Month: August 2021

The announcement was met with widespread disappointment from Overwatch fans across the world, showing the continued importance of large in-person events to the esports scene despite the social distancing of the past year. Though many of the largest esports events of 2020 were able to continue digitally despite the pandemic, they lacked the roaring crowds and packed stadiums that helped bring a sense of legitimacy to esports events during the early days, before awareness of esports and its widespread popularity had fully entered the mainstream. 

Nowadays, you’d need to live under a rock to not be at least tangentially aware of the cultural impact of esports — but the thunderous audiences at events such as the Dota 2 International and the League of Legends World Championship are a warm reminder that the market for competitive gaming is large and ever-increasing. When in-person events truly return post-pandemic, these prominent events are likely to sell out quickly.

The most prominent esports have flourished through financial support from their developers, and many of the largest esports events are owned and operated by corporate video game publishers such as Activision Blizzard, Riot Games and Epic Games. One exception to this rule is Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, whose competitive scene involves a scattering of major tournaments administered by third-party companies and occasionally sponsored by CS:GO developer Valve Corporation.

Here’s a breakdown of the most prominent esports events for every major esport — and some of the smaller ones.

Dota 2

When it comes to prize money, the largest esport event is The International — the most prestigious championship event for the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) title Dota 2. Affectionately known as “TI” by Dota fans, The International consistently breaks prize pool records across esports because its prize pool is partially funded by sales of both the tournament’s tickets and in-game content bundles known as “Battle Passes.” 

Due to the pandemic, The International didn’t happen in 2020, and its usual August date has been pushed to October for the 2021 edition. TI 2019 featured the highest prize pool in esports history at just over $34 million — a nearly $10 million jump from the $25 million offered in 2018. Past iterations of The International have been held in large arenas such as Vancouver’s Rogers Arena and Shanghai’s Mercedes-Benz Arena, and past champions include teams such as Evil Geniuses (2015), Team Liquid (2017) and OG (2018–2019).

Fortnite

The only true rival to The International, in terms of prize money, is the Fortnite World Cup. Held in July 2019 at Arthur Ashe Stadium in Queens, New York, the event was the most prestigious competition ever held for the battle royale title Fortnite. The largest share of the event’s $30 million prize pool — then the largest in esports — was won by the then-16-year-old Kyle “Bugha” Giersdorf, who took home $3 million for topping the solo event finals. Similar prizes were also awarded to winners in other categories, such as duos and a “Pro-Am” celebrity event.

So far, the Fortnite World Cup has only happened once. Epic Games envisioned the event as an annual occurrence, but was unable to continue it in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, as the largest event for one of the most popular video games, the Fortnite World Cup cannot go unmentioned in this list. “It was a pretty big cultural thing in gaming — not just in esports, but in broader gaming,” said Vince Nairn, managing editor of gaming and esports publication DBLTAP.

League of Legends

Dota 2 might boast the highest prize money of any event in the MOBA genre — but the title for most-viewed MOBA goes to the League of Legends World Championship. “Worlds” is the culmination of the year-long League of Legends season, pitting players from across the world against each other to determine which team — and region — is the strongest. The 2019 and 2020 iterations of the League of Legends World Championships are two of the most-viewed esports events of all time, with the 2019 edition garnering just under 4 million viewers. (The most-viewed esports event of all time is technically the 2021 Free Fire World Series, a massive event for a relatively new mobile esport.)

The World Championship is usually held in the late fall or early winter, but specific dates vary. League of Legends also has a mid-year playoff event known as the Mid-Season Invitational, which follows a similar structure and also pits international teams against each other in heated competition. Though the stakes at the MSI are high, it is widely considered the second-most-prestigious League of Legends competition after the World Championship.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive lacks the clear playoff structure of Dota 2 and League of Legends. Instead, the competitive season for the first-person shooter title hinges on a series of “majors” organized by third-party companies and sponsored by CS:GO developer Valve Corporation.

While these major tournaments are often annual events, they are not always sponsored by Valve year-to-year, causing some ambiguity about exactly which tournaments are the most prestigious. “Counter-Strike is a little weird in that sense, because there are majors that are designated as the most important tournaments [by Valve], but there are also legacy tournaments that have been around for a long time,” Nairn said. These independent legacy events can command just as much prestige as their Valve-sponsored counterparts, particularly if Valve has sponsored them in the past.

In 2021, the only Valve-sponsored CS:GO major is esports company PGL’s Stockholm event in October, which boasts a prize pool of $2 million. In the past, however, events held across the world by companies such as ESL, Intel Extreme Masters and StarLadder have been granted major status by Valve. “It’s still a really big deal to win those events,” Nairn said.

Overwatch

Rounding out this list of top-tier esports championships is the Overwatch League playoffs. Though Overwatch viewership has declined in past years, the Activision-Blizzard-produced OWL playoffs remain one of the most talked-about esports events on the calendar. “The thing that I look at is: how do the people who cover esports look at Overwatch?” Nairn said. “It seems like all the people who cover it, they still look at the game at that level.” 

