Month: May 2021

Below is an overview of the bill updating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and why Markey and other lawmakers and regulators are pushing back on Instagram for kids. 

First, here’s what the bill would do:

• New bipartisan legislation — cosponsored by Markey along with Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican — would update COPPA by prohibiting internet firms from collecting personal information from anyone aged 13 to 15 without the person’s consent and establishing a so-called Digital Marketing Bill of Rights for Minors that would limit the collection of personal information from teens.
• If adopted, the law would ban targeted advertising directed at children.
• Notably, it also would create a Youth Privacy and Marketing Division at the Federal Trade Commission to address children’s privacy and the marketing aimed at them. Additionally, it would require the FTC to deliver a report on whether apps aimed at kids follow the updated COPPA rules.
• The bill would also require companies to allow young people and their parents to eliminate personal information supplied by children.

Markey already wants answers on data usage in Instagram for kids

Markey, a longtime advocate for stronger federal privacy protections, has joined other lawmakers in criticizing Facebook’s plans for a version of Instagram for children under age 13. “Facebook has an obligation to ensure that any new platforms or projects targeting children put those users’ welfare first, and we are skeptical that Facebook is prepared to fulfill this obligation,” Markey, and three other Congress members, wrote in an April 5 letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The legislators spotlighted the potential for privacy infringements associated with data use and sharing that might be provided by kids or generated through their use of a new version of Instagram, including for marketing purposes. Arguing that kids “are a uniquely vulnerable population online, and images of kids are highly sensitive data,” they asked Facebook to supply details on potential data collection and use by the future kids-aimed Instagram. They also questioned the potential for marketers to use the forthcoming service for influencer marketing and other ad messages immersed in the content itself that children would have difficulty deciphering as marketing messages. 

Why states are piling on to fight Facebook’s plans to launch a kids-aimed Instagram

Attorneys general from states — including Facebook’s home state of California in addition to Guam, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. — argued Facebook should “abandon” plans for an Instagram for kids because they believe it would harm children’s physical, emotional and mental well-being. In a May 10 letter sent to Zuckerberg, the AGs reiterated concerns reflected by others advocating against Instagram for kids, noting it would exploit kids’ fear of missing out and desire for peer approval while perpetuating problems associated with device addiction and body-image dissatisfaction.

AGs say kids don’t understand data sharing and privacy

The letter from the AG collective approached privacy concerns through the lens of children themselves. “Children do not have a developed understanding of privacy. Specifically, they may not fully appreciate what content is appropriate for them to share with others, the permanency of content they post on an online platform, and who has access to what they share online,” the AGs wrote.

While the Markey bill could help ensure that kids and their guardians can remove content that might be detrimental down the road, the AG letter highlighted how children’s lack of understanding regarding data sharing could hurt them while they’re still young. In particular, it cited data from U.K. charity the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which found that “UK police reports documented more cases of sexual grooming on Instagram than any other platform.” The letter also noted a report from the group showing “an increase of 200% in recorded instances in the use of Instagram to target and abuse children over a six-month period in 2018.”

Markey and the AGs say Facebook has a bad track record on protecting kids

Facebook’s version of Messenger for kids was criticized in 2019 when a bug exposed children to chats with uninvited — therefore potentially dangerous — people. The company still operates Messenger Kids despite calls by child advocates to take it down. “This episode illustrated the privacy threats to children online and evidenced Facebook’s inability to protect the kids the company actively invited onto this platform,” Markey and other legislators stated in their April letter. The letter from the AGs also pointed to the Messenger Kids app’s “design flaw,” calling it an example of Facebook’s “record of failing to protect” kids’ safety.  

Facebook has a variety of reasons why Instagram for kids is a good idea

A Facebook spokesperson in April told Digiday the company wants to build a separate place in the Instagram universe for kids to “find practical solutions to the ongoing industry problem of kids lying about their age to access apps.” In response to the AGs’ letter this week, the company focused its justifications more on parental control. 

“As every parent knows, kids are already online. We want to improve this situation by delivering experiences that give parents visibility and control over what their kids are doing. We are developing these experiences in consultation with experts in child development, child safety and mental health, and privacy advocates. We also look forward to working with legislators and regulators, including the nation’s attorneys general,” the company wrote in another statement sent to Digiday.

