Month: July 2021

BuzzFeed now finds itself in an opportunistic position in the livestream space, thanks to its ability to combine its affiliate commerce business, its product licensing business and its video production studio business to create hours-long programming that highlights shoppable products to its audience.

“QVC and HSN are like two of the largest platforms that have been doing live shopping for decades so we definitely know the [livestream shopping] behavior exists [in the U.S.],” said Nilla Ali, BuzzFeed’s svp of commerce, “but what we’re super keen on cracking is how do we unlock that same behavior for a new generation.”

Since the beginning of the year, BuzzFeed has put on more than 50 livestreams on Amazon Live (the online marketplace’s shoppable livestream offering), which ranged between one and three hours in length, with 90 minutes being the sweet spot, according to Ali. In 2020, the publisher hosted a 16-hour-long livestream for Amazon Prime Day that generated over 1 million views across the main Amazon Live video as well as on the syndicated stream on Facebook Live, she said.

Ali declined to disclose the number of sales that have been transacted during the company’s livestreams, but said that it was meaningful enough that this is a business model her team is doubling down on this year.

One of the biggest barriers to entry with livestream shopping, Ali said, was finding a platform or a tech stack that would enable easy transactions that would not pull away from the programming, which is why her team is working with Amazon Live. The plan is ultimately to build a livestream platform that will work on BuzzFeed’s owned and operated sites, but there are no set plans for that launch yet.

Ali also would not disclose the terms of the partnership, but noted that revenue share models are traditional in the livestream space. She cited big branded content opportunities for advertisers looking for bottom-of-the-funnel KPIs from this type of campaign.

For the time being, Ali said BuzzFeed’s biggest opportunity lies in content programming, which starts at the storyboarding phase and goes all the way to producing the actual livestream. Given that the publisher has its own production studio and a collection of homegrown talent it has brought up through its own editorial series, she said BuzzFeed is at an advantage for producing entertaining, non-scripted content that will keep audiences watching and ready to buy.

For the 16-hour live stream on Prime Day, the programming included in-house talent Hannah Williams, who had her kids unboxing items from the sale that they picked out, while another creator redecorated her apartment in real time using items available in the sale. And in order to attract more Gen Z shoppers, Ali said TikTokers and Instagram influencers have been invited on as well, in hopes that their followers come to the livestream for further amplification.

While Amazon Live and Facebook Live are the only platforms that BuzzFeed has experimented on thus far for livestream shopping, Ali said that social amplification pre-event and during the stream is a major marketing tactic being used to drive more awareness to new platforms.

However, some brands and retailers have begun experimenting with a less formalized version of livestream shopping on other social media platforms. 

Instagram Live and TikTok Live are also allowing brands to showcase items while interacting with consumers, but they do not have the check-out functionality on either platform that gives people the chance to purchase in-program. Instead, some brands offer discount codes or incentives to drive customers to their websites from the livestream, which creates excitement but also gives the brand the ability to track the livestream’s success, according to Ben Zettler, a digital marketing and e-commerce consultant and founder of Ben Zettler Digital Media. 

Zettler said none of his clients have had “crazy levels of success” yet with this model to make it a core part of their business strategy. But he added that he sees this as an area of opportunity for any retailer or product category, so long as there is a hook to get consumers excited about pressing the buy button in the moment. 

Product drops, which release a small number of limited-edition items on a first-come, first-serve basis, are “where you can create hype and excitement,” said Zettler. This, combined with the assistance of publisher programming and access to those audiences, is where the success will come into play, he added.

“The nature of live shopping — you’re asking a consumer to pull out their credit card and buy something without having the time to think about it or research it or go through the typical consumer journey before you make a purchase,” said Ali. “When needing to compress the buying cycle, you need to give consumers a reason to take action that quickly.”

While it is too early to talk about the potential of combined Complex and BuzzFeed commerce integrations, Ali said that the Complex audience is already very primed for the product drop model, which is a tentpole of its ComplexCon and ComplexLand franchises.

