Month: June 2021

After all, Roblox has been a public company for only four months. And in that time questions have emerged as to how it will consistently monetize 42.1 million daily active users. Naturally, media dollars are top of the list.

“The events of the 18 months have opened an opportunity for marketers to see that the metaverse is something they need to lean into more,” said Christina Wootton, vp of brand partnerships at Roblox. “We’re not seeing the emergence of specific teams dedicated to the idea of the metaverse yet but we are hearing more say they’re building one just like they did for social media several years ago.”

For the uninitiated, Roblox isn’t a video game, it’s a platform where people go to create and publish video games that are often free to play. In effect, Roblox outsources game development to its users, and there are around 40 million games currently available.

People come to these games, or “experiences” as they’re known, for all manner of entertainment, from watching a concert from their favorite performer like Lil Nas X to doing a virtual flash mob in a scene from their favorite film. So much so that users spent a total of 30.6 billion hours on these types of experiences in 2020, at an average of more than two and a half hours per day. For context, Netflix viewers watched 3.2 hours on average of streaming video per day in 2020.

“Roblox enables an owned, always-on interactive experience where any brand can accessibly build any metaverse-type shared experience — this is a compelling motive to get involved,” said Sam Cox, creative technologist at digital agency We Are Social. “It’s paving the way for a new era of branded gaming; but it’s more than a game, it’s an entire gaming platform.”

Put another way: these experiences can be a lot more engaging than when someone scrolls through their news feed. Unsurprisingly, Roblox has already piqued the interest of many marketers. 

From Nike to Disney, Warner Bros. to Gucci, some of the world’s largest advertisers are already trying to reach Roblox’s audiences, which historically has had a very young demographic though that is changing. 

Warner Bros. is a case in point. The movie studio has created a virtual rendition of the Washington Heights neighborhood in New York that serves as the setting for its new musical “In the Heights.”

Launched at the start of the month (June 4), players can explore the environment for collectibles that teach them Spanish as well as meet characters from the film including its creator — Lin-Manuel Miranda. Think of it like a fully realized version of a fan forum, a concept Roblox is pushing hard. 

On June 10, fans will be able to attend a virtual watch party for an exclusive clip of the movie followed by a Q&A session with some of the cast. 

It’s the first time a launch party like this has been held in Roblox for anything other than a music artist like Swedish singer Zara Larsson. The day after the party there will be a virtual flash mob in which players can take part in a choreographed dance as it happens in the film.

“Ten years ago there might have been a Reddit group for ‘In the Heights’ so we wanted to demonstrate what a fully realized spatial version of that would look like,” said Morgan Tucker, senior director of product for social at Roblox. “It’s a space where you could have people coming to talk about their favorite scenes from the movie.”

Partnerships seem to be the way forward. Roblox chief financial officer Michael Guthrie said as much on the company’s earnings call when he told an analyst: “We expect [Roblox] to be different than just a CPM kind of a business.”

Of course, marketers can buy the more traditional native placements in its app store, which include banner and promoted game placements. But in many ways, the Warner Bros. campaign serves as a glimpse into what larger, brand-focused advertising in Roblox could look like in the future.

That said, Gucci has shown there can be opportunities for direct response marketing in Roblox as well. Last month, the luxury fashion company ran the “Gucci Garden Experience” where plays could try on and subsequently buy certain products. In fact, someone spent $4,115 on a limited-run Gucci handbag.  

“Some brands are coming to the platform because they see a business opportunity,” said Wootton. “We’re seeing different types of categories reach out right now.”

But it’s not all inbound traffic. Increasingly, Roblox is proactively pitching marketers. Indeed, its brand partnerships team has at least four execs including Wootton — and there will be more hires over the coming months. Its headcount swelled by 403 people to a total of 1, 054 employees over the first quarter.

“My team is working mainly on entertainment, fashion, and sports but we’re seeing more interest come from other areas too,” said Wootton.  “We’re working with a lot of brands that are treating these experiences within Roblox like a channel in that they’re updating them frequently to encourage people to spend more time there.”