Hosted in different countries over the years, the Overwatch World Cup occurs in early November and features qualifying teams from across the world. The 2021 playoffs offer a prize of $1.5 million to the winning team, with past champions including the San Francisco Shock and the London Spitfire.

If the outcry from fans following the aforementioned announcement is any indication, the Overwatch League playoffs remain in high demand among millions of potential viewers — but the declining viewership of Overwatch shows how the popularity of an esport and its marquee event can shift over time. Eventually, another esport may rise to take Overwatch’s spot in the pantheon of major esports.

The contenders

One potential rival to Overwatch is Valorant, the hot new first-person shooter title published by League of Legends developer Riot Games. Valorant Champions 2021, the finale of the Valorant Champions Tour, is going down in December in Los Angeles, according to a report by esports news site Upcomer.

Past playoff-stage events in the VCT have reached an average viewership of 800,000 across feeds, and Riot has successfully stirred Valorant fans into a frenzy of hype going into the season-ending event. Though Valorant currently does not stand among the top tier of esports, a successful playoff event could be what the shooter title needs to spark a further rise.

“That is absolutely going to be one of the things that you should be watching, because it’s going to be huge,” said Upcomer staff writer Nick Ray. “I really think it’s like Worlds and TI, in terms of the biggest events.”

Another esport on the rise is Call of Duty. Also administered by Activision Blizzard, the Call of Duty League debuted in 2020 and follows a similar model to the Overwatch League. As Activision Blizzard works to bring the CDL to the heights of the OWL, it’s worth keeping an eye on large Call of Duty events such as the CDL Grand Finals.

Small, but strong

The list above includes the most prominent events for the largest esports, but it is not an exhaustive list of the many esports events that can reach thousands to millions of viewers and generate significant interest for potential sponsors or brand partners.

There are larger standalone events such as Evolution Championship Series, a massive fighting game tournament held annually in Las Vegas that draws hundreds of thousands of viewers; the Rocket League Championship Series has featured prize pools in excess of $1 million.

The media landscape of esports is constantly growing, and today’s top-level events could be old news in a few years — but for now, these are the ones that everyone should know.

“It feels like we’re kind of being nudged to almost think about a post-upfront upfront. Getting things locked in as far in advance as possible,” said Bill Durrant, president of media agency Exverus Media.

Case in point: Exverus Media, which typically starts locking in scatter ad buys six to eight weeks before a quarter starts, was advising clients to prepare their scatter ad plans for the fourth quarter back in the second quarter. Considering that the TV ad market is so tight that TV networks turned away linear ad dollars in this year’s upfront negotiations, the fourth quarter is likely to be “tighter than potentially ever,” Durrant said. He’s not alone in that expectation, nor in the strategy of securing ad slots in advance.

TV ad-buying firm Tatari applies its own variation on the upfront approach to the scatter market. While the firm doesn’t participate in the traditional upfront, Tatari arranges agency-level deals with TV networks for their non-preemptible scatter inventory — the variety that is guaranteed not to be bumped by political advertisers or networks reallocating slots as make-goods for upfront advertisers — and effectively holds the supply for its clients until they’re ready to place their buys.

“We can buy the inventory and have it available for clients when they need it. It provides our clients with flexibility,” said Brad Geving, vp of media at Tatari. The firm “had a lot of our agency deals wrapped up by Aug. 1” and expects to complete the rest by early September, he said.

Fueling scatter advertisers’ urgency is the fact that the fourth quarter is typically the most important period of the year for many advertisers. Retailers, for example, count on the holiday shopping period to meet their revenue goals for the year, and after last year’s relatively muted fourth quarter in light of the pandemic, this year’s period may be under even more pressure from advertisers whose businesses have rebounded in 2021, such as travel advertisers. 

“We are already securing some guaranteed 4Q scatter schedules in the highly sought after female and sports category,” said Ben Speight, evp and director of client services and strategic initiatives at media agency Lockard & Wechsler Direct, in an email. As with Tatari, the agency’s strategy for locking up guaranteed scatter inventory is to give itself and clients some flexibility and security heading into the hectic holiday advertising season. Added Speight, “It’s worth the fixed premium to ensure we deliver the audience for our clients.”

The potential pent-up demand likely contributed to TV networks pushing up their scatter ad rates for the fourth quarter. Prices on TV networks’ rate cards are up 30% year over year, Geving said. The actual prices advertisers pay could change, though. For example, if supply-chain issues force companies to adhere to extended shipping deadlines like last year, then some advertisers may need to end their fourth-quarter campaigns early, which could free up inventory and lead to lower rates for other advertisers. 

Then again, the slated return of TV to its regular programming schedule — with broadcasters’ traditional fall lineups back and the college football season looking to remain in tact — may only make TV more attractive to advertisers, especially if that programming attracts a larger-than-expected audience to linear. So, after a year and a half of ups and downs, scatter advertisers are taking some solace in the consistency of the TV ad market’s tightness because at least it means they know they can plan ahead.

“Everything’s been tight, and there’s just not a meaningful amount of inventory or as much as we would have expected in scatter. We’re seeing that for Q3, seeing it for Q4 and fully have the expectation to see that again in Q1,” Durrant said.