“Right now, I’m thinking that one of the directions that we’ll go down is a data science drive approach when it comes to those fragments of journeys,” said Brian Harte, head of customer engagement and e-marketing at Tourism Ireland.

This way there’s at least a system to corral all the data sets Harte’s team can access once third-party cookies go. It’s important because so much of this plan rests on marketers knowing how their ads, whether it’s on Google, Facebook, or elsewhere, result in reaching someone in Ireland.

It also needed a way to continue tracking whether ads drove people to book a trip on another site sans third-party cookies. A marketing body like Tourism Ireland doesn’t actually sell tickets to the country. So it struck a deal with travel data firm Adara, which provides evidence of searches and conversions for Ireland on third-party travel sites. It means the advertiser can see whether its ads are generating sales and searches on other sites at a campaign level. These then become the fragments of the customer journey that Tourism Ireland’s data scientists knit together.

“Not only will we be able to understand the journey fragment and its conversion, but we can also start to understand the relationship between those fragments both in terms of the sequencing and contribution [to conversion], especially when you pair them with a first-party environment we control,” said Harte. 

Like all things identity-related, however, Tourism Ireland’s plan, developed in partnership with Omnciom’s OMD, comes with a lot of caveats. For example, questions remain over how many so-called “presence campaigns” it would need to run. These are the ads it targets to people in Ireland it believes have traveled there after seeing one if its ads. Thanks to the third-party cookie, it only needs to run one or two of those ads. But without those cookies, more ads may need to be run in a lot more places to get a clearer view of how people behave in each one.

“That’s a lot of presence campaigns we’d potentially need to run, which is tricky because it layers a lot of administration on top of the marketing process,” said Harte. “We could spend our lives in data science and not necessarily get an answer.”

The tough choices don’t stop there. 

At some point, the advertiser’s ad tech stack will need to be overhauled. Indeed, it is already working with Adara’s data cleanroom product, which has over a billion first-party IDs across multiple partners. That said, there won’t be any big changes for a while, said Harte. Not when there’s so much uncertainty in the market. 

“We’ll continue with ad tech stack in the medium term as there’s a lot we can learn from the smaller subsets of journeys that were able to see,” said Harte. “From a martech perspective, it will give us crucial time for our models to learn what works and inform our choices of architecture, processes, formats and creative going forward.”

That’s a lot to untangle for any marketer  — even more so when you’re smaller and can’t afford to test as many alternatives to third-party cookies as you’d like. Get it wrong and everything from targeting to measurement can be put out of kilter. And if that happens marketers are usually left out of pocket. No third-party cookies and blunt targeting mean marketers like Harte have to spend more money on impressions. Naturally, he is cautious. 

“We’re still uncertain about the nature of identity post depreciation of the third-party cookie in Chrome,” said Harte.

What he is certain about, however, is that those cookies will be replaced by a mix of solutions, not one. 

These approaches will be a blend of the following: first, there will be authenticated IDs, which are essentially the email and single sign-on solutions used by tech platforms and increasingly publishers; then there are probabilistic IDs that rely on relationships between different first-party IDs to support cross-domain targeting and measurement when authenticated solutions aren’t available; next, there are contextual or cohort-based solutions, which use content and other device signals such as time and location and leveraging machine learning to cluster and group similar devices together according to interests. Finally, there’s the use of data partnerships and first-party IDs that publishers develop and limit to their own owned and operated ecosystems.

“Marketers are realizing that a better path is to develop a combination of solutions, building a more cohesive identity that works across and with the walled gardens, owned experiences and existing first-party data ecosystems,” said Whitney Hutchinson, head of data and analytics at Razorfish. “The opportunity is to lean into first-party relationships and maximize the value exchange, which only strengthens a marketer’s foundation and long-term footing with their customers.”

Again, there’s a catch to this approach. Sure, the portfolio approach is the most pragmatic given the state of the market, but it won’t always be the most practical — especially for smaller advertisers like Tourism Ireland. A portfolio of multiple solutions is hard for smaller teams in smaller markets to manage, for example. 