Even so, current efforts are more often than not one-off campaigns leaving Roblox with work to do to turn media dollars into a larger, recurring revenue stream. The reality is that most marketers are still trying to figure out how to fund Roblox.

“Marketers will often say they’re interested in working with us but then they’ll tell us they have to go and find the budget,” said Wootton. “Right now, those dollars are coming from different budgets whether its theatrical interactive gaming or even licensing.”

Furthermore, virtual environments aren’t exactly scaleable in the same way banner ads are. Still, it’s cost-effective for marketers to build them given they use the same developer tools as users do. Once built, these environments can be used in perpetuity. 

It wasn’t something Higgins had planned to do, he said. But after gaining a following on the live social audio app, he took the leap. Currently, Higgins is one of the most popular people on the app, with more than 430,000 followers. Higgins said brand partnerships on the channel have become a main source of revenue for him. He declined to say exactly how much he earns but that brands like Ted Baker, Adobe and Amazon Prime Video have approached him for work hosting themed Clubhouse rooms.

While Higgins was able to attract a following without relying on small audience donations — essentially tips — on the platforms, he sees them as a way to support new creators. He considered them a way for platforms to engage creators, attract their audiences, and ultimately, increase user retention rates.

“I think tipping is the best way to start [monetization],” he said. “The best thing you can do is put something in there that’s quite small and voluntary, and let’s see how people behave. You can understand how good that is for a musician or comedy act.”

In April, Clubhouse introduced a donation-based tipping feature known as Payments, where listeners can digitally send money or tip their favorite creators via payment processing software Stripe without leaving the app. Since then, the app has launched a 3-month long creator fund program, offering a $5,000 per month, per show stipend, equipment and training to help creators monetize their work. 

Twitter also rolled out a donation-based tipping feature, with its Tip Jar in early May, in which users can tip others through third-party payment services such as Cash App, Patreon, PayPal, Bandcamp or Venmo. And not to be outdone, Snapchat last month announced its Gifting feature where users can purchase Snap Tokens to send a gift and creators earn a share of the revenue. Instagram just launched a three-day summit to help creators monetize on their channels, per previous Digiday reporting.

Per marketers, all the signs point to competition heating up between the platforms to keep users engaged and advertisers paying to access their audiences. As social platforms like TikTok and Clubhouse continue to take up audience market share, titans like Twitter and Snapchat are rolling out competitive features to keep creators happy, they say. Because where there are creators, brands and ad dollars aren’t far behind. And it won’t be long before other platforms offer similar features.

“Ultimately, what the platforms are able to monetize is usage. And the more they can point to usage growth, retention of users and things like daily and monthly active users, those are really the bread and butter that allows them to go to advertisers and sell,” said Noah Mallin, chief strategy officer at IMGN Media. “Having a robust influencer, creator ecosystem helps to make all of that work.”

Marketers and media buyers are keeping an eye on the features for now as these efforts could change the way brands work with influencers.

Mallin predicts a potential outcome where brands look to specifically work with influencers or creators with tipping jars, likening it to a social media blue check verification badge of honor. In another less rosy outcome for marketers, Mallin predicts another revenue source for creators means less dependence on brands and ad dollars. 

To put things in perspective, the concept of creator monetization isn’t anything new and can be traced back to at least 2013, when online personalities garnered tips through payment apps like Patreon. The donation platform Buy Me a Coffee launched five years later. Since then, Twitch, YouTube and TikTok have all launched their own in-app take on direct payment options for creators.

However, now the landscape is a bit different — consumers have been communicating on these channels more than ever before after a pandemic kept them at home. And other companies have dabbled in consumers’ affinity to pay for content, such as subscription-based OnlyFans.

Over at the shop Laundry Service, head of the agency Jordan Fox recognizes this history — that tipping features and other monetization efforts aren’t new — but that these new features could demonstrate that the creator ecosystem is maturing, giving creators more revenue options and discretion as to which brands they partner with.

“A lot of creators understand that you only want to really enter into a brand partnership where there’s like a meaningful connection between you and the brand,” he said. “You trust that you’re going to be able to show up authentically as yourself and not have to kind of contort yourself in order to partner with that brand.”