Like boilerplate at the end of a press release, a statement mentioning the Privacy Budget concept turned up recently in specifications for proposed tech that would enable services like Zoom to determine how best to format video for a conference call or for Netflix to choose the most appropriate format for movie streaming. The specs acknowledged the potential for misuse: the streaming tech could identify people via fingerprinting by helping distinguish someone’s device from another. So, as a possible mitigation for that privacy infringement, Google engineer Chris Cunningham, a co-editor of the spec, suggested that web browsers “may implement a ‘privacy budget.’”

“The Privacy Budget is kind of poisoning the space,” said Pete Snyder, senior privacy researcher and director of privacy at browser maker Brave. Snyder described what he said is a “constant” flow of statements mentioning Privacy Budget that have been inserted into specs for proposed technologies he has reviewed as chair of the Privacy Interest Group at the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C). The group provides guidelines and advice for addressing privacy considerations in web standards specifications like the aforementioned proposed streaming technology. The Privacy Budget has also appeared as a protective panacea in specs for font-related technology and tech that helps websites choose optimal media content for people. 

Designed as a defense against fingerprinting, the Privacy Budget is a browser-based technique intended to place limits on “fingerprinting surfaces,” or distinctive characteristics associated with someone’s device — such as installed fonts or configurations that help a streaming codec choose the best video format to use — that can be pieced together to detect or assign someone’s identity. In an effort to prevent fingerprinting, the Privacy Budget restricts the amount of those distinctive characteristics that a technology can access or detect.

Google engineers have pointed to the Privacy Budget as a way to reduce fingerprinting potential in its Privacy Sandbox tools since at least as far back as 2019, when it got a shout-out in early specs for FLoC, a highly-scrutinized ad targeting method the firm itself acknowledges could help identify people through fingerprinting. Google included the method way at the bottom of a list of privacy-protecting tech it plans to launch as part of its Privacy Sandbox initiative, giving it a wide 2023 launch window.

“Privacy Budget is an early-stage proposal designed to protect people from fingerprinting, a problem we believe is critical to solve holistically as the web evolves,” a Google spokesperson told Digiday for this story.

Privacy solution: details TBA

The problem is, even though Privacy Budget is mentioned in multiple proposed tech specifications as a possible safeguard for privacy abuses, it is far from ready for prime time. “[We want to] make sure [we’re] looking at mitigations we can ship today,” wrote Sam Weiler, an MIT security engineer during a meeting in May of the consortium’s Privacy Interest Group, expressing a concern commonly raised about the lack of details about how the Privacy Budget would be implemented. 

“The Privacy Budget is more aspirational than a concrete proposal,” said Eric Rescorla, CTO at Mozilla’s Firefox, another of Chrome’s competitors. Although he said it is common for preliminary ideas to be included in collaborative specs as technologies are in development, he added, “I’m a little surprised it’s showing up in a lot of places because as an implementer I don’t know what to do with that text.” 

Another member of the Privacy Interest Group, Konrad Dzwinel, an engineer at browser maker DuckDuckGo (another Chrome competitor), told Digiday in an email, “Google only shared a vague definition of the privacy budget idea so far, so we don’t have many thoughts about it. We do think that fingerprinting is an important problem to solve, we’re working to address it in our products, and are waiting for Google to share more details about their idea.”

“As with all Privacy Sandbox proposals we will continue to get feedback through the open and iterative process and provide resources for developers to test and integrate in advance to help ensure a smooth transition to a more private web,” said the Google spokesperson.

Disrupting standard web functions = ‘developer hell’

In general, technologists including privacy tech researchers Digiday spoke with about the Privacy Budget, as well as others commenting in developer forums, said it is not clear how it would be implemented without some serious negative side effects. For instance, it could disable technologies used to identify whether people have logged into a website, essentially disrupting what’s called session persistence by preventing sites from recognizing when a unique device has already logged in. One tech researcher Digiday spoke to who asked not to be named said that, if Chrome were to be updated without proper implementation plans made clear to site developers and ad tech providers, it could break a variety of standard web functions including recognizing logged-in users. “That’s basically what will happen simultaneously across the internet,” said the researcher.

Without more clarification, enabling the Privacy Budget in Chrome could amount to what Snyder called “developer hell.” He told Digiday, “It’s hard to get people to write code that says ‘check to make sure functionality is available every second.’ It seems like a non-starter from a developer perspective.” 

And at this point, it does not appear that Google has addressed what to do when it sets off errors. When asked during the May W3C meeting whether Chrome would generate error messages if Privacy Budget limits run out, Google’s Cunningham wrote, “I don’t know what that would look like.”

Snyder and others also have said the technique could actually enable new privacy harms because prior browser behavior could be revealed by the amount of “budget” someone has remaining. “The way you spend your budget is in itself a unique identifier, which is ironic three times over,” he said.

But ultimately, said Rescorla, technical specs should come with workable approaches to limiting fingerprinting or other privacy infringements baked in. He said, “People should not fool themselves into thinking that, if the spec otherwise has privacy issues, that this text fixes those issues.”

