Less BS, More Facts, Some Opinions
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by David Kohl, President and CEO, TRUSTX In the few weeks since Google took its foot off the gas on deprecating Chrome third-party cookies, I’ve been encouraged that publishers and advertisers still appear to be pushing… Continue reading »
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“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Alan Chapell, founder of law firm Chapell & Associates. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has raised significant issues with respect to the Privacy Sandbox and Google’s proposed depreciation… Continue reading »
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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Née AppNexus AT&T is reportedly in a rush to offload Xandr because the company is “losing tens of millions” of dollars per year, Axios reports. Xandr, formerly AppNexus, has been “grossly mismanaged” by AT&T, and InMobi is in talks to pick up the company… Continue reading »
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Crypto-focused financial media company Blockworks is planning to host an in-person event for 5,000 people in spring 2022. That may sound like a pipe dream, with the COVID-19 Delta variant spreading across the globe and cases going up. But Blockworks co-founder Jason Yanowitz believes the rise of “DeFi,” or “decentralized finance,” is a topic interesting enough to draw thousands of institutions, investors and financial advisors to Florida for the event next year, called Permissionless.
To be clear, Blockworks, an independent company that hasn’t taken any outside venture capital money, will not be going all-in on in-person attendance for Permissionless. Like other media companies, the publisher is adopting a hybrid approach and will live-stream the event for people to view remotely. That being said, Yanowitz called virtual events “over-hyped.”
No one wants to “sit behind a computer for 10 hours” to tune into a conference, he said. “The main reason people go to events is for networking. DeFi is the single most interesting sector in crypto right now… and the best way to talk about [DeFi] is in person,” he said.
W. Joe DeMiero, CEO of experiential agency Hawkeye, said that while its clients are planning for large-scale in-person events next spring, “we anticipate most events will continue to have a strong virtual component, to meet attendees on their terms.”
The two-day Permissionless conference will feature in-person networking opportunities, panels, sessions, debates and roundtable discussions, in either Palm Beach or Miami. “The area around Miami has a really booming crypto scene,” Yanowitz said, who added that Blockworks did not choose Florida as the setting for the event because of its historically more lax COVID-19 restrictions.
According to Ethereum analytics company Dune Analytics, there are over 3 million people who participate in the DeFi industry, which lets people access savings, loans, trading and insurance online without going through a centralized company.
Attendees will be required to either upload proof of vaccination to a portal hosted by EventScan, or get a rapid COVID-19 test onsite at the event. COVID-19 precautions mean events are more expensive to run compared to pre-pandemic times, but it’s worth “lowering your margin 5% or even 10% so that attendees are really safe,” Yanowitz said. In the past, a venue for 3,000 people might be chosen for a 5,000-person event, to accommodate last-minute cancellations or no-shows, “but now you can’t take that risk,” he said. “We get a bigger venue that costs more money, and then the margin goes down a little, but people are more comfortable.”
Tickets to Permissionless went on sale on yesterday for $15.59. As of Tuesday evening, Blockworks had sold 500 tickets to Permissionless. Today, the ticket price jumped to $49 and will go up again to $99 on Sept. 1. “Then we’ll increase the price every two weeks to drive continued buying,” Yanowitz said.
Yanowitz expects “high seven figures” of revenue from sponsorships and ticket sales to Permissionless. Since launching in May 2018, Blockworks has hosted about a dozen events, which make up less than 30% of the company’s revenue, Yanowitz said. To have a diversified media company, “we don’t want any part of our business to make up more than 30% of our revenue,” he added. Blockworks is expanding other parts of its business this year too, adding two more newsletters to double its portfolio in the second half of this year. The company plans to expand its team from 22 to around 35-40 by the end of the year, Yanowitz said, to help grow its events as well as newsletter, podcast and content businesses.
Blockworks hasn’t had an in-person event since it cancelled its last conference in March 2020, an event that was supposed to take place during New York Blockchain Week in May. But by the time it hosts Permissionless next spring, the publisher will have put on three in-person events in 2021: a summit in Bretton Woods, NH from August 11-13, an event in NYC in September and another one in London in November.
The Bretton Woods event is invite-only and will host about 250 people, while the ones in NYC and London will have 600 to 700 people, according to Yanowitz. The Bretton Woods event will be limited to in-person attendees. As with Permissionless, the NYC and London events will be hybrid affairs. Each panel will be live-streamed, and virtual attendees will be charged 10% of the in-person ticket cost. Tickets for the Bretton Woods event are nearly sold out. Yanowitz expects to sell out all three events this year.