Still, not all content creators are keen on the platforms moving to monetize content via tipping, even fearful that the slew of monetization efforts will have the inverse effect by introducing hard sells. 

“Social media was initially supposed to be a place where all of us could share content… and have fun,” said Destiny Yemayá Davis. “But now it’s becoming this place where [there are] celebrities and people who are popular with their followers, and you can pay them. It’s too much.” 

Davis is a part-time content creator who uses Instagram and brand sponsorships as her main revenue driver. The Facebook-owned platform introduced a tipping feature via Instagram live videos late last year, which Davis said she’s open to exploring but hasn’t yet.

Davis finds herself spending less time on apps like Instagram (a platform that has become a place for ads and product sales, she said). She’s in favor of creators getting paid via tipping, but cautious of more monetization efforts complicating the user experience.

Ultimately, tipping and monetization isn’t a win or lose situation for brands or creators, per Fox. Instead, he encourages media buyers and the industry as a whole to take a wait-and-see approach, noting healthy competition in the platforms rolling out these features.

“It drives creator-friendly behavior on the part of all the platforms, both the incumbents and the new entrants,” he said. “Because they all want creators on their platform to attract and retain their user base.” 

The return to production’s latest phase

Fifteen months after in-person shoots took a hiatus in the face of the coronavirus crisis, digital video and commercial productions still don’t look entirely normal, but they’re getting pretty close.

“We have a couple upcoming shoots that are going to be in-person, and the shoots themselves are going to feel relatively normal,” said Jack Foster, art director and film director at creative studio Stink Studios.

To be clear, “relatively” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. A producer time-traveling from 2019 would still not see today’s commercial and digital video shoots as normal. Mask mandates, testing requirements and distancing measures remain in place, and they will likely continue to be a part of production at least through the end of 2021, said Dani Hiravy, head of production at creative agency Mustache. Compared to the projects being shot entirely remotely in spring of 2020, though, productions are approaching normalcy.

“If it’s on a scale of 1 to 10 normal or not, we’re at like an 8,” said Gabriella Mangino, executive producer at food publisher Food52.

The key hits:

• Digital video and commercial productions have returned to shooting inside and have been expanding their crew sizes.
• Between the typically busy summer season and the addition of remote capabilities, production loads are increasing.
• While companies are relaxing some COVID-related safety measures, they plan to maintain many protocols until the pandemic is officially over.

Digital video and commercial productions began their return to normal last summer. When companies initially resumed in-person shoots, they typically limited themselves to shooting outside and with less than a dozen — at times, less than a handful — people working on location. Since then, as coronavirus case numbers have dropped and vaccination rates have risen, they have eased toward shooting inside and expanding their crew sizes. 

“We are doing maybe not large-scale [productions], but we’ve got crew sizes exceeding 40 [people] at times,” said Hiravy, noting that the agency continues to limit sets to only necessary cast and crew members. The average commercial project has 40 to 60 people working on set, she said.

The production return’s latest phase is coming at an opportune time. Summer is typically a busy season for commercial shoots, and companies are already seeing brand activity pick up and even exceed pre-pandemic levels. Stink Studios is slated to have four to five projects going into production over the next few months, which is roughly double the number it had in production during the summer of 2019, Foster said.

For Food52, last year’s shift to remote production has helped with the resumption of in-person shoots. The publisher developed and refined processes for being able to shoot in the homes of its shows’ stars, like Sohla El-Waylly, Erin McDowell and Rick Martinez. So rather than having its stars return to shooting in its studio, which began reopening last summer, Food52 has continued to shoot in their homes with a limited number of crew members, such as a director and a couple people to manage lighting, IT and sound. That has enabled Food52 to produce more editorial videos — “Before with Sohla, we would only do one a day. Now we’re up to three videos in a day with her,” Mangino said — and has freed up Food52’s studio for branded video productions.

“Our brands partnership work has been scaling up, so it means we can do three shoots for brand partnerships every week. Previously it was like one day a week,” said Mangino.

