successful film or TV show.

Roku versus YouTube:
The Roku-YouTube standoff shows how audience data and ad inventory have become central to the connected TV industry, according to Wired. Admittedly, it’s an obvious assessment. But that two of the biggest companies in the streaming ad market have reached such a stalemate — with Roku removing YouTube’s YouTube TV app from its CTV platform — definitely underscores the issue. And the more attention the topic receives from the high-profile dust-up, the more aware people are likely to become of the data being collected by their TVs to track their viewing and target them with ads and the more likely this segment of the ad market will receive the kind of regulatory scrutiny being paid to the web and platforms like Facebook.

Hollywood’s outdated pandemic protocols:
The pandemic is not over, but as it has abated in the U.S., it may be time for the entertainment industry to revisit its safety guidelines, according to Variety. Covid-related costs have been a burden on production budgets, and safety measures, like limiting crew sizes, have also affected shooting schedules. But with vaccination numbers rising, coronavirus case numbers dropping and social distancing mandates lifting, perhaps industry unions’ safety measures are due for an update.