The biggest question attendees and advertisers ask Blockworks about its upcoming events is if there is a contingency plan if the pandemic comes roaring back, Yanowitz said. (Blockworks has worked with clients like Fidelity, Coinbase, Gemini and TD Ameritrade.) The plan? “If an event ends up getting pushed, there is no charge for the clients. We roll their sponsorships, and attendee tickets, into future events,” Yanowitz said. In other words, instead of moving advertiser money into newsletter sponsorships or podcast ads if an event shuts down, Blockworks will ensure advertisers get to sponsor another event in the next six to 12 months.
“Audiences will dictate how they interact and consume experiences such as these — and this needs to be considered when designing and creating events and experiences. Some audiences can’t wait to be in the thick of things. Others will want to join in remotely,” said Jonathan Emmins, founder of media and marketing agency Amplify.
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The Future of TV Briefing this week looks at how the free, ad-supported streaming TV market has entered a new era in its maturation.
The free, ad-supported streaming TV market has matured through the growing pains phase. There remain some pain points, like the pressure of programming costs, but the swelling of the FAST industry has helped to offset those issues and introduce some stability.
The key hits:
Over the last six months, digital studio Gunpowder & Sky has seen its FAST business begin to stabilize. That stability doesn’t stem from the FAST market settling down, though, nor does it mean that FAST viewership is slipping or advertiser interest is cooling. Instead, it’s a sign of how the business has come of age as more FAST services and 24/7 streaming channels have come into the market.
“What we’re seeing is a growth rate across the board. The line is straighter where the peaks and troughs are less for now. Initially, it bounced all over the place,” according to Floris Bauer, cofounder and president of Gunpowder & Sky. The company operates 24/7 streaming channels across a variety of FAST services, including Amazon’s IMDb TV, Roku’s The Roku Channel and Samsung’s Samsung TV Plus.
When Gunpowder & Sky stepped into the business in 2018, the FAST industry was relatively nascent. Viacom had not yet acquired Pluto TV; Roku’s year-old The Roku Channel had only just begun adding 24/7 channels; and Amazon was a year away from pitching publishers on distributing their linear streaming channels on IMDb TV, which did not debut until 2019. The next few years were a boom time for the FAST market, but a volatile one as companies adopted a “Field of Dreams” mentality by standing up FAST properties in hopes of attracting audiences and, in turn, advertisers. And so they have.
This year Gunpowder & Sky’s monthly FAST viewership has tripled compared to a year ago, and its FAST channels’ revenue has quadrupled in that span, according to Bauer.
As another indication of FASTs’ viewership and revenue growth, Pluto TV’s monthly active user base has increased from 15 million people in April 2019 to 49.5 million by April 2021. Additionally, the ViacomCBS-owned FAST service is expected to receive $786.7 million in U.S. ad revenue this year, a 78% increase year over year, according to eMarketer.
While the U.S. is considered by industry executives to be the most mature FAST market, services have been expanding internationally to regions including Europe, which have also shown signs of maturation. “The biggest indicator of success is fill rates and monetization,” said Sean Doherty, CEO of Wurl, a video technology company that powers linear streaming channels for publishers. Roughly two years ago, the fill rates for FAST channels in Europe that Wurl powers saw only single-digit percentages of their available ad inventory be filled with ads. Now the fill rates have risen to 40% to 50%, Doherty said. That’s short of the 80% average for FAST channels in the U.S. but indicates the trajectory.
Other signs of the FAST market’s maturation include the competition for programming and the polish of platforms’ work with channel owners.
In addition to Roku’s foray into original programming for The Roku Channel through its acquisition of Quibi’s library, channel owners are also feeling pressure to improve the programming their channels carry in order to stand out to audiences and stand up against the programming on the services’ own channels, as Pluto TV adds more channels filled with ViacomCBS shows.
“It’s getting competitive to get good content for FAST services. A lot of the stuff on our FAST channels are acquired programs, and what used to pass for 50-50 rev-share deals are now commanding significant minimum guarantees,” said one streaming executive.
“Content licensing becomes more expensive, but it’s easier to manage because it’s allocated over more platforms and those platforms are becoming a little less volatile,” Bauer said.
Meanwhile, FAST services’ dealings with channel owners are further developed. Vizio, for example, has given channel owners a dedicated point of contact to pitch editorial opportunities, and Roku’s pitch to channel owners features a scripted presentation. “There was a sense of maturity there that was interesting,” said a streaming executive who has received Roku’s pitch.
Additionally, technical issues that had dogged some services, such as bugs delaying or interrupting streams, have abated. “The platforms are requiring, in many cases, that integrators like Wurl provide very fast load times [when people change channels]. Two to three seconds is the state of the art that platforms want so people can channel surf,” Doherty said.