“Nevertheless, there’s a pragmatism we will need to have throughout this process,” said Harte. “It will definitely be a portfolio approach.”

“The use of that word, if it doesn’t already scare people and make them want to take action they should now,” said Arun Kumar, chief data and marketing technology officer for IPG, which owns marketing data giants Acxiom and Kinesso. He called the Biden administration’s use of the term surveillance in the context of data collection “a wakeup call for brands.”

The July 9 executive order uses “surveillance” in just two places. After referencing “the aggregation of data, unfair competition in attention markets [and] the surveillance of users” in relation to big digital platforms, the order called on the Federal Trade Commission to use its existing rulemaking powers to address “unfair data collection and surveillance practices that may damage competition, consumer autonomy, and consumer privacy.” The context of the executive order — competition — and reference to the “dominant Internet platforms” offers clues regarding how the White House defines phrases like “surveillance of users” and “surveillance practices.” However, Kumar said it could signify broader application of the word in connection with all digital advertising.

“I will not be surprised if more legislators or more regulators take a cue from this order and decide that [it is appropriate to] use the word ‘surveillance’ with respect to digital advertising,” said Kumar.

The White House did not respond to a request to comment. 

Language evolution and the ‘Surveillance Capitalism’ effect

When the term “surveillance capitalism” entered the lexicon of magazine think-pieces and public radio talk shows, it came amid a wave of interest in the 2019 tome, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” by Harvard Business School emeritus professor Shoshanna Zuboff.

Many familiar with the intricacies of data use for marketing and digital advertising may have dismissed it as ivory tower hyperbole, or just more fodder for the same fringe critics who had fought against data-driven targeted advertising for years. But language matters, particularly because as it evolves, perceptions evolve along with it.

The s-word is slowly seeping into government parlance as a way to illustrate the effects of data collection as the source of revenue for digital businesses. When Rep. Anna Eshoo, a Democrat representing the Silicon Valley region, admonished the CEOs of Facebook, Google and Twitter during a March congressional hearing on disinformation, she said she planned to introduce “a bill that is going to ban this business model of surveillance advertising.” She didn’t provide any more detail on the bill and has yet to introduce it. 

More recently in Europe, advocacy groups and media outlets have employed the term “surveillance-based” ads in support of a reform to EU digital services rules that would ban ads targeted using data gleaned through online tracking. And, in a February opinion piece, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen referred to Zuboff’s book and wrote that “it is true that whenever we visit a website and are asked to create a profile or when we conveniently register with a large platform, we have no idea what happens to our data.”

“It’s not called surveillance capitalism to be melodramatic,” said Zuboff. Her book offers up a variety of definitions for “surveillance capitalism,” including “A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sales.”

Instead, Zuboff told Digiday the phrase is meant to counter the “euphemistic” wordsmithing of companies whose businesses are built on data collection. “Part of what we deal with in this domain between people and the huge tech companies is a veil of euphemism where things that should not be normal are normalized,” she said. “It is meant to convey the technical requirements for these companies to produce revenue and those technical requirements begin with massive-scale, human-generated data.”

‘An intentionally pejorative term‘

Use of the word surveillance in the White House order is significant, Zuboff said, because it “represents the movement of thinking and comprehension on the part of our lawmakers and elected officials.” She noted the importance of the administration’s use of the term in the frame of antitrust and competition. “Just the shift in vocabulary itself tells the public that we are in a political contest here. This is a contest about power; this is not simply a contest about technology — this is corporate power.”

Use of word in the White House order is “an evolution on this recognition that consumers don’t adequately understand or consent to the advertising ecosystem,” said technologist and longtime thorn-in-the-side-of-data-driven-advertisers Ashkan Soltani, who helped craft the California Consumer Privacy Act and served in the FTC’s Division of Privacy and Identity Protection.

“The word ‘surveillance’ is an intentionally pejorative term,” said Kumar, because it “paints with a common brush and says that everyone of the ecosystem is guilty.” 