However, the bulk of travel sales has been directed toward domestic leisure — not corporate — travel. A survey last month by the Global Business Travel Association revealed 50% of respondents have canceled or postponed most or all of their domestic business travel and 83% of their international business travel.

A Wall Street Journal analysis concluded that between 19% and 36% of all business trips are likely to disappear permanently. Many organizations are pushing video conference calls in lieu of in-person visits in an effort to slash costs, cut carbon emissions and contain the transmission of the highly contagious COVID-19 delta variant. 

There are also the weary road warriors who are not ready, or are unwilling, to return to their former frantic lifestyles, transatlantic treks and stuffy business suits. For some, the hours spent on the road, chasing flights and being away from partners, family and pets, no longer seems worth it.

“I’ve been to 113 countries, stayed in over 600 hotels, and the pandemic was the first time I had to sit still,” said Jeremy Im, director of public relations for Appetize and founder of the travel site TravelBinger.com. “When you’re in it, there’s no stopping you. You feel like it’s your job, you have to do it and you have to be constantly on the move.”

“But the pandemic put the brakes on all that,” Im added. “Now, I look back and think: ‘How did I ever go on eight flights in one month?’”

Although corporate travel is on the upswing and expected to swell following a return to office life, it’s been sharply curtailed and is projected to remain at only 30% of its 2019 levels by the end of 2021, according to a recent Deloitte survey of 150 travel managers. New virus variants and surges, continued mask requirements and the onset of cold and flu season could further dampen demand.

Tori Emerson Barnes, evp of public affairs and policy at the U.S. Travel Association, anticipates corporate travel won’t fully rebound until 2025. Airlines’ flight schedules, routes, terminals and even gates are being reevaluated or overhauled to reflect the shifting demand.

The U.S. experienced a similar hit on business travel following The Great Recession between 2007 and 2009, when international business travel from the U.S. dipped by more than 13% and took five years to recover.

Before the pandemic, business travelers accounted for about half of all revenues for major airlines, but only 30% of the total trip volume, according to the industry trade group Airlines for America.

Why? These high-end fliers, often traveling on someone else’s expense account, tend to prioritize convenience and comfort, and are more likely to splurge on last-minute tickets, non-refundable fares, non-stop flights and premium seating. They are also more willing to purchase additional amenities and enroll in incentive programs, like frequent flier miles, which can be a valuable source of data for airlines. 

And, although it may seem counterintuitive, these premium-paying travelers help subsidize travel costs for leisure vacationers. Thanks to their revenue and influence, airlines can offer cheaper tickets to help fill remaining seats and will even add additional routes to help meet their demand. 

“Airlines are definitely stuck between a rock and a hard place,” said The Washington Post’s travel reporter Andrea Sachs. “The fares are now skewed because they want to charge leisure travelers like they did business travelers, but they can’t. They need to draw nervous fliers back in, and there are still a lot of places they can’t go.”

Since airlines first sandwiched a premium business class between first and coach seating in the late 1970s, it has been a lucrative arm of the global travel industry, exceeding trillions of dollars. Millions of jobs at airlines, convention centers, hotels and travel agencies, hinge on its expedited return.

However, the downtime caused by the pandemic has offered workers — and their employers — a rare opportunity to reset, reevaluate and proactively plan for the future. Many companies are reimagining their organizational arrangements, including when, why and how their employees are sent on the road — including Amazon, who announced it saved nearly $1 billion on employee travel expenses last year. 

Some have welcomed the chance to rein in their spending, embrace the available technology and explore more sustainable options for their employees and the planet — from the types of trips employees take, and their environmental impacts, to their length, location and frequency. 

And while the pandemic has shown how much work can be accomplished more easily, and cheaply, behind a screen at home, there is still a need and desire for face-to-face meetings for business purposes. According to U.S. Travel Association’s Barnes, 85% of American workers view in-person meetings and events as irreplaceable. “Businesses that got back to in-person events following the Great Recession were more profitable and productive,” she said.

Yet, although there will always be value in face-to-face exchanges, traveling across the country for a one-hour meeting may no longer be a productive or sustainable use of time or funds. 

“Companies really need to ask themselves: ‘Do we want to or need to put this person on a plane and potentially risk their heath, our company and the broader community?’” Sachs added.

3 Questions with Marcus Kremb, head of sustainability, energy group Enel

The renewable energy sector is growing fast, but outside of that what’s changed the most for Enel and its workforce over the last year? 

We’ve historically had a centralized workforce. Throughout 2020 and 2021 we didn’t experience a lag in the delivery of energy products and services, and we delivered those services with an exclusively distributed workforce. That has proven to be highly effective and is enabling better opportunities internally like work-life balance and recruitment potential for individuals from a variety of backgrounds. So no longer will the company, for all positions, require relocation to our headquarters or to certain satellite or regional office locations. But increasingly, we’re seeing the company allow for remote workers that can then be recruited and retained in a wide variety of geographies around the country [the U.S]. So from a sustainability and community development standpoint, that type of workforce development and talent acquisition aligns well with the company’s diversity, equity and inclusion objectives.