The FAST market’s development has not been lost on ad buyers. Once largely considered by advertisers to be the streaming equivalent of remnant inventory — thanks to channels’ primary programming being old TV shows and movies as well as stitched-together streams of YouTube videos — the FAST services have improved in some agency executives’ estimations as the urgency for advertisers to find linear TV alternatives has risen.
“There was enough shift toward CTV this year that everyone was looking at all of those properties,” said one agency executive.
While the FAST services still pale in comparison to the allure of major ad-supported streamers like Disney’s Hulu, they are not necessarily relegated to scrapping for leftover streaming ad spending. “They are a very viable place to reach the viewer. They tend to be a bit more efficient than the Paramount+s and Peacocks,” said the agency executive, who declined to share ad pricing information.
“There was some overbuying in the upfront. Buyers were so afraid of what they were hearing [about a lack of available linear inventory] and held on to more linear. There could be a little loosening with some dollars being dropped on orders or [advertisers exercising] cancelation options.”
— Agency executive
After Netflix’s subscriber growth slowed in the first quarter of 2021, the dominant subscription-based streamer’s subscriber growth slowed even more in the second quarter. In the U.S. and Canada, Netflix actually saw its subscriber base shrink.
The key details:
Surge turns to slump
Last year’s streaming surge in the immediate wake of the pandemic putting people in quarantine was always going to ebb at some point. But for Netflix’s business in the U.S. and Canada, it has receded to the point of shrinking.
Netflix attributed the loss of subscribers to the company already having a lot of subscribers in the U.S. and the second quarter historically being a slower growth period.
That would explain Netflix not adding as many subscribers, but losing subscribers in the U.S. and Canada may be a sign that Netflix’s continuing price hikes combined with competition from other subscription-based streamers like Disney+ and HBO Max may be having an impact. Or maybe Netflix just didn’t have enough new programming on offer to combat people’s subscription fatigue.
Netflix’s gaming gambit
One way to get more people to pay for Netflix subscriptions — and to keep paying as prices increase — is to offer them more content. That appears to explain why Netflix is making a foray into video games.
In its letter to shareholders released on July 20, Netflix said that it plans to add games to its service at no additional cost to subscribers and initially will focus on mobile games. “We view gaming as another new content category for us, similar to our expansion into original films, animation and unscripted TV,” the company said.
27%: Percentage of people’s total TV usage in June that went to streaming.
$500 million: How much money advertisers committed to spending on NBCUniversal’s Peacock in this year’s upfront market.
473,000: Number of pay-TV subscribers that AT&T’s DirecTV lost during the second quarter of 2021.
17.1%: Percentage of new overall streaming subscribers in the second quarter who signed up for Amazon Prime Video.
ABC, CBS and NBC have released their fall programming schedules, and their plans show how TV is moving away from its traditional calendar, albeit only slightly.
The week of Sept. 20 marks the official start of the fall TV season, but networks are withholding many shows to premiere later in September and October.
The staggered premiere strategy seems designed to help the shows stand out. Overloading audiences in a single week risk people missing the first episode of a show and becoming less inclined to catch up to watch week to week.
Considering how tight the linear TV ad market is, with the fourth quarter typically being the tightest period, the networks are probably also trying to make sure they’re not falling short of viewership guarantees made to advertisers in the upfront since that could limit their abilities to sell their linear and streaming inventory at even higher prices in the so-called scatter market. In the past, TV networks have premiered some shows in September only to cancel them by October and November. So if debut episodes are likely to be the high-water marks for viewership, then doling out those debuts would be a way to ration GRPs.
How BuzzFeed taps its resources to grow an early foray into livestream shopping:
Read more about BuzzFeed here.
NBC News’ ‘Stay Tuned’ has stayed the course on Snapchat:
Read more about ‘Stay Tuned’ here.
Why Overtime is banking on third-party metrics to grow its roster of advertisers:
Read more about Overtime here.
Media giants debate the bundle:
Now that many of the major media companies have rolled out their standalone streaming services, their attentions have turned to the bundle, according to Variety. During the Allen & Co. conference earlier this month, traditional media executives discussed how tech companies like Apple or Roku may look to package together various streaming services to sell to people, similar to the traditional pay-TV bundle. While that may help streamers to get subscribers, it also risks distancing them from their audiences and making them even more dependent on the connected TV platform owners.