The executive order implies that surveillance in the context of war and foreign intelligence gathering — something the U.S. has been engaged in for decades — is equivalent to data gathering for advertising, he said. “It’s the same U.S. government that is now saying that the term surveillance can be used in association with collection of data.” Inclusion of the word in the order, he added, “is very unfortunate because it tends to conflate certain issues and [indicates] that the administration has bought into certain approaches.”

Brands need to ‘speak up now‘

To be sure, lawmakers have linked government surveillance with data collection for marketing purposes before. Back in 2013, West Virginia Democrat Sen. Jay Rockefeller suggested that the National Security Agency is held to higher accountability than data brokers are. But Kumar and Soltani both said specific use of the term “surveillance” in the executive order is different, not only because it calls on the FTC to make rules in response to it. “It’s different than one senator making a comment,” said Soltani, explaining that the term “surveillance advertising” inspired by Zuboff is “now shorthand for this problem.”

There is a “big, huge distinction between the two,” said Kumar. “Why this is more meaningful than the comment about data brokers is, in a way, this sort of tends to legitimatize the use of the word ‘surveillance,’” in relation to data collection for advertising, he said.

Kumar lamented what he believes to be an absence from brands in the conversation around data collection for advertising. Legislators have “allowed the Googles and the Facebooks of the world to represent the digital ecosystem. I don’t think brands are as active as they should be,” he said, suggesting that brands need to “speak up now” about how targeted advertising supports journalism and create common industry standards for things like personal and sensitive data. 

“We have allowed the dialogue to be taken in directions where we have not explained what we truly do,” he said.

Many athletes have made moves into the media business, from Derek Jeter with The Players’ Tribune to LeBron James with Uninterrupted and SpringHill Entertainment to Alex Morgan, Sue Bird, Chloe Kim and Simone Manuel with TOGETHXR. That list also includes Kevin Durant.

Through their company Thirty Five Ventures, the NBA star and his business partner Rich Kleiman have been building a media business that has evolved from a channel on YouTube and show on ESPN+ into a media company called The Boardroom.

“Boardroom was an evolution of us wanting to have a voice, knowing we had a voice but wanting to have our take and our point of view on the sports world and on what was happening in the culture around the sports world,” Kleiman said in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

On pushing into podcasting

It felt obvious and most on brand for us to continue to expand Boardroom. We had clearly defined what Boardroom was; we now just have to grow it. But in order to grow it, we have to really define both Kevin’s and my voice within the brand. And Kevin especially just has so much to say and represents so much and understands so much about culture, around music, sports, fashion, art. That, to me, is what Boardroom is about.

On deciding not to dive fully into digital video

As recently as six months or a year ago, video content was just like — I thought you had to do it. Let’s create these video series. And then as soon as I saw that that wasn’t the right move, I just said, “Now let’s cut that” because I saw where it was going. It’s not about episodic videos that cost a lot of money. It’s just as hard as getting a show to pop on television.

On managing deals with brands that want to work with The Boardroom to get to Durant

It’s not even something that’s under the radar. It’s obvious and overt with most brands. And that is easy. That means that I can put a certain filter in place with a brand that I know that Kevin would never associate with. And if that’s the case, then I can say to a brand, “This deal’s for Boardroom and Boardroom only. If you’re not interested, then there’s really nothing to talk about.” But if it’s a brand that Kevin probably doesn’t want to align himself with, at least at this stage in the development of our business, it probably isn’t the right brand necessarily for Boardroom.

One of the major shifts marketers saw during the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown was the increase in online shopping. And of course, marketers moved to meet them in those channels. At Gupta Media, a Boston-based digital marketing agency, clients are coming to the table with bigger budgets for digital ad buys ahead of this year’s back-to-school season.

“Part of it is, with the pandemic, so much shifted to digital advertising overall. We saw advertising and digital channels get a lot more expensive,” said Ilyssa Bloch, an account director at Gupta. “In order to achieve similar volume results that we achieved in past years when things were cheaper in the digital space, budgets had to ramp up to keep up with that increased competition.”