However, even as production ramps up, companies are taking care to not race toward risk. Many of the health and safety protocols put in place last year, particularly mask-wearing and testing requirements, continue to be a part of production, but that has enabled companies to relax some measures as government- and/or industry-mandated restrictions lift. 

“You don’t want to lighten up too much too soon, but the things we’re lightening up on are putting multiple people in vehicles,” said Adam Zimmer, executive producer for West Coast at production company Valiant Pictures.

Productions typically rent out 15-person passenger vans to transport cast and crew members to and from locations. Valiant Pictures had been limiting its vans to only carry two or three people but has started to allow a few more people in each van, said Zimmer. The company had also been limited its lunch tables to seating two to six people at a time and has similarly expanded that to a few more people per table. As a result, Valiant Pictures does not need to rent out as many passenger vans and tables for shoots, which has lowered its production costs by 5% to 10% on average, he said.

Food publisher Tastemade had been requiring cast and crew members to wear contact-tracing dongles that monitored whether two people were within six feet of one another for more than 15 minutes at a time, according to the company’s head of production Kevin Firuta. But after Los Angeles County updated its guidance in March 2021 following a drop in hospitalizations, Tastemade relaxed the requirement. That has enabled the company to add extra crew members to productions.

“To be able to get extra crew members in there, that can help out a production. You’re able to do more in the day,” Firuta said.

Next week, Tastemade will take another step in its return to production. The company will implement a system to track cast and crew members’ vaccination records — in compliance with federal health privacy law — in order to have fully vaccinated productions for some projects (the company will make accommodations for people who do not get vaccinated for health or religious reasons). But, even for fully vaccinated productions, protocols like mask mandates and cleaning procedures will remain in place, said Firuta, who noted that Tastemade has had no instances of COVID being spread on one of its productions.

However, even as restrictions lift and productions approach normalcy, “we are not going to ease protocols for the sake of easing protocols,” Firuta said. The safety-first sentiment was shared by everyone that Digiday interviewed for this article. As Hiravy noted, “COVID is not over.”

What we’ve heard

“Facebook is killing it right now. We’ve just come off our best month ever [for revenue and video viewership]. We cut our content [output] by 30% and still killed it.”

— Entertainment executive

Stay tuned: The accelerated upfront

The pandemic has sped up many areas of the media and advertising business, including the annual TV upfront negotiations. By February, advertisers and their agencies had already begun going over their plans for this year’s buying cycle. And deal talks were already underway by the time the broadcast TV network owners hosted their presentations in mid-May.

Now, it’s early June when the upfront market is usually just getting going, but ad buyers and sellers are already deep into their deal-making process. Broadcast TV network owners Disney, NBCUniversal and Fox are making sales, according to Variety, and some agency executives told Digiday senior editor of media buying and planning Michael Bürgi that deals could be finalized in the next week.

Driving the acceleration is the still-high level of demand for traditional TV inventory despite a dwindling supply. That isn’t only pushing up linear TV ad prices but is also pressing advertisers that typically wait to do calendar-year upfront deals in late summer and fall to consider moving up their timelines.

“I have a couple calendar-year advertisers that I’ve heard word from partners that are like ‘You might want to talk to them about switching that up because we don’t know if there’s going to be inventory for a calendar-year upfront, and if there is, it’s going to be ridiculous,’” said one agency executive.

Numbers to know

1,000: Number of movies that ViacomCBS will add to Paramount+ this week.

$24.88: Price of Walmart’s onn-branded connected TV device.

0: Number of broadcast TV networks’ entertainment shows that received at least a 2.0 audience rating during the 2020-21 season.

7,000: Hours of Olympics programming that NBCUniversal will air across its TV networks, Peacock streaming service and other properties.

Trend watch: The ad-supported streaming battlefield

A year ago, the ad-supported streaming market was largely dominated by Disney-owned Hulu and free, ad-supported streamers like YouTube, ViacomCBS’s Pluto TV and Roku’s The Roku Channel. Since then, NBCUniversal rolled out Peacock nationally, and Discovery debuted Discovery+. Within the past week, WarnerMedia’s HBO Max and ViacomCBS’s Paramount+ have added ad-supported tiers to their respective services.