How has your hybrid-working model for office workers [60% of workforce], affected your real estate needs? 

In terms of square footage, our real estate plan has remained the same, if not slightly reduced due to optimizations. However, without the pandemic forces the office real estate plan would have likely doubled in square footage. In our North American workspaces we’re able to accommodate hybrid-working models with greater flexibility, as opposed to having a dedicated workspace for each of our newly planned employees. The clean energy goals this country has, along with the urgency needed to act against the global climate crisis – means we’re going to see the quadrupling of solar power workers up to 2035, to the tune of around 900,000 new jobs created just in solar industry alone. In the U.S., Enel is looking to add — just for our renewable energies business alone — another 1,000 employees by the end of 2022. But the real estate footprint is not expanding at the same rate as the acquisition of employees, but will remain flat, because of the flexibility model for our workforce.

What are the environmental benefits that hybrid working setups can create? 

There is a major environmental case to be made for the hybridization of the workforce. We did a commuting survey in 2019 to look at alternate ways to get people more efficiently into the office from the Metropolitan Boston area, which is where we have the majority of our workforce. And what we learned is that the average employee at Enel North America [pre-pandemic] spent 22 hours commuting each month, adding up to 33 work days per year. Obviously, there are stressors that go along with commuting — some would call it soul crushing. And they consumed the equivalent of 130,000 gallons of gasoline, to enable that commuting. We’re now seeing excellent examples of companies taking strong commitments to green to support distributed workforces. On a personal note, I’ve been able to drive both of my sons to school every day, and still be home in time for my first morning meetings. Not having to go into an office, but instead help my children get ready for their school days, was invaluable for me as a father and as someone who does value work-life balance. And there have been similar stories across the company. I think if surveyed, most people would say that the time extra time spent with family or friends — that flexibility would probably outweigh the loss of collaborative experience with coworkers.

By the numbers

• 45% of Americans plan to avoid crowded places and public transport while on holiday this year, 71% plan on getting themselves tested upon returning.
  [Source of data: Piplsay report.]
• 22% of 1,000 U.S. workers said they would like AI to help improve their ability to interpret the mood or interest of the person they were conversing with on video meetings.
  [Source of data: Uniphore survey.]
• 7 in 10 professionals said the pandemic increased their access to networking opportunities, using platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook.
  [Source of data: Skynova report.]

What else we’ve covered

• Figuring out the right model for hybrid-working set ups, will take time and a willingness to experiment. Microsoft has been testing different approaches for some time and has clocked up some useful lessons, including how to capitalize on asynchronous working and how to make hybrid meetings work well.
• One of the unintended consequences of implementing a hybrid working setup, in which employees get to choose which days they’re in the office is the creation of a “culture of cliques.” Some bosses fears that if people pick the same office days as their friends, diversity of thought and ideas will be diluted and this will ultimately water down an organization’s culture.
• We spoke with academic and industry experts to find out what communicative skills are necessary to navigate these new waters successfully and lead happy, productive teams.

This newsletter is edited by Jessica Davies, managing editor, Future of Work.

But how many subscriptions can one reader pay for? And how many will they keep, especially without the rollercoaster of 2020 to keep them locked into the news cycle? 

Retention rates are holding steady — for now. But to ensure that they can keep the customers they’ve won over the past 18 months, publishers are hiring more people focused on keeping and bringing in subscribers and also investing more in content across multiple formats to add to the value of a subscription.

More people for more segmentation

Publishers are investing more manpower into figuring out how to retain and attract paying subscribers. 

Several publications have made additions or changes to their leadership ranks to keep their subscriber momentum going. On Aug. 16, Michael Ribero took on the role of The Washington Post’s first chief subscriptions officer, tasked with overseeing the company’s digital subscriptions business. Karl Wells was promoted to a new role at Dow Jones, chief subscriptions officer, in April, and he will have three new vp positions reporting to him starting this fall: vp of WSJ Core Subscriptions, vp of Barron’s Group Subscriptions and vp of International and Young Audiences.

Others are investing in large teams to improve specific functions. The Los Angeles Times, for example, had a “significant uptick” in digital subscribers last year, CMO Joshua Brandau said, though he declined to share specific numbers.  

“Like most news publishers, we certainly saw more attention and time spent with our content in 2020 —specifically, breaking news about the pandemic and the local openings [and] closings for L.A. neighborhoods,” he said. 

The focus now? How to keep them. “Subscriber growth comes from finding new prospects but also, largely, from keeping more of our current subscribers,” Brandau said.

The L.A. Times is using first-party data “to inform creative messaging and perform content tests with specific user segments,” Brandau said. That same data is used to create benchmarks that it uses for spending in acquisition channels. 

In the last year, the Times has hired “around 10” people each to its creative services and growth marketing teams to support its subscription strategy, including designers, copywriters, acquisition marketing managers, retention marketing managers, a media director and media planners, among others. Brandau expects the company will need to continue to increase the size of these teams through the next year, especially when it comes to figuring out how to retain subscribers — churn was a big challenge for the L.A. Times a few years ago. 