YouTube Kids might have inspired Facebook to rule out ads on Instagram for kids

Facebook has said it will not offer advertising on the kids-aimed version of Instagram. Not only would strict privacy rules guiding kids’ data use — such as the COPPA here in the U.S. and Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation — pose significant restrictions to ad targeting, but YouTube’s experience in allowing ads on its YouTube Kids platform may also serve as a warning.

The FTC fined Google $170 million in 2019 for violating COPPA by collecting persistent identifiers reflecting children, then using them to track kids across the web without parental notification or consent. And lawmakers are still criticizing YouTube about the platform. A letter sent in April to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki by Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), chair of the House Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy, suggested that advertisers are burying marketing messages in content uploaded on the platform and asked the company to provide details on its policies and procedures for reviewing ads and content.

Why regulators care now
There’s no way to separate the general anti-big tech attitudes among legislators on both sides of the aisle from increased scrutiny of Google’s and Facebook’s kids-aimed services. Amid federal and state-led antitrust lawsuits against Google, antitrust legislation targeting Facebook’s Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions and the FTC’s current investigation of Facebook, we can expect any controversial moves by both companies to attract negative attention from regulators going forward.

Socialfly consolidated and transformed into a studio with mock bedrooms, living rooms and other modifiable setups. With the changes, the studio focused on turning out Instagram Reels, product imagery, stop motion video and more for clients like Girl Scouts, Whisps Cheese Crisps and City Row fitness brand. As a result, the agency was been able to continue to create content and maintain clients.

To build the new Socialfly Studios, the agency let one of its two leased NYC-based office spaces end and moved everything from its studio space into the main office space, where the lease continues. From there, the team’s creative director restructured the office, converting conference rooms into prop and equipment storage, space for hair and makeup as well as wardrobe. Meanwhile, former office space is now reserved for talent and clients, compliant with coronavirus social distancing guidelines. 

The agency continues to limit the number of clients and staff allowed in the studio at any given time. 

Currently, Socialfly doesn’t have plans to return the office to it’s traditional function or bring remote staffers back to their pre-Covid office setting or functions, according to Courtney Spritzer, CEO of SocialFly. There are plans, however, to create a flexible plan or hybrid remote work option, where employees can utilize the studio as office space on a sign-up basis. 

“We’re trying to figure out how to make this work in this new normal,” she said.

Content creation is the one thing agencies can’t do on Zoom calls, said Allen Adamson, brand analyst and co-founder of Metaforce. Adamson said most of the work agencies do doesn’t require an office setting, so opting to pivot to a production studio in it place was a smart use of space that would have otherwise been dormant.

“[Socialfly] boiled down their business to the one piece that can’t be done on Zoom and actually is the most important piece, which is how you take an ad and bring it to life,” Adamson said.

In terms of costs, Spritzer said the agency going remote and converting its main office has allowed them to save on overhead expenses like rent, internet access, office snacks and supplies. Although the CEO declined to provide details, she did say monies saved went into hiring more staff, including a managing director and a new vp of client services and strategy. However, there are still Covid costs. 

“If anything, there’s more added costs because of the safety concerns, the cleaning you have to do, the protective equipment you need to order,” she said. “I would say it’s kind of the opposite [of saving money], actually.” 

But staying in the game, and in business, is mission one and the pandemic and social distancing guidelines have changed what content creation means and looks like for brands and social media agencies alike. For example, earlier this year, the shoe company Reef spoke to Digiday about a new creator program to keep social content production going.

Post-pandemic, the agency world may have learned that the concept of a headquarters-envisioned office space isn’t as important as it was pre-pandemic, Adamson said.

“The disruptive and transformative effects of the pandemic on the ad business is yet to be understood. But the one thing it did show, is that you don’t need large offices to get people to collaborate to make advertising,” he said.

Bloomberg Equality will publish quarterly briefings, revamp and continue its weekly newsletter and populate special sections in the Businessweek magazine. It will also add a new season to its “Pay Check” podcast hosted by Simmons and contribute coverage and programming across Bloomberg products, including Bloomberg TV and Quicktake. That’s already included a four-part video series on Quicktake called “Then This Happened,” exploring how policy choices have affected people at historical moments.

Added to the site May 4, the Bloomberg Equality hub — which is featured on Bloomberg.com’s homepage and is being updated daily — has a section for broadcast clips of business and finance executives that are women or come from diverse backgrounds, called New Voices, which is part of a company-wide newsroom initiative to prioritize more sources spanning genders and ethnicities.

a company wide initiative to prioritize non-white, male sources, Bloomberg Equality will put an emphasis on talking to a range of experts spanning genders and ethnicities.

