Month: August 2021

Founded in 2019 by former Call of Duty pro and Team Envy founder Skyler Johnson, Paper Crowns is a prominent gaming-endemic creative agency. It was named Creative Team of the Year at the 2020 Esports Awards and pulled in revenues of over $1 million last year. Johnson believes his agency’s success is built on its members’ deep roots in the gaming scene. “We’ve built out a really good relationship with all of the talent agencies in the space,” Johnson said. Collaborations with prominent streamers such as David “StoneMountain64” Steinberg, alongside partnerships with prominent companies and leagues like Activision Blizzard and its Call of Duty League, have helped Paper Crowns sign contracts with non-endemic brands such as Sinai Health and Gopuff.

Johnson and his colleagues are well aware of the growing presence of non-endemic agencies in the space, but he believes Paper Crowns’ nimble nature and competitive rates will help it succeed despite the encroachment of these competitors. “The value that we bring is, not only are we going to hopefully get you new eyes, but also, you’re getting a hands-on experience,” Johnson said. The agency offers both conceptual and artistic services, cooking up everything from logos to full suites of stream graphics for brands, streamers and media organizations such as Upcomer. Paper Crowns also has the ability to execute on these ideas, with in-house designers and developers capable of shepherding unique activations such as the Call of Duty League Pick’Em brackets to completion. The company offers its services on a sliding scale depending on the scope of the project and the capacities of the client, with the rate for a single package ranging between $1,500 and $7,300.

Though gaming-endemic agencies have a head start, non-endemic creative agencies are looking to muscle their way into the space using their advantages as larger and more established firms. According to Mark Boyd, co-founder of creative agency Gravity Road, his company’s strength similarly comes from its established relationships — but for Gravity Road, these relationships are mainly with the non-endemic brands that are looking to get into gaming. “As these categories mature, you see brands come back to long-term kinds of relationships,” Boyd said, “because, in a sense, the gaming work has to fit into the broader comms ecosystem — it can’t be disconnected.”

With marquee clients such as Uber, TikTok and Netflix, along with gaming clients like Pokémon Go developer Niantic, Gravity Road has deep connections to some of the biggest companies looking to establish themselves in the space. And though it lacks the relationships with gaming influencers that have helped agencies like Paper Crowns make a splash, Boyd believes these connections are relatively easier to forge. “Everybody’s open for business at the moment,” Boyd said. “When we’ve got a smart proposition and an influencer we want to work with, there’s nobody saying, ‘you know, I only work with that endemic agency.’”

The competition between endemic and non-endemic agencies in the gaming industry is not a battle to the death. As the gaming market expands, there’s more than enough room for both types of agencies to do brisk business. Still, at the moment, it feels like each holds a piece of the whole — the question is which side will more quickly master the other’s area of expertise. “The agencies that really perform in the video game world are endemic agencies,” said Margot Rodde, a creative consultant and founder of boutique marketing agency WePlay. “However, the opportunity for non-endemic agencies is when they can help create these partnerships with brands.”

No matter the future of creative agencies in the space, Rodde said, it’s imperative that both endemic and non-endemic agencies hire individuals whose interest and experience in gaming is legitimate. Without such a foundation, any attempts to reach the gaming audience will almost certainly fall flat. “Playing games is part of the talent that we hire,” Boyd said. “It’s where they want to work.”

In addition to independent non-endemic agencies such as Gravity Road, the “big five” agency holding companies are also moving into gaming and esports, further ensuring that competition within the space is heating up. In January, Publicis Groupe UK launched Publicis Play, a specialized gaming and esports department staffed by members of Publicis•Poke, Publicis Sport & Entertainment and Spark Foundry.

Gaming content has entered the mainstream, and so has the branding and marketing that accompanies it. No longer can streamers throw together an overlay in MS Paint and call it a day; on the other end, brands must carefully craft their advertisements in order to avoid alienating a corporation-wary gaming audience. To reach the modern gamer without coming off as ingenuine, streamers, influencers and brands alike are hiring creative agencies to lead their branding and marketing efforts.

The pivots happened in several ways. I was focused on our digital media. But we also had a lot of traditional mediums that got disrupted pretty quickly as well. So we made sure that [our content and marketing] felt very relevant to what was happening. We didn’t want to feel tone deaf to what’s happening with the concerns around the pandemic as a whole. Keeping that in mind, we wanted to make sure that we also recognized that a lot of people that would typically shop brick and mortar or shop at optometrists no longer had that option when everything shut down. So we wanted to also make sure that people who had a need [for new glasses] knew that they could come to [Zenni]. 

Many marketers pulled back on spending on out-of-home, experiential, etc. Does that include Zenni?