It’s especially true when it comes to marketing that targets college-aged students as enrollment returns to pre-pandemic levels, Bloch said.

And according to social media advertising company Smartly.io, tech brands (i.e. laptops and tablets) have been ramping up social media advertising efforts, surpassing even the investment levels of Black Friday last year, per Corinne Demadis, vice president for Smartly.io for the U.S. East Coast.

Aggressive on TikTok

Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat will continue to be key parts of brands’ strategies. But brands are getting more aggressive in their approach to TikTok, emphasizing the short-form video platform in their back-to-school marketing campaigns.

“They’re so authentic. The ad types are unexpected and different,” said Gupta Media founder, Gogi Gupta. “So they have balanced out some of the more corporate sales just being able to influence behavior.”

While the pandemic kept consumers at home, TikTok exponentially grew — and widened its user base — to 100 million monthly active users in the U.S., per Omnicore agency.

Vying for the Gen Z audience, backpack brand JanSport’s back-to-school campaign this year will tap TikTok stars like Boman Martinez-Reid, Caroline Ricke and Brooke Averick to make cross-promoted posts, including on the brand’s YouTube channel. Stationery company BIC also recently announced plans for a TikTok campaign ahead of this school year. 

Careful brand messaging

Brand messaging will be tricky to navigate as the safety of returning to full capacity in schools continues to be debated. For Gupta’s clients, including Amazon Prime and Amazon Student, this has meant staying away from creative that shows multiple students occupying the same pace.

Crayola has adopted a similar ideology. 

“We are definitely seeing more schools and educators asking for supplies and products to be more individual than shared in the classroom,” said Victoria Lozano, executive vice president and general manager of Crayola attractions and retail.

As of now, the Crayola brand says this year’s campaign messaging will celebrate the return to school, but won’t stray too far from its traditional campaign messaging, Go Back with the Best. 

“We’re seeing a really celebratory mood, environment and approach to back to school this year,” she said. “There’s definitely more of a celebratory feeling this year because I think both kids and parents view it as another step toward [a] return to [a] more normal life.”

By the numbers

The pandemic lockdown turned many on to social media as a way to communicate as well as a source of entertainment. With user-generated content exploding on TikTok and Clubhouse carving out a lane for audio on social, there’s no shortage of people on social media and using new channels. And as marketers look to find new ways to get in front of shoppers, knowing which platforms people are using is crucial. New data from social media management platform Sprout Social sheds light on just that. Find the data points broken down below:

• 87% of consumers say they use Facebook, followed by YouTube (74%), Instagram (68%), and Twitter (50%) most frequently 
• Facebook (78%), Instagram (57%), YouTube (47%), and Twitter (36%) are where consumers follow brands most
• When it comes to platforms consumers want brands to use more, Facebook tops the list (60%), followed by Instagram (48%), YouTube (41%), and Twitter (30%)

3 Questions with Elizabeth Dimond, CMO of Pumpkin pet insurance

What does marketing look like for your team this summer? 

One of the fun things about working in the pet industry is “pet holidays.” For instance, coming up soon is “Dogust” on August 1st, which is the honorary birthday for rescue pups. Pumpkin will be celebrating through a “Turn Bark Time” fundraising campaign for the lifesaving work of Wags & Walks rescue while celebrating the joy of adopting animals of all ages.

In teaming up with Wags & Walks, we launched this campaign yesterday and will be announcing winners starting on July 26th.  While our overall tone is fun and celebratory, the most important part of this is supporting Wags & Walks in their incredible, lifesaving work.

With a rise in Covid variants, has that impacted anything for your team or efforts? 

Our team has continued to work from home, with many team members spread out geographically. With that in mind, we’re continuing to focus primarily on digital initiatives, like “Turn Bark Time,” since we saw such success with other online initiatives, like the Indoguration, where everyone can participate.

How is your team maintaining work-life balance? 