The global conversation around equality “radically transformed this past year,” according to Anne Kawalerski, global chief marketing officer at Bloomberg Media. It was largely focused on gender and issues of equal pay and equal rights. But after the events of last summer, including the death of George Floyd and the pandemic, the conversation “shifted, grew and broadened” to span racial equity as well. “Seeing this major shift happen in the world, it felt like an imperative to step it up from a commercial and editorial standpoint,” Kawalerski said.

As for Bloomberg’s own DE&I initiatives, the company told Digiday that the senior management team for editorial and research has gender balance: the chief content officer, senior executive editor leading Americas coverage, two senior executive editors leading Asia coverage, and the head of Bloomberg Economics are women. About half of Bloomberg’s new hires in 2020 were racially and ethnically diverse, according to the company. The company did not provide a more detailed breakdown of its staff by race and gender.

Equality is the latest content vertical from Bloomberg. Last year the publisher launched Bloomberg Green, which focuses on climate change, and Bloomberg CityLab, which focuses on cities, adding to existing verticals like Prognosis, which was created in June 2018 to organize its health care coverage. Bloomberg’s verticals can have “a lot of crossover” for coverage, Simmons said. Bloomberg Green and Bloomberg Equality could team up on a project around climate justice, for example. Topics under Bloomberg Equality now touch nearly every company and government Bloomberg covers, so journalists are being “reprogrammed” to incorporate equality coverage into their day-to-day beat reporting, said Simmons.

In 2020, Bloomberg formed the Equality Task Force, a group of 20 editors and reporters across beats and Bloomberg products to report on this topic. Bloomberg Equality will expand that coverage to every Bloomberg platform, including the Bloomberg Terminal and print, digital, social, video, streaming TV, broadcast, audio and events. Executive editor Rakshita Saluja oversees the task force and leads Bloomberg Equality editorial.

Bloomberg is selling three tiers of sponsorship packages to advertisers for Bloomberg Equality: supporting, presenting and premiere. The company did not reveal pricing for these packages, but said digital advertisers included Tiffany, SHRM, Bank of America, TPG, P&G, HPE and Google.

Premiere sponsors get access to Bloomberg’s Equality Council, a network of Equality’s editorial team and industry experts. These advertisers can also sponsor the New Voices module on Bloomberg Equality. Premiere sponsorships span a full year, with opportunities for shorter periods of sponsorship as well, according to the company.

Bloomberg is developing ways for premiere and presenting sponsors to take advantage of collaborations between different editorial verticals. For example, Bloomberg Equality editors could work with Bloomberg Technology editors to create content focused on the intersection of those two verticals, and a sponsor would advertise against that content. Supporting sponsors will be able to advertise against Bloomberg Equality’s content on streaming TV, podcasts, digital, print, TV, radio and social.

“We are seeing more and more companies committed to making diversity, equity and inclusion part of everything they do — not just how they think internally but how they show up in front of their consumers,” said Angelique Gillmer, svp, client solutions at media agency Essence. Bloomberg Equality could provide “a place to show up in front of consumers in really meaningful ways” for a brand, she added.

GNI provided the funding for News 12 to build a new tool that uses machine learning to contextualize every single video clip produced by the local media company, which typically ranges between 85 and 100 clips per day. Then the tool tags the content with labels like entertainment, sports, crime, COVID or, in this first use case for News 12, lifestyle. From there, all of the content with the same tag can be filtered into one dedicated landing page, app or other web destination. Google and Altice declined to share how much money was dedicated to this project. For Google, this is part of its effort to support the journalism and news industry through financial investment.

For News 12’s first use of the tool launches today as a lifestyle vertical on its website called Spark News 12 that is aimed at growing its millennial viewership.

Lifestyle content tends to be more appealing to audiences between 18- to 34-years-old, according to Benjamin Speight evp and director of client services and strategic initiatives at media buying and planning agency Lockard & Wechsler Direct. “Local news, as well as national news in general, doesn’t really cater to that audience, so it certainly seems to fill a much needed hole for that demographic,” he said.

Since the category of lifestyle content is “broad enough,” it allows the broadcaster to take a significant portion of its pre-existing content and relocate it to a secondary vertical that opens up the opportunity for more opportunity for display, programmatic, direct sold and especially more pre-roll ad placements.