More of what subscribers want

Sometimes, giving people what they want can mean simplifying. Quartz’s strategy is to give its subscribers more of what they want, in the format that they want it in.

The business news publisher Quartz had a notable year of subscriber growth. Its subscriber base grew 71% year-over-year, according to editor-in-chief Katherine Bell, to 27,000 paying members, each paying either $14.99 per month or $99 per year.

But on Aug. 1, Quartz announced it was refocusing its three-year-old subscription program around its email newsletters, after the publisher found in a March 2021 survey that 75% of its paying subscribers were driven to most of Quartz’s content via their inbox.

“Members were telling us: ‘There’s a lot here to read [on the website and app], we can’t take advantage of all of it, we don’t know where to look,’” Bell told Digiday. 

In other cases, it means doubling down on coverage areas. The Atlantic’s subscriber base has grown by nearly 50% over the past 12 months, adding 280,000 paid readers from the first half of 2020 to the first half of 2021. It now has more than 830,000 total print and digital subscribers.

To keep that growth going, Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, said editorial is investing in areas of coverage that have “defined and distinguished” its reporting over the past year: on the pandemic, the rise of authoritarianism, the dangers of extremism, the fracturing of the country across political and racial lines, and examinations of culture and society. The Atlantic is also expanding its coverage into topics like climate and technology.

Thompson said he doesn’t think much about competing with other publishers. Though some media observers have fretted about news subscriber growth mostly going to a handful of players — that same Reuters Institute study found that almost half of news subscribers pay for at least one of The New York Times, the Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal — Thompson said the Atlantic’s focus is instead “about being better ourselves” — meaning producing journalism that gets people to subscribe and retaining them. 

“It’s not like we are a gas station on one side of the street, worried about the gas station on the other side of the street selling gas three cents less than we are,” Thompson said.

Barry Lowenthal, CEO of Stagwell Media Network’s Media Kitchen, had every intention of mandating that everyone return to the office three days a week and give them two days of flexibility on where they work, effective this September. Then he and his management team ran into a wall of pushback, facing questions of how and why that decision was reached.

That pushback led to a self-examination of sorts, where Lowenthal said he realized the situation was better handled from a team-up perspective rather than a top-down management style. Lowenthal admitted he grew up in the Jack Welch/Peter Drucker era of management style, which was very top-down, decisive — and immovable. But the reaction of some staff, coupled with the lessons learned from working from home — that it can be done successfully — led him to change his perspective.

“It’s really hard to legislate uncertainty,” he said. “I’ve always been a believer that if you’re pushing water uphill, it’s probably better to just let it roll the way it’s supposed to. These are all management signals we all should be listening for.”

Lowenthal said he found inspiration in The Media Kitchen’s change in vacation policy a few years ago when the company allowed unlimited vacation and stopped tracking days off. At first, “it made some people uncomfortable at first, then found its own rhythm — the teams supported each other,” he said. “And if we trust them to take vacation when they need to, why can’t we trust them to work side by side as often as they need to? So we backed off” from its return to office mandate.

Meanwhile, Andrew Bailey, North American CEO of independent agency The&Partnership (in which WPP holds a minority stake), had been quietly encouraging his people back into the office since last October and implemented a voluntary three days in office, two remote since Memorial Day. To his surprise, a majority of his staffers did so willingly, up to 75% of the staff, he said. But he also found a certain segment resisted.

When looking into it, Bailey discovered that staffers in more collaborative roles (creative directors, account people and junior project managers, for example) were happy to come in, needing the interaction with colleagues that inspires innovation and fresh thought. The more reluctant segment were mostly media, IT and data/analytics staff, who “don’t have as much interaction with colleagues that requires face-to-face contact,” said Bailey. 

Working to Bailey’s advantage was the extra office space The &Partnership opened in its Soho (New York) facilities eight months before the pandemic started. That extra space has been used to space people out for a safer, in-office working environment. But Bailey said the focus now is to update in-office technology — for example, he’s looking into installing new Zoom-like tech that allows each person in a boardroom meeting to be seen individually rather than a single camera focused on the entire room. “Our clients won’t be going into the office before October or maybe January. So we need to accommodate them even if we’re in the office,” he said.

The bottom line for both CEOs is, so long as the business continues to grow they’ll stick with the flexible course. “This was one of the first times I found where the best way to provide people assurance is to provide them maximum flexibility,” said Lowenthal. 

Perhaps Rishad Tobaccowala, former Publicis Groupe executive and current industry deep thinker, put it best in a June installment of his “The Future Does Not Fit Into the Containers of the Past” column: “The jigsaw of return cannot be solved elegantly with every piece fitting, but if people see the big picture you are trying to solve for, they are more likely to accept or resent less whatever decisions are being made. How the decisions are made may be as important as what decisions are made.”