Given the influx of streaming services offering current TV programming and TV-quality original shows, the ad-supported streaming war is really only just kicking off. Case in point: the audience overlap among the major ad-supported streaming services is relatively minimal, according to an agency executive. As a result, advertisers are in a position where they feel the need to spread their money across the various properties until winners and losers emerge.

The primary deciding factor will be what shows and movies the services have on offer. That will come down to exclusive and original programming for attracting audiences and a sufficiently extensive library to keep them coming back.

But another factor will be cost. While YouTube et al. are available for free, the others largely require people to pay (Peacock has a free tier but limits its most prized programming to the paid tiers). The cost consideration is more nuanced than the straightforward price, though. What audiences may also consider is how much more or less they may have to pay for the services’ ad-free options.

• Discovery+: $4.99 with ads, $6.99 without ads
• HBO Max: $9.99 with ads, $14.99 without ads
• Hulu: $5.99 with ads, $11.99 without ads
• Paramount+: $4.99 with ads, $9.99 without ads
• Peacock: $4.99 with ads, $9.99 without ads

What we’ve covered

Why Instagram is starting its first training week for creators:

• This week Instagram is hosting a virtual event to support creators on the platform.
• The event will feature sessions with Instagram executives and creators as well as pitch-style competitions.

Read more about Instagram here.

Subscription-based streamers outstrip ad-supported services’ share of watch time:

• Of the time that people spent streaming video in 2020, 62% was spent on subscription-based services versus 32% on ad-supported services, per PwC.
• The influx of major ad-supported streamers in the past year could eventually tip the balance.

Read more about streaming watch time here.

Why L’Oreal is turning to TikTok for commerce boost:

• L’Oreal is starting to sell some products through TikTok, including a special TikTok Product tab.
• The cosmetics company is also working with 14 TikTok creators to promote its products.

Read more about L’Oreal here.

Crooked Media will use Team Whistle’s Snapchat Discover channel to drive views to its YouTube show:

• Team Whistle will manage a Snapchat Discover channel for Crooked Media’s “ALL CAPS NBA” show.
• The Snapchat channel will feature cut-down versions of the show’s YouTube episodes.

Read more about Crooked Media here.

2021 will be the year of CTV and flexible and transparent video ad buying:

• Flexibility, CTV targeting and identity and transparency dominated the discussion at Digiday’s Business of TV Forum.
• Flexibility is not a fad, and how flexibility is found can be similarly fluid.

Read more about video ad buying here.

Mozilla calls on TikTok to tighten controls on political videos:

• TikTok has come under fire for carrying videos that may be sponsored content but are not labeled as such.
• TikTok provides a tool for some creators to label sponsored posts, but it’s unclear how widely available it is.

Read more about TikTok here.

What we’re reading

Production costs are on the rise:
A dearth of set-building supplies is pushing up production costs for movies and TV shows, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Materials such as plywood have tripled in price. To offset the increases, productions are opting to use cheaper materials or reuse already-built sets. Meanwhile, studios are looking to spread out where they set up shoots so that they aren’t creating too much demand for materials in any one location.

YouTubers aren’t journalists, says court:
The Washington State Supreme Court has decided that YouTube creators do not qualify as members of the news media, according to Reclaim the Net. The case highlights how outdated laws can be and how challenging the business of being an independent creator is. Per the law, a person would need to be part of an organization to qualify as a news media member. In that case, a creator would need to be recognized as an independent contractor of YouTube to meet the requirement.

Disney is fighting with Comcast over Hulu:
Disney may be the majority owner of Hulu, but Comcast still has its stake and is arguing that the former is limiting the streaming service’s value, according to The Information. At issue is the decision Disney made last year not to roll out Hulu internationally. Disney executives had reportedly been wary of building up Hulu’s value and, in turn, adding to the amount of money the company would owe Comcast for taking the latter’s stake in the streaming service, per Bloomberg.