“This is a direct revenue driver,” said Ben Monnie, director of global partnerships solutions for news at Google. “This isn’t audience development for its own sake. It’s with the goal of creating more inventory and creating more relevance with a demographic and audiences that are relevant for advertising.”

The project began in 2020, with the idea first proposed to Google by Vaccaro prior to the pandemic, he said. The new tagging tool was created in-house at New 12 by a few full-time and contracted staffers, all of whom worked on this initiative over the past year in tandem with their other responsibilities, said Vaccaro.

Once the tool was built and established, it became a “set and forget” add-on to News 12’s CMS, Vaccaro added. “It took a conversation between myself and a product manager to set up the category tags and define what type of content you want surfaced.”

Spark News 12 will be promoted primarily via social media to start, Vaccaro said. He declined to share initial audience goals as well as revenue goals, but said that this will be a long term project that has the potential of breaking off into other categories.

“We want to make sure that this allows News 12 to reach new audiences with their journalism and create habituation and loyalty with those users,” said Monnie. 

Beyond News 12, the technology created from this partnership will eventually be available for other news organizations and publishers to plug into their own CMSs and use in a variety of ways as well, Google’s Monnie said, with the goal of specifically supporting local media publishers as they build out new revenue streams.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What frustrates you most about the way companies are trying to tackle low diversity rates? 
My biggest concern is that it’s seen as a short-term problem that can be fixed by numbers. A lot of companies are doing reports and actively promoting the results to say they’ve increased the number of females they’re employing or the number of senior people of a different race — but that doesn’t fix the problem: you’re fixing a number, but you’re not changing the culture. And by not changing the culture, it just creates a whole spiral of problems. When you focus on quotas, you’re building more inequalities elsewhere.

Talk me through the consequences of that approach. 
One is positive discrimination. I’ve witnessed it where companies haven’t chosen the best candidate who happened to be a white male, because they’re trying to meet a quota. And that’s a problem — the appearing to change as opposed to wanting to and believing in change. When you’re hiring people based on color or gender, not based on their experience, particularly in senior roles, you’re setting them up to fail. And by setting them up to fail, it gives employers the excuse to say ‘well we tried it as a test, and it didn’t work, so we’re going to go back to our previous way’, as opposed to actually creating meaningful change. And it’s why tokenism remains.

What’s a better way to approach it? 
It has to be from the ground up. It shouldn’t be just a hire-from-the-top approach, where you bring someone of a different profile in — you need to do both so you’re building a fair base, but focus at the bottom and ensure that [inclusion] mentality translates through the business. Many businesses are tackling it like it’s something they can fix at once, but it’s going to take a generation if not longer. HR also needs to be more accountable. More thought should go toward how we develop people and how we change our processes and recruit people more fairly at entry-level. For instance, does it really matter that someone’s had a [college] degree, particularly in media? Probably not. We should look much more at things like people’s capacity to learn, their hunger to be in the industry, their team-building skills. The rest we can train them in. It shouldn’t be the fact they’ve gone to certain universities — that automatically makes the pool [of talent] very small.

There has been a lot of effort toward improving culture with unconscious bias training and the establishment of Employee Resource Groups. How effective are these? 
Training is good but employees need to think about what they must personally do to change. Because the effect of this training isn’t measured in any way. People are asked to sign up for unconscious-bias training because there is an uneasiness around saying you have to do it. But people don’t always sign up. It should really be mandatory. Likewise with establishing networking groups where people can come together and share their views — unfortunately, those groups cluster people that have a certain perspective, and that perspective doesn’t then get shared. 

What more can leaders do to maintain a fully inclusive culture? 
To build the necessary culture you need a leadership that really believes and wants to change, and is actually going to put the resources toward making those changes. Because this is going to cost money and time. And to get it right, it may impact short-term business. There’s a big trade-off — there are companies that you maybe shouldn’t be working with because of how they treat people. That’s why leadership is so important because they really have to walk the talk. There are a lot of people currently just throwing out [public pledges] lines, but they have to act and do things differently.

Given there is pressure to bring about change fast, quotas should have a place though, right?
I toss and turn on this because the positive thing about a quota is it can make some change, but the problem is what is the right quota? Should it be 10%, 20%, 50%? It depends, to be honest. If you take the population of the U.K. for argument’s sake if anything you should try and mirror the population, but that then looks very different if you compare somewhere like Hong Kong. If you put a quota in and say, ‘We want X % who are ‘non- whatever’, in some countries that would be very easy but in others much more difficult, plus different countries are also at different stages of diversity. That’s why the quota approach doesn’t sit [easily] with me, because the problem is, quite often a global company will look at what they see in their headquarters of the country, and then try to roll that across the board, as opposed to approaching it differently and saying, well, this is the mindset — the mentality that we need to be embracing — and trying to improve it gradually.