Color by numbers

Although some schools are already back in session (either virtually or in-person), some don’t begin the fall semester until after Labor Day. AdImpact, a SaaS platform that tracks and analyzes ad spend data, found that from early June up to the week of Aug. 8, a total of 304,630 back-to-school ads have run across media, led by retailers, which accounted for 109,700. Among retailers, the top school-focused advertiser was Kohl’s, with 48,800 total ads.

Takeoff & landing

• Consumer insights platform Disqo raised $85 million in Series B financing, the company announced last week, including investments (and seats on the board) from Sageview Capital and March Capital, among other investors.
• Wavemaker named Sharb Farjami, most recently the CEO of News Corp’s Storyful, its new COO, reporting to Americas CEO Louisa Wong. Farjami was also once COO of MindShare in Australia, a fellow GroupM agency. 
• Out of home (OOH) ad revenue grew 38 percent to $2 billion in Q2 2021over Q2 2020, according to the Out of Home Advertising Association of America, with digital OOH leading the growth at just under 80 percent growth over Q2 2020.

Direct quote

“How to use [the acronym OTT]: Don’t. Repeat: Do not use this acronym. Please. OTT was fine for a time, but that time has passed … OTT has become synonymous with streaming, so let’s just say streaming instead. That way our friends and family members will know what the hell we’re talking about.”

— Digiday senior media editor Tim Peterson, in his latest Future of TV Briefing, on learning TV’s new lexicon.

Speed reading

• Digiday marketing reporter Kimeko McCoy spoke with several media buyers about how up-and-coming social media platforms are starting to challenge Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. 
• Variety explained how NBCU wants to build a new measurement system that challenges Nielsen’s longtime dominance and sudden vulnerability.  
• CNET takes a look at how TikTok is looking to expand its video limits to five, possibly 10 minutes in length.

Whether on basic cable, mobile or now on CTV too, because of their timeless appeal music videos have been a constant fixture in a dynamic landscape,and today they are programmed more personally and relevant to tastes, platforms, moods and other measurable contexts.

Mood, interactivity and meaningful context are king in the music video space

Premium music videos are a broadly popular category of content, with an addressable market in the U.S. of almost 90% the population and reaching over half that market each month. Just as the musical tastes within broad audiences vary, so do additional contexts like the mood they might represent or evoke. Time, place and message remain important contexts for marketers, of course, but there are more contexts marketers consider, like moods, than they may have considered 40 years ago. 

Interactive product features such as on-demand and live streaming, search, recommendations, targeted advertising and more have enabled a more purposeful viewing experience for audiences. It means something to a distributor when a consumer watches all 10 episodes of a series season. It gives them a measure of value for that particular content they’ve produced or licensed and it empowers the consumer. Consumers watch content today at times, places and platforms that are available to them, best for them, dictated by them, all informed by data generated from all of their previous interactivity. 

Similarly, marketers want to put their efforts into meaningful context. Questions they ask include: Will my CTV campaign be incremental to my linear TV efforts? How does co-viewing affect delivery? Does the audience vary by daypart, or by demographic? Are they in the room watching the content? Are their eyes on screen? Can we secure premium pod positioning? How can brand and activation efforts work together?

Four essential tools in the CTV marketing toolkit

Marketers use a range of tools to put their CTV experiences into context, as do distributors and artists. Many of these tools were not available when music videos emerged on television sets 40 years ago. Here is a look at a few that make a significant difference to the toolkit every stakeholder can use to quantify the cultural cache of music videos in the advertising world.

• iSpot helps marketers answer how all the elements of a hybrid TV/CTV plan work together. It puts CTV and traditional TV delivery into context, measuring how a given campaign contributes to a client’s overall audience delivery. What we’ve found is encouraging. Even against the broad and saturated linear TV campaigns, at least 40% of Vevo’s media, for example, has been incremental to those efforts, in every instance. This is but one insight to support diversified planning in today’s market. 

• TVision also puts delivery together into context for marketers, measuring which viewers are in the room, and who are visually attentive relative to a range of TV networks’ performance. Vevo data shows that viewing levels can vary by daypart and this insight has huge implications for audience measurement, dayparting, and inventory management. It also ties to ad receptivity, where industry and client research supports that advertising to audiences viewing together has more resonance than when viewing alone.

• DISQO helps put the effectiveness of a campaign’s many moving parts into context, using a large, high-integrity panel to measure complete campaigns. Often this research is designed to address both upper- and lower-funnel behaviors together. 

• Beachfront puts the effectiveness of CTV ad pods into context, helping build more optimal pods for marketers and consumers alike, informing pod position, frequency and cadence. Fifty-plus years of ad research into pod positioning, effective frequency management and flighting, tells us that the quality of ad exposure and value in these areas can vary widely. We are encouraged by a more optimal, more valuable delivery for our partners.

These are but a few examples of the many objective, third-party tools the industry has today that marketers didn’t have when music videos first became a must-buy 40 years ago. 

The future of TV and CTV is bright — context, nuance and tools are building it

The fundamentals of media effectiveness remain largely unchanged, though so many contexts have changed or become available, as have tools to understand and leverage them as marketers. 