YouTubers have developed their own voice:
Creators on YouTube have created their own way of talking, accord to Vox. Dubbed “YouTube voice,” the speech pattern involves going hard at emphasizing and pronouncing words. The trend has similarities to how newscasters talk and seems most common among creators, like video essayists and commentators. That makes sense. These people are largely posting talking-head videos, so the exaggerated speaking style may help to keep audiences entertained when faced with looking at just a face.
TikTok has a misinformation problem:
TikTok’s audio-sharing feature has emerged as a means of spreading misinformation, according to NBC News. On the platform, people can reuse the audio from someone else’s video, which can serve as TikTok’s version of a retweet on Twitter or share on Facebook. The feature enabled one anti-vaccine rant to be reused in more than 4,500 videos that, in aggregate, accrued more than 16 million views.
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With the return to the office at hand, more companies are making the wellness of their people a priority — and that includes physical fitness.
Now, some employees have a high-profile workout buddy to help keep them on course. Wayfair, Samsung, SAP, Accenture Interactive and Sky are among the companies joining Peloton’s new Corporate Wellness program, which provides employees access to the Peloton app and exclusive benefits on its connected fitness products to support team building and healthy habits.
“We heard from partners that they need flexible employee wellness solutions that can meet the evolving demands of a modern workforce,” said Cassidy Rouse, global general manager of Peloton Corporate Wellness. “Whether you’re at home, on the road, or in the office, you should be able to access the physical or mental exercise that fits your schedule, and even team up with a coworker to motivate each other.”
Some companies have gone as far as to create dedicated studios equipped with the sleek bikes and technology the brand is known for, but perhaps the timeliest feature of the new program is its portability, considering employers’ embrace of hybrid work arrangements. “We spent a lot of time asking, What does the future of work look like?” said Rouse. “Everyone agrees that it’s more flexible and more dynamic. Organizations need wellness benefits that meet the needs of employees where they are.”
The benefits are not limited to physical fitness. In a survey of members in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Germany, 83% of Peloton members said their Peloton routine made them feel more accomplished at work while 64% said it made them more productive.
Firms that partner with Peloton, which boasts 5.4 million members globally, can offer their employees subsidized access to Peloton memberships and connected fitness products. Peloton is promoting the program not only as a means to boost employee health and wellness, but also as a tool for employers to encourage employee engagement and workforce retention.
Dan Healey, head of HR for SAP North America, said the last year showed that strategic investments in programs that foster strong employee engagement, teamwork and inspiration can drive positive results that support hybrid working models. “Our decision to build on early momentum seen from Peloton exercise campaigns we held last year and join Peloton’s Corporate Wellness program reflects this experience,” he added.
Peloton has also partnered with healthcare and insurance company UnitedHealthcare to provide members of the health plan with access to thousands of live and on-demand classes via the Peleton app. These will be available starting in September and will be available for up to a year, or members can receive a four-month waiver toward an all-access membership at no additional charge.
Fitbit is another fitness brand looking to build connections with companies and their people. Its enterprise health platform, Fitbit Care, was designed to motivate employees to manage their health and fitness via the personal trackers the company is famous for, as well as in-person coaching support.
Emory University, a corporate partner of Fitbit, reported that 92% of its employees said the service motivated them to be more active, while Robert S. Montgomery-Rice, president and CEO of Bangor Savings Bank, another corporate client, said: “Anything we can do to help employees stay healthy is a win for everyone. It means they are more productive employees — more engaged with their teammates and our clients.”
Of course, company gyms have been a mainstay of big tech firms like Google and Apple forever, while elsewhere, subsidized health club memberships have become a familiar employee benefit. But the reconfiguration of office spaces amid The Great Reopening has inspired more companies (and not just the Googles of the world) to build fitness facilities right in their own headquarters, including workout rooms, yoga studios and walking tracks.
Robin Skidmore, CEO of U.K.-based performance marketing agency Journey Further, said that since COVID-19 the company has made “significant investments” at all three of its offices based on employee input, including real estate devoted to fitness. “Our offices are an integral part of our culture, so it was an important signal to the business that we needed to continue to invest in it, preparing for when we could return,” added Skidmore, whose shop has done work for clients like Clos19 and Airtasker. The company now sports space for deep work, HIIT, yoga classes and weight training.
Grace Roberts, global communications officer at the creative agency B-Reel, said that in planning for employees’ return to the office, it was essential to create a space where they could focus on their physical and mental wellbeing. Its new fitness facility includes yoga mats, Chirp wheels and access to the breathing app State, which was developed by the agency.
It’s just the latest fitness initiative at B-Reel, which counts Nike and H&M among its accounts. “Wellness Wednesdays” are already an established weekly feature of the company, which also offers employees a monthly stipend toward health and wellness activities that serve to help them recharge and refocus.
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