Latin America grows FAST

The free, ad-supported streaming TV market has grown pretty drastically in the past few years. But it’s growing even more dramatically in Latin America, to the point of already rivaling more established markets like Europe. 

For ViacomCBS’s free, ad-supported streaming TV service Pluto TV, Latin America is “our second-biggest region outside the U.S.,” said ViacomCBS Networks International COO and president of streaming Kelly Day. 

That designation is especially notable considering that Pluto TV only launched in Latin America in April 2020, starting in 17 countries and expanded to Brazil in November. By the end of 2020, its app had been downloaded more than 19 million times in the region. Day declined to say how many monthly active users Pluto TV has in Latin America but described the audience segment as “a very significant portion” of the service’s non-U.S. monthly active user base. In total, Pluto TV has nearly 50 million monthly active users worldwide.

“If you look at the growth in streaming consumption and usage — both on the free and [subscription-based] side of things — it really has been taking off in a really substantial way in the last year. It’s now one of the fastest-growing video markets in the world,” Day said.

The fastest, in fact.

In the first quarter of 2021, the amount of time that people in South America spent streaming shows and movies increased by 240% year over year, and 63% of that viewing happened on a TV screen, according to video measurement and analytics firm Conviva.

The key hits:

• Streaming viewership in Latin America has surged in the past year.
• Ad-supported streaming viewership, in particular, has risen to rival more established markets like Europe.
• Adoption among advertisers, however, has been slower.
• But ad-supported streaming viewership will likely only continue to grow given Latin American audiences’ appetites for ad-supported programming.

In light of Latin America’s streaming viewership surge, media and entertainment companies are upping their efforts in the region. Pluto TV, for example, has increased the number of channels on its Latin American service to more than 90, and on May 4, the company rolled out three new channels for Spanish-speaking countries in the region and three for Brazil. Meanwhile, Samsung’s FAST service Samsung TV Plus debuted in Brazil in December and expanded to Mexico in January.

Companies in the free, ad-supported streaming market are not the only ones taking greater notice of Latin America and the broader Latinx audience. WarnerMedia plans to develop more than 100 Latin American original shows and movies over the next two years. NBCUniversal’s NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises has formed a production studio specifically to produce streaming shows for Latinx audiences in the U.S. and internationally. And in March, Univision — which is merging with another major Spanish-language media company, Grupo Televisa — launched its free, ad-supported streaming service PrendeTV in the U.S.

For Jukin Media, Mexico and Brazil represent the media company’s fourth-largest supply of ad inventory behind its U.S. sources, according to Mike Richter, director of programmatic partnerships at Jukin Media. “We’re averaging right now in Latin America about 300,000 to 400,000 ad pod requests per day. That equates to [roughly] 1 million available 30-second [ad] requests,” he said. By comparison, in Europe the company is averaging 100,000 requests per day across 10 countries. “From an adoption perspective, it is taking off,” Richter said.

Adoption is somewhat slower on the advertiser side, though. A streaming executive who manages multiple FAST channels said that since December the channels’ volume of available inventory in Brazil has already grown to rival their more established channels in Europe. In the first quarter of 2021, the European channels averaged 4 million available ad impressions per day, compared to 3 million available ad impressions per day for the Brazilian channels. However, the company was able to sell 40% of the European ad impressions, on average, but less than 10% of the Brazilian ad impressions (for comparison, the company typically sells 70% of its U.S. channels’ inventory, which averages 40 million available impressions per day). 

“All the tech and ecosystem are just not quite there yet” in Latin America, the streaming executive said.

As can be expected with any emerging market, advertisers typically take some time to follow shifts in audience behavior. They not only want to learn the nuances of that new behavior to understand which aspects of their existing strategies can be applied and which need to be updated, but they also want to learn how the ad opportunities may differ. When it comes to the Latin American streaming ad market, the process is no different.

“We are in a phase where we need to start sharing different specifics of [streaming] or connected TV to the advertisers. The same thing happened with digital,” said Charlie Alvarez, svp of global delivery for Publicis Groupe’s PMX in Latin America. Specifically, advertisers are looking for stats on ad-supported streaming viewership in Latin America, the advantages of reaching audiences through streaming versus traditional TV or other media and breakdowns of the available ad placements and formats, he said. The comparisons to TV as well as digital video platforms like YouTube are particularly important.