As an industry, TV and CTV markets are better resourced than ever before, and this is  helping to make it easier to understand, plan and buy media in today’s market. Imagine now a world not so far off, where there is seamless synchronicity across mobile and CTV, where voice commands drive tune-in and fandom across a multitude of platforms and services. The industry is almost there, and the tools above are markers along that path, each empowering marketers to offer more context, deeper nuance and improved outcomes along the way.

Today, most programmatic marketers use third-party cookies to build audiences, target and retarget ads, segment audiences and provide ad personalization, as well as attribute conversion events to ad exposure. Google has announced that by 2023 third-party cookies will not be used within its Chrome browser, following Apple’s work over the past few years to phase out third-party cookies from the Safari browser. There are a number of reasons for these changes, but the most obvious is that cookie-based ad-targeting is out of step with digital privacy expectations in 2021. Meanwhile, cookies aside, Google and Facebook know virtually everything about all of its users, and they advertise to them with near impunity and a massive competitive edge.

What happens next will be both important and fascinating. Of course, Google has an incentive to use its virtually monopolistic power to control the new paradigm, and it is leading that charge through its Google Privacy Sandbox initiatives and programs. But the future of targeted advertising across the open internet should not have to depend on Google. There are powerful privacy-forward methods to target digital ads that do not depend on third-party cookies or Google. Most importantly, it would be a shame if Google is allowed to leverage its self-appointed role as emcee of the post-cookie world to fashion a new structure in which it obtains as much power outside of its walled gardens as it already maintains inside.

What’s really driving cookie deprecation, and why the open internet matters

To put this in context and level-set on motives, Google’s main business is online advertising.

More than 80% of Alphabet, Inc.’s (Google’s parent company) revenue comes from Google ads, amounting to $147 billion in 2020. Of that, approximately $124 billion relates to Google’s monetization of users and properties within its vast walled gardens. Specifically, $104 billion (71% of its ad revenue) is from Google’s Search property and the placement of ads on other Google-owned properties, with another $20 billion from YouTube. According to eMarketer, in 2021, Google is expected to capture 56.8% of Search ad revenue, with Amazon at 19% and growing. Google is also expected to obtain 28.6% of global digital ad spend, with Facebook expected to capture 23.7%.

Interestingly, $23 billion (16%) of Google’s ad revenue is from Google Network and ad tech for publishers, such as revenue from ads sold outside of Google properties, in the so-called open internet.

As noted, this open internet has historically relied on cookies for behavioral-based ad targeting because web browsing behavior was considered the best available proxy for user interests or predispositions. If the question was, “who should receive the cat food ad?” then collective marketing wisdom suggested the answer was the people who watch or post cat videos. And unlike within the walled gardens, characterized by Google and Facebook’s omniscient view of their respective resident customers and users — i.e, Facebook not only knows you have a cat, it knows your cat’s name — in the open internet, cookies were considered valuable to fill gaps in knowledge about users. It is also worth observing that while the behemoth social and search giants now take public offense at cookies, they have been less vocal about the need to reign in their own personalized ad-targeting capabilities.

How programmatic can work across the open internet without individualized and personalized user tracking

There are steps advertisers can take already.

For example, as part of the Google Privacy Sandbox proposals for managing interest-based advertising while protecting user privacy, there are proposed mechanisms for managing the ad serving, measurement and attribution of media so that digital advertising can operate effectively and efficiently across the open internet. 

All of this benefits users by subsidizing publisher content and making ad content more valuable. Proposals based on first locally executed decision over groups experiment (FLEDGE) include plans to store and manage ad serving and attribution data locally within the browser. In this manner, programmatic advertising capabilities such as reach, frequency and machine learning can still occur without needing to share data that would allow privacy-invasive tracking.

A brighter future lies with machine learning targeting methods

This brings marketers to an answer for the open internet that does not depend on Google, Facebook or individualized user profiles and that must be defended by the industry at all costs: Machine learning-powered ad targeting.

Marketers should consider machine learning and targeting approaches like predictive targeting, which uses aggregated and statistical data for modeling and targeting as a substitute for individualized ID-based ad targeting. Machine learning and statistics-driven advertising offer great potential to deliver the best of both worlds — targeted ads that drive engagement and ROI for advertisers and a privacy-forward approach to user data that focuses more on common attributes associated with conversion statistics and less on individual behavior.

As noted, the success of this next phase for the open internet is dependent on whether Google and Facebook are permitted to use their near-monopolies to create new barriers to advertising success on the open internet. Sometimes these barriers result from governmental lobbying, which results in clumsy, out-of-touch laws that disadvantage smaller, more innovative enterprises — Big Tech’s stealthy version of self-regulation. Or, they can be in the form of purposely engineered ad tech roadblocks that only Big Tech can solve, especially when it comes to accessing conversion data and the conversion feedback loops that are important to advertisers.

The post-cookie framework cannot be a disguised effort to build more walls. If Häagen-Dazs controlled the weather, it would always be warm, everywhere. Programmatic industry leaders need to monitor for new wall-building and be vocal about this as the new Google Chrome paradigm takes shape. And marketers need to understand these dynamics and push for machine learning-based alternatives to the current cookie-focused approaches.