When it comes to the traditional mediums, we were pretty heavily invested in things like airline magazines — and, of course, the airline industry and travel was hit big time, as well as a lot of billboards and out-of-home [businesses]. So we had to do some pretty quick shifts and pivot there as well. We did keep our OOH on in the San Francisco area. This is our home and we wanted to continue to support, even though a lot of people were not out and about because of the restrictions within the city. We didn’t want to pull back completely. 

In recent weeks there’s been an uptick in Covid numbers in some areas due to the delta variant. Is that having an impact on your marketing plans yet?

I would say that what the pandemic has taught us, and a lot of businesses, is to let the customer be the one that leads the way. We continue actively listening to our customer base, as well as our employees even within our business, to understand their comfort level, what their needs are and their concerns. And we let that influence what we’re doing. So as of right now, because everything is changing so drastically on a regular basis, and we are in a needs-based business, we’re continuing to lean in where our customers are actively searching for glasses, or looking for our types of products. And we’ll probably continue to do so and just let them sort of determine how to continue to move forward.

We’ve heard from lots of marketers that this pandemic has changed their approach to planning. Is that true for you at Zenni? 

Yeah, absolutely. I would say we have shifted into a different type of planning mode as a result of the pandemic. I think a lot of businesses used to plan for longer cycles. Now we do these smaller, bite-sized cycles where we have plans, but we’re very fluid. We know we have our plans in front of us, but we are willing to shift and move a lot more even than we previously had been because we want to be as relevant as possible as to what’s going on. This gives us an opportunity on a daily basis to decide [how to adapt if things] are shifting in social, or if the demand is looking different in search or [consider how] different cities or different places [are doing as] the restrictions are changing. We want to try to continue to listen and be as relevant as possible.

By the numbers

Marketers have a lot to think about when it comes to targeting with the end of third-party cookies and other data privacy laws coming soon. Even though Google’s cookie-delay offers marketers a bit of breathing room, some have already started preparing, according to new research from self-service programmatic ad platform, Choozle. Here are some highlights from Choozle’s mid-year digital advertising trend report, below:

• Trends show that more digital advertising campaigns have used third-party data (from 35 percent to 42 percent) and contextual targeting (from 6 percent to 16 percent) since the end of 2020. 
• Despite higher CPMs, marketers have increased the usage of third-party data targeting because they see higher CTRs, highlighting how this targeting strategy enables reaching the right audience.
• Marketers have moved on from IP-address targeting in 2021, with usage decreasing by 20 percent as businesses offer more hybrid work options. — Kimeko McCoy

Quote of the week

“Over this period we’ve seen clients diversify their budgets into areas like CTV and Snap but that’s not necessarily meant they’re switching dollars away from Facebook. Few media platforms have the interactions, conversions and audience data that Facebook can offer even now, which is why we’ve seen budgets change the way they have done over the period.”

— Playbook Media’s Bryan Karas told senior news editor Seb Joseph and senior media buying and planning editor Michael Burgi for their piece on how Facebook’s ads business is doing with Apple’s cookie changes.

What we’ve covered

• Gaming reporter Alexander Lee spoke with a former Activision Blizzard employee about sexual harassment at the company for our latest Confessions interview.
• Marketing reporter Kimeko McCoy dug into marketers’ and agency execs’ feelings about TikTok as the platform continues its rise in popularity.  
• Senior features and research editor Max Willens reported on LinkedIn’s latest approach to boost premium membership: paywalled content from premium publishers.

Good Housekeeping set a standard at Hearst UK that the rest of the portfolio wants to replicate.

For nearly 100 years, the homelife magazine has cultivated a following of readers who trust its product recommendations, reviews and seals of approval enough to spend their money on those tried and tested items. Now, the Good Housekeeping Institute has expanded into the Hearst Institute, enabling the rest of the UK-based titles to use the same resources, experts and testing facility that has strengthened the GH brand’s trust with readers.

In the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Laura Cohen, Hearst UK’s head of accreditation, talks about what the expansion means for both the physical operations of the Hearst Institute as well as its ability to drive revenue from working with more brands and producing more content that can be monetized through affiliate commerce.

Below are highlights from the conversation that have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Replicating the Good Housekeeping model

The Good Housekeeping Institute has been testing products since 1924, so [it’s] nearly 100 years old. We’ve taken the amazing credibility and authority that the GHI has and we’re utilizing that and expanding it to all brands at Hearst [including] Cosmo, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, Men’s Health [and] Women’s health. We’ve taken what the GH Institute does, which is test products and write reviews that consumers find really useful, and we are taking that across the whole of Hearst. 

Widening the aperture to different editorial perspectives 

A lot of our brands write about beauty, music, women’s health and men’s health [but] Harper’s Bazaar will look at beauty in a slightly different way to Cosmo in a slightly different way to Elle in a slightly different way to Good Housekeeping. So that’s where a lot of our testing can fit across lots of different brands because actually, Good Housekeeping might talk about a certain number of brands when it comes to eye cream, whereas Harper’s Bazaar would talk about slightly different brands. And so we’ve tested them all [in the end].