Recognizing that this has been a difficult year for many, we’re encouraging our team to prioritize enjoying their summer. As a result, Pumpkin is asking all employees to take a mandatory, completely unplugged week off this summer. In the same spirit, we’ve also instituted a “no meetings after 1 p.m. on Fridays” policy during the summer so everyone can get a head start on their weekend.

Quote of the day

“Test outdoor advertising. This would be a time to double down on measurability and scalability. And remain in test mode channels outside of that.”

Overheard on the first day of Digiday’s CMO Summit on July 19, which operates under Chatham House Rules as marketers talked through the pain points of modern-day marketing.

What we’ve covered

Marketing reporter Kimeko McCoy and senior brands editor Seb Joseph explored how the influencer space is changing in light of the recent college athlete NIL ruling.

Platforms, data and privacy reporter Kate Kaye took a look at how pharma marketers targeted doctors on the heels of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Future of Work managing editor Jessica Davies explored how employers are getting creative as the industry enters a new era of remote work.

“I think it’s an interesting tactic because it kind of puts the consumer in the attorney general’s office and helps them in the policing function,” said Jessica B. Lee, partner, chair, privacy, security and data innovations at law firm Loeb and Loeb.

The tool asks a series of questions related to details about the business in question such as “Does the business have a ‘Do Not Sell My Personal Information’ link on its website or its mobile app?” Similar to tools automating letters for political advocacy causes, it spits out a draft letter after questions are answered. One of many iterations of letter drafts created by the tool reads, “I believe that your business…is in violation of the California Consumer Privacy Act’s requirement to provide a clear and conspicuous ‘Do Not Sell My Personal Information’ link on its Internet homepage that enables consumers to opt out of the sale of their personal information.”

“it seems like it’s walking this really interesting line with outsourcing the cure notices” to everyday people, said Stacey Gray, senior counsel of Future of Privacy Forum.

Questions remain regarding due process

Simply using the tool does not make for an official consumer complaint regarding a CCPA violation, the AG’s office told Digiday. However, sending notice using a letter built with the tool could lead to enforcement action, according to Bonta. “This email may trigger the 30-day period for the business to cure their violation of the law which is a prerequisite of the attorney general, my office, bringing an enforcement action,” he said during a press conference on Monday to mark the one-year anniversary since the AG’s office began enforcing CCPA in July 2020.

When the attorney general’s office itself sends letters notifying firms they are not in compliance with CCPA, they get a 30-day grace period to work with the AG’s office to make changes to come into compliance. 

The letter-generating tool raises “a number of due process concerns that don’t feel particularly well-thought-out,” said Lee. For instance, she said it’s not clear whether the 30-day clock starts ticking when someone sends a letter or if a company should wait until they get separate correspondence from the AG’s office.

She also said it is unclear whether companies receiving letters from people who use the tool would have the same ability to work directly with the AG’s office to determine an appropriate fix that they have been afforded when the office itself sends them a notice-to-cure letter. “That 30-day window opens the door to actual conversations with the attorney general’s office,” she said.

Lee also worried people might misuse the tool in a way that creates a barrage of consumer communications that companies would have to respond to even if they do not sell data. “This opens the door to potential nuisance letters going out,” said Lee.

Bonta said 75% of businesses receiving CCPA notice-to-cure letters have come into compliance within the 30-day cure period.  “My belief is that the vast majority of businesses really want to comply and will comply. They want to know how and once they know how, they do,” he said.

There are some CCPA-related investigations under way of companies that did not comply within the allotted 30-days, Bonta said but declined to provide more detail. 

A tool to spot dark patterns?

The tool might find a welcome user base among researchers tracking CCPA compliance, suggested Gray. Indeed, researchers like Jennifer King, privacy and data policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, have been watching for violations to recently-established CCPA-related rules that prohibit use of dark patterns in data collection notice design that obscure opt-outs. The tool gives people an option to indicate when a business features an opt-out link that is “very hard to find or confusing to find.”

For now, the tool is limited to drafting notices to businesses that do not post an easy-to-find “Do Not Sell My Personal Information” link on their sites, but the AG’s office said it “may be updated over time to include other potential CCPA violations.”