“In many cases, regular or open television is a cheap way to deliver to homes with low CPMs and is still where a major focus is in terms of video,” said Benjamin Gomez, president of PMX Latin America. Similarly, YouTube and Facebook provide large video audiences at low prices to compete with traditional TV, whereas on the streaming side, “Netflix is the only one with high penetration, at least anywhere that can compete with local television,” he said.

That’s changing, however. Multiple executives interviewed for this article said that viewers in Latin America are more interested in free, ad-supported programming than audiences in other markets. “Purchasing power is limited in Latin America, so there’s more appetite for advertising in order to consume content,” said a second streaming executive. 

In a survey of 4,000 people in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico conducted by Harris Interactive in January 2021, 74% of respondents said they prefer to watch free or lower-priced ad-supported programming. It’s worth calling out that the survey was commissioned by ad tech firm Magnite, which is trying to make CTV a bigger part of its business. But the aforementioned ad availability stats seem to substantiate the survey’s results — and why media and entertainment companies are making Latin America a bigger priority. 

“That’s the exact same thing we saw in the U.S. five, six years ago,” said Jukin Media’s Richter.

Confessional

“[NewFronts] has become way too much work because to literally take all that time out of our days is a lot. Clients are pinging you, ‘Hey, what about this Roku OneView?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, we’ve talked about that like five separate times. You’re just now paying attention?’”

— Agency executive

Stay tuned: MRC checks Nielsen’s math

After trade organization the VAB alleged that Nielsen undercounted TV viewership during the pandemic, agency executives said they wanted the claim to be substantiated before TV networks use the allegations to claim they fulfilled (or at least came closer to fulfilling) their viewership guarantees and to push for higher prices in this year’s upfront negotiations. Well, now the Media Rating Council — the advertising industry’s de facto measurement arbiter — has weighed in.

Nielsen’s measurements did, in fact, fall short by 2% to 6%, the MRC announced on May 10. There are a couple important caveats to consider, though.

• The MRC only said that Nielsen understated viewership for February 2021.
• The measurement shortfall only applies to viewers between the ages of 18 and 49 years old, which is the prime age ranger for TV advertising.

So what does this mean? Well, it means the allegations by the VAB — and by extension its TV network members — have been substantiated. The MRC’s findings only apply to one age group in one month, but it’s a significant age group and a month that featured the Super Bowl. And, it leaves open the possibility that Nielsen may have undercounted viewership in other months and for other age groups.

More to the point, it means that a tight TV ad market bracing for a tough upfront negotiation cycle may have just gotten a little more tense.

Numbers don’t lie

$100 million: How much money YouTube will spend to pay creators over the next two years to create videos for its TikTok rival YouTube Shorts.

-54%: Year-over-year decline in AMC Networks’ content licensing revenue in the first quarter of 2021, in part, because of pandemic-related production delays.

53.6 million: Number of active Roku accounts, a 36% increase year over year.

36 million: Total number of streaming subscribers that ViacomCBS has across properties including Paramount+ and Showtime.

Trend watch: Streaming “roadblock” ads

The ad-supported streaming industry is increasingly resembling the traditional TV industry.

Connected TV platforms are the new Comcast’s and Charters. Free, ad-supported streaming TV services are the new cable TV networks. And people are often watching streaming programming on TV screens. But a stalwart of traditional TV that has not quite made its way to streaming is the ability for advertisers to reach a large number of people at a given time. That’s changing, though.

During its presentation at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s NewFronts event on May 6, NBCUniversal unveiled an ad format called Spotlight for its Peacock streaming service that allows an advertiser to have the first ad served to anyone tuning into the streamer during a given period of time.

“It’s a way to combat that [idea that] streaming is not as big as prime time,” said one agency executive. To reach the same number of people tuning into a prime-time show on broadcast TV, an advertiser may need to run an ad for weeks on a streaming service, this executive said.

To be clear, NBCUniversal did not invent the mass-scale, time-sensitive streaming ad format.