In 2012, the Times had two employees working on the Learning Network, and by September 2019 had four. But its team has more than doubled in the past two years, with nine full-time employees now, according to Michael Gonchar, editor of the Learning Network.

During the pandemic, the Learning Network added around 20 webinars on topics like writing, math and social studies, two live events where students could ask Times journalists questions and a one-year professional development program for teachers. Now the team is working on a full-year curriculum focused on journalism and news literacy for students that will likely be available within the next year, following the success of a previous curriculum the team produced on writing lessons two years ago, Gonchar said.

“The Times sees us as part of its corporate responsibility to give back to the education world. To get kids engaged with the news, and help teachers bring the world into their classrooms… and maybe one day, they’ll choose to subscribe,” said Gonchar.

The Wall Street Journal has seen that online education programs can help to spur more active direct relationships with audiences. In August 2020, the publisher launched its first free, course-style newsletter — the Six-Week Money Challenge — to help people with their finances, followed by a six-week Fitness Challenge last winter with exercises one could do from home.

The Fitness Challenge had “one of the highest open and click-through rates we’ve seen for a WSJ newsletter,” driving readers to the Journal’s website, said Ebony Reed, The Wall Street Journal’s new audiences chief, in an emailed statement. The Journal declined to share those rates. Whatever the figures, they sufficed to lead the publisher to launch another newsletter-based education program. On June 3, the Journal announced a five-part course on stock investing written by WSJ Heard on the Street columnists, called the Investing Challenge. 

Informative as publications can be, education is not necessarily their area of expertise. That’s why Penske Media outlets like WWD and Rolling Stone have turned to online education platform Yellowbrick, which currently has over a dozen programs, working with media companies like Complex and Condé Nast and schools like Fashion Institute of Technology and New York University.

Publishers work with Yellowstone by contributing to the content and promotion of the program to their audience. Yellowbrick offers the production, development, technology, marketing and acquisition of paying customers for the programs, according to Rob Kingyens, CEO and co-founder of Yellowbrick. Publishers get paid through a revenue share agreement. All of the people Digiday spoke to for this story declined to provide details on the agreements. The WWD and Rolling Stone courses cost $999, each offering five units.

“I don’t know if we could have built this ourselves,” said Amanda Smith, president of Fairchild Media, which owns brands like WWD and is part of Penske Media. Yellowbrick has “a real understanding of what schools need and want from programs like this. We know the fashion business really well,” she said.

WWD created a program in February with Yellowbrick called Fashion Business Essentials, collaborating with The School of Fashion at The New School’s Parsons School of Design. It has over 15 hours of instruction that can be completed at one’s own pace.

Programs like these are a “great way to show our expertise, knowledge and our contacts,” Smith said. Rolling Stone’s program, for example, has big-name contributors from the film industry like Judd Apatow and Ang Lee. Providing education courses helps “bring more, new voices into the fashion business community” and “develop and seek out talent,” Smith added.

Fairchild Media will launch another course with Yellowbrick, under its Beauty Inc. brand, likely this fall. The company will also do another one under its Footwear News brand after that.

Last fall, Rolling Stone worked with Yellowbrick, IndieWire and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts to launch a course around film and TV. Rolling Stone is now working with Yellowbrick on another course focused on writing. Before working together, Rolling Stone was “figuring out” how to engage with students who wanted to learn about the film and TV industry, hosting them at their offices and having Rolling Stone editors and journalists speak at colleges, said Gus Wenner, president and COO of Rolling Stone.

“The more a business like ours can offer compelling ways to engage online with our content and our brands — we are always looking to pursue that,” Wenner said.

The talk now is all about hybrid working, but there are concerns that some parents will struggle with any new regime. They have got used to being there when their youngsters come home from school or at bedtimes. Some now fear that as office days are reintroduced or increased they could miss out on important milestones in their child’s development.

Of course, parents working in healthcare or other key sectors such as grocery or transport during the pandemic (and who may have actually seen less of their children in the past 18 months) may have little sympathy. 

Yet separation anxiety among parents is a real concern that employers need to be aware of.