Making money on reviews

The main way in which we monetize the product testing is through selling the accreditation. So the Good Housekeeping Institute-approved or Harper’s Bazaar-approved. Normally, we offer between a six and a 12-month license on that individual product that’s passed the testing. And then clients can come to us and we can have a conversation about renewals at the end of the license period.

We also drive revenue through affiliate and e-commerce. There’s a huge amount of content that comes out of all the testing that we do and that content is then hosted on various different Hearst brand websites. What we found is that the products that had a logo next to them were the best-selling products within that article.

While some of those changes are unsurprising — events were a tough business to grow in 2020 — others serve as a reminder that publishers have a long way to go if they want to truly diversify their revenue streams.

In early July, Digiday polled 126 publisher professionals about how their companies make money. The survey presented a list of revenue sources and asked respondents to indicate how much of their revenue came from each, using five options that ranged from “none of our revenue” to “an extremely large portion of our revenue.”

The survey marked the third time Digiday has asked its research panel these questions; it previously asked them in the first quarter of 2020, and the third quarter of 2020 prior to that.

While the respondents — and the exact number of them — in each sample was not identical over time, their composition was similar; in all three samples, Digiday received at least 30 responses from publishers that generated less than $10 million in revenue per year, 30 responses from publishers that generated between $10 million and $50 million, and 30 responses from publishers that generate more than $50 million per year. 

The results showed, more than anything, that direct-sold advertising has become significantly more important to publishers than it was 12 months ago.

It also showed that many areas of strategic importance, such as subscriptions, are basically flat compared to where they were 12 months ago as at least “large” sources of revenue. Others, such as branded content, actually slid backward from that perspective.

Signs of more modest progress could be found if the results were examined from another angle. For example, affiliate commerce now represents at least a “moderate” portion of revenue for 30% of publishers, up from 18% in the first quarter of this year and more than double the 12% it represented in the third quarter of last year. Similarly, video advertising now represents at least a “moderate” portion of revenue for a majority of publishers for the first time. 

It was only natural that as digital transformation modernized the physical elements of OOH, automated transactions followed. Now, data partners have emerged to complement the first-party data inherent to publishers, and programmatic has become a viable way to bring the digital out-of-home (DOOH) channel into broader conversations.

The promise of DOOH is that of omnichannel expansion — and revenue

While traditional OOH has been around for a long time, DOOH is often still considered an emerging channel. This classification connotes innovation and promise surrounding the medium’s potential. Indeed, DOOH is beginning to generate a level of revenue and omnichannel purpose that is taking it from promise to prominence — earning it a seat at the adult table.

From national brands to performance-based D2C companies, savvy buyers are leaning into DOOH for its visual impact and full-funnel proficiency. That trend is coupled with certain challenges, however. For example, in a recent Verizon Media study, 90% of advertisers agree that DOOH is the right place to invest, but 53% find buying it difficult. Much of this perception comes from the sheer number of screen formats and creative assets requiring management. This contributes to the medium’s uniqueness but can be daunting when resources are limited. 

The path to simplifying DOOH is marked by partnerships — and leads to creativity

DOOH has dynamic content capabilities, and display and video-enabled supply that bridge the in-home and out-of-home viewing experience. Some of the leading tech platforms simplify the DOOH activation process by offering creative services that share best practices and assist with reformatting.

Omnichannel platforms make DOOH easier to purchase by catering to the 93% of advertisers who want a single platform for ad planning. With an effective partner, advertisers get the DOOH tools they need to drive growth. Audience insights, retargeting and full-funnel measurement capabilities help demonstrate DOOH’s value in the modern media landscape.

DOOH also plays nicely with others. When incorporated in an omnichannel media strategy, DOOH provides essential reach across audiences who are on the go and can amplify the effectiveness of other channels. The medium is proven to reach light TV viewers, providing linear and connected TV buyers with audience extension opportunities and cost efficiencies.

Top spenders in the channel do it right by taking advantage of new features and producing clever creatives — think Apple, Netflix and McDonald’s. Netflix believes in the medium so much that it purchased a billboard network.

Success at DOOH is leading to long-term strategies

With the tools and expertise in place to guide spending and deliver results, adding DOOH to the media mix has never been so straightforward. Extended campaigns and reinvestment prove that DOOH is earning the trust of buyers who have no history of engaging with this channel.

To advertisers seeing diminishing marginal returns in certain media, a test that reallocates spend to DOOH can demonstrate its performance capabilities across advertising plans and objectives. DSP teams can help guide advertisers in the right direction for budget allocation, KPI alignment and creative requirements. To DOOH sellers who have a story to tell, do so through compelling case studies and resources that help refresh longstanding habits. 

After the “year of mobile” turned into five years, and with the “years of CTV” underway, DOOH confidently holds the promise of being the next big thing at the adult table.