• Spotlight is a streaming-specific spin on traditional TV’s “roadblock” format, in which TV network groups like Disney set an ad to run in a certain timeframe across their various TV networks.
• Hulu had adapted the format back in 2009 when the dominant ad-supported streamer was best described as a “web video site.”
• Discovery introduced an ad program in 2018 called Discovery Premiere that offered advertisers exclusivity for a specific set of shows’ premiere episodes, whether people watched them on its linear networks or digital properties.

The streaming roadblock ad format may not be new, but it may become more common, as major ad-supported streaming services build their audiences and can confidently secure a certain reach threshold for an advertiser on a given day and date.

“Advertisers will always love day and date because people are people and have behavior and habits that advertisers want to take advantage of,” said Scott Schiller, a former NBCUniversal ad sales executive who is now global chief commercial officer at Engine. He added, “Day and date gives the advertiser the opportunity to have mass scale at a time and be a focal point.”

Traditional TV may be a cost-effective way to reach a lot of people in a time-sensitive manner. But with Spotlight, NBCUniversal is betting that Peacock can pull off a similar feat. And with viewership for major live TV events like the Super Bowl and the Oscars declining, the bar for streamers to meet isn’t quite as high as it once was, creating a newer opportunity for streaming ad sellers to siphon advertisers’ money away from traditional TV.

“They know that we need scale,” said the agency executive.

What we’ve covered

In this year’s TV upfront market, agency executives expect a return to business as usual:

• After last year’s relatively congenial negotiations, ad buyers expect TV networks this year will try to make back the money they felt they left on the table last year.
• Linear TV ad price increases and flexibility demand extensions will be two of the biggest points of contention.

Read more about the TV upfront market here.

NewFronts’ final day showcased the merging of TV, streaming and social video:

• The event’s fourth and final day featured a social video platform, publishers and a TV network group sharing the virtual stage.
• Nearly every presentation flaunted the targeting tools and first-party data that large media publishers and platforms have at their disposal.

Read more about NewFronts’ fourth day here.

Social platforms and publishers retook the NewFronts stage on the event’s third day:

• Creator-driven short-form shows shared on social platforms took the spotlight.
• Platforms and publishers also highlighted the importance of diversity and inclusion.

Read more about NewFronts’ third day here.

Shoppable video and cookieless targeting steal the show on the second day of NewFronts:

• Condé Nast and Verizon Media pitched their attempts to make it easier for audiences to buy products seen on screen.
• Cookieless targeting options were also a major talking point.

Read more about NewFronts’ second day here.

What we’re reading

Podcasts are the new after-show:
TV networks and streaming services are adopting podcasts as a complementary means of promoting shows and movies and extending their share of audiences’ time, according to The Hollywood Reporter. WarnerMedia’s HBO and Netflix are among the companies to get in on the trend. Still to be sorted out is to what extent movie and show makers are able to cash in on the trend. Per THR, some HBO filmmakers didn’t receive extra money for their podcast participation because the TV network considered it part of their promotional commitments.

Netflix calculates its “plus” strategy:
The “plus” trend may soon claim Netflix. According to Protocol, the preeminent streaming service is surveying people about a project called “N-Plus” that may be the company’s move into podcasting and other complementary programming. The surplus of pluses is already a minus on the symbol’s titular significance (except in the case of Digiday+, of course). Netflix’s potential addition to the mix  will likely only encourage more companies to follow suit or to try their hands at other mathematic operations. HBO to the Max?

NBCUniversal’s regional sports networks face relegation:
NBCUniversal is trying to figure out whether to distribute its regional sports networks on Peacock or sell them off altogether, according to The Wall Street Journal. Owning a regional sports network at the moment seems akin to hanging on to GameStop stock. Sinclair Broadcasting has a whole host of regional sports networks that have been losing distribution from streaming pay-TV services including Hulu’s live TV service and YouTube TV and accumulating billions of dollars in rights fees owed to teams. Meanwhile, with viewership shifting to streaming, it’s becoming harder for regional sports network owners to recoup their money through the traditional combination of pay-TV carriage fees and advertising.

Cable news confronts post-Trump era:
Several months into the Biden presidency, cable TV news networks are coming to grips with the impact of the Trump era, according to Vanity Fair. The central question seems to be whether viewership will ever return to the peaks of the past four years, and the consensus answer seems to be no, or at least not on traditional TV. News networks seem like they should be O.K., though. They’ll need to recalibrate their costs as traditional pay-TV revenues erode, but as streaming news outlets like Disney’s ABC News Live and ViacomCBS’s CBSN have shown, the flexibility of streaming may be better suited to adapting to the news cycle.