Research by energy retailer Love Energy Savings revealed that 61% of 1,000 U.K. parents would miss not seeing their child as much when they return to the office. One in eight are worried about the negative impact on their own mental health as the world reopens.

Founder of the parenting forum Mumsnet, Justine Roberts, said many parents will look to retain some ability to work from home to avoid feeling anxious.

“Being at home for family meals and spending an unhurried hour together before bed and less time spent commuting have been a definite upside of lockdown for some working parents,” she said. “Few have missed the frantic dash to make the after-school club before it closes.”

Parents are also worried about whether or not to let their children have a COVID-19 vaccine.

Research by the Kaiser Family Foundation in the U.S. has discovered that only 29% of parents would get their children vaccinated right away and one third will wait to see how the vaccination program for younger people is working before they decide. Other parents will only get their child vaccinated if their school requires it, while 19% say they definitely will not let their child have the jab.

Psychotherapist Alison McClymont has worked in the child and adult mental health space for more than a decade. She said lockdown has made parents realize just how stressful their lives used to be.

“There have been family benefits of lockdown, and people are panicking that these might be taken away. This is particularly true for parents of young children for whom the pandemic may have forced employers to allow them to work from home for the first time,” she said. “The pandemic has offered parents a rare opportunity to spend extra time with their children as well as reduce the significant cost of childcare which can be financially crippling.”

McClymont added that lockdown had also brought real opportunities for parents to bond with teenagers.

“For some parents the thought of going back to just passing on the stairs due to busy work and social schedules brings real fear. They have been given this unique chance to be highly involved with their young adult and now it’s slipping away.”

However, she felt that any parental anxiety brought on by the end of lockdown will be short lived. “People will once again settle into routines, but the desire to have more flexible workdays is probably here to stay and employers do recognize that.” 

It is not only parents suffering from separation concerns. 

Research by raw and natural pet food company Natures Menu claims that 83% of dog owners are anxious about leaving their pooch alone when they start returning to the office.

In fact, 68% of workers are engaged in talks with their boss to discuss more flexible options, while 14% have set up baby cams to keep an eye on their pet at home and 7% are considering buying a second pet to keep them company.

Melanie Sainsbury, veterinary education manager at Natures Menu has urged pet owners to start implementing techniques early to ensure a smooth transition when they do return to the office to avoid anxiety for their dogs as well as for themselves.

It sounds like sensible advice for parents too.

As more brands make influencer marketing a part of their strategy, the content-creation and social commerce tools platforms make available to creators have become more important: more influencer testing leads to better tools, which draws more influencers, which, in turn, draws brands and retailers.

Key Details:

• Instagram’s native affiliate tool is still in the testing phase and only in the U.S. Partner brands include Benefit, Kopari, MAC, Pat McGrath Labs and Sephora. The test will involve a “small number of creators,” Facebook said; the platform did not provide a specific number or a timeline on when this will roll out to more brands and influencers. The platform did waive all fees yesterday for creators until 2023.
• Starting today, creators who have a merchandise line will now be able to link their products to not just their business account, but their personal creative account as well.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

The pandemic was a catalyst for the influencer space. With folks stuck at home and on their phones, brands turned to influencers to reach their customers on social media.

Instagram is feeling the pressure to do more for creators, especially when rival platforms such as Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, and Pinterest, have already been hosting influencer summits, accelerator programs, and started creator funds.

Instagram’s waiving of selling fees and look into the affiliate space, may help move the needle when it comes to social commerce. 

“Every [social] app will have a creator commerce component. It’s here to stay,” said Chris Lamontagne, CEO of Spring, a creator merchandise platform.

More platforms, more revenue

Either way, the new Instagram features will be additional tools for creators to monetize their relationships with their fans. 

While most creators get their start on one platform, they often expand their presence onto other platforms as a way to grow their following and become more attractive to brands looking for additional reach. Only 9% of U.S. influencers said that affiliate links and promo codes were their main source of revenue, according to an April 2021 survey by eMarketer. Nearly 70% of influencers said that brand collaborations were their main source of income.