Month: August 2021

Publishers look to pounce on Safari

The digital advertising industry may have received a reprieve from Google cutting off third-party cookies in its Chrome browser. But publishers are hoping the postponement provides a window of opportunity for themselves, advertisers, agencies and ad tech firms to finally confront the escalating issue of Apple’s Safari browser.

The key hits: 

• The digital ad industry has largely swept the Safari issue under the rug because of third-party cookies’ availability on Chrome’s bigger browser.
• Safari’s tracking limitations have capped publishers’ revenue and are becoming a bigger issue as mobile web traffic increases.
• Apple’s lack of communication with publishers hasn’t helped matters.
• Publishers don’t want browser-specific fixes, but believe that solutions for Safari could be applied to other cookieless browsers — even eventually Chrome.

A festering issue now inflamed

In the four years since Apple introduced Intelligent Tracking Prevention to rein in tracking on Safari, publishers have found their ability to profit from ad impressions running on Apple’s browser similarly circumscribed. One publishing executive said their Safari impressions sell for less than half the price of Chrome impressions, and a second publishing executive pegged the difference at 70% lower for Safari versus Chrome. But because Chrome has represented a larger share of the overall browser market — 65% globally in July compared Safari’s 19%, per StatCounter — publishers and advertisers have dealt with the issue by directing more of their efforts and ad budgets to Chrome.

“Apple has been given a bit of a hall pass based on [Safari’s relative] scale and the fact that there were alternatives. Revenue in total wasn’t entirely impacted; it just shifted from one browser to another,” said a third publishing executive.

However, with Google’s Chrome set to become more Safari-like once it kills off the third-party cookie and with mobile traffic likely to increase as people return to life outside their homes, publishers see some urgency for the industry to revoke that proverbial hall pass. A fourth publishing executive said that Safari accounts for half of the mobile traffic and a third of its desktop traffic to their company’s sites.

“The Google delay is going to shift publishers’ focus heavily toward Safari and solving that problem. Two years is a long time away, so I don’t care what happens in Chrome tomorrow because nothing is going to happen. But Safari is a problem,” said the fourth publishing executive.

Safari is not only a more immediate problem, but a growing one. “Now that people are getting out and about again, we’re seeing mobile traffic [increase] again. With the delay of deprecation of third-party cookies, that’s reintroducing that spotlight on Safari,” said the third publishing executive.

Solve Safari to cover Chrome

Among the reasons that the digital ad industry has not adequately addressed the Safari problem, in publishers’ minds, is that a browser-specific fix likely would have little upside. 

Advertisers typically do not buy ads based on what browser a person is using. Besides, publishers have been able to use their Chrome impressions to offset Safari’s monetization limits. For example, they use broad-reach sponsorship deals to fill the cookieless Safari impressions that are often left untouched by audience-based advertisers buying through programmatic open or private marketplaces. “For line items with cookie requirements, we’re unable to run in those environments. So we sell a ton of just sponsorship takeovers and that sort of share-of-voice-based buying that’s cookie agnostic,” said a fifth publishing executive.

However, with Chrome eventually going cookieless, publishers are looking to address the Safari issue as a way to prepare for the Chrome change.

“There are a lot of vendors out there that should be focusing on Safari-specific fixes. If you can solve for Safari, it’s going to work in Chrome,” said the fourth publishing executive.

Radio silence on Safari

Problem is, publishers seem to be largely alone in banging the drum on the Safari problem. Multiple publishing executives said they have yet to see advertisers or ad tech firms identify the Chrome extension as providing a window for finding a fix for Safari that could then be applied to any cookieless browser. 

“I haven’t encountered any buyers who say the light bulb went off,” said the fifth publishing executive.

“If there is an effort [by the industry to address Safari’s limitations], I haven’t heard of it,” said the third publishing executive.

Ad tech firms may be wary of coming up with ways to overcome Safari’s limitations if only to have Apple render them null and void. “There’s no third-party solution [for Safari]. I think all the third-party solutions are worried what if they build something for Apple and they take that away,” said a sixth publishing executive.

Therein lies the crux of the issue: Apple. The iPhone maker has been effectively absent in working with publishers to rejigger their advertising businesses around Safari’s limitations. 

“There has been no outreach from Apple to us,” said the third publishing executive. They added, “no one really calls out Apple for their failure to engage the industry, engage with publishers.” 

“With Apple, it’s like, ‘Does anyone even know who to call or who to talk to at Apple?’ They’re not talking to publishers, for sure,” said the sixth publishing executive.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment by press time. — Tim Peterson

What we’ve heard

“What Facebook owes us as a publishing community is updated analytics permissions through the News tab. If so much of the business is shifting to the News tab, we need to see that. I want to make sure we’re not writing things and throwing them into the void that are definite failures. On any given month, I want to be able to say, ‘Oh, we’re doing this wrong’ or ‘this type of post was doing well for us in June but it seems like there has been a loss of interest in that [topic].’ But they have not made it easy to get those insights.”

— Publishing executive

Will returning to the office impair productivity?

Media companies, including Hearst, The New York Times and The Washington Post, have told staff to expect to be in the office three times a week once they reopen. But some media employees are questioning the requirement.

Companies’ management teams spent the last 18 months praising employees’ productivity while working from home, as well as the efforts they went through to transition to working remotely, so why are they being required to come back into the office this fall?

“We are not being treated as though we made any progress in the future of work,” said Lizz Schumer, senior editor for Good Housekeeping. Employees “worked really hard” at the beginning of the pandemic to transition to working from home, she said. Schumer and her team used to print out documents for the magazine and pass them by hand to each other, but now their workflow is fully digital. “A lot of that hard work is being discounted,” she said.

Of course, some employees are keen on returning to their cubicles. Parents with young kids are perhaps less likely to find working from home all that more productive. “The idea of going into work and then leaving it behind to be with your kids is definitely appealing,” said Julia Dennison, digital content director at Parents magazine, who said she’s ready for a separation between work and life again.

Giving employees the choice to work from wherever they want may be the answer. Quartz CEO Zach Seward has seen “no changes in productivity” since reopening offices in June. “Where people choose to work from does not affect their productivity at all,” he said. Quartz employees can work from home or from the office and are not required to come in on a regular basis.

“The way I think about it is we want each employee to be as best equipped to do their work as possible,” Seward said.

But some media companies are locked into multi-year leases they can’t back out of, so perhaps it’s painful for executives to look at an empty office building and only see cash floating out of the windows.

Condé Nast, for example, recently repaid nearly $10 million of rent it owed on its 1.2 million square feet of office space at One World Trade Center, and the publisher is working with a brokerage team to sublease roughly 400,000 square feet of space the publisher won’t need. Its lease runs until 2039. — Sara Guaglione

Numbers to know

3%: The percentage of publisher professionals who responded to a recent Digiday+ research survey who said they plan to return to full-time work in an office when their companies go back to work.

830,000: The number of print and digital subscriptions The Atlantic now has, up 50% over the past 12 months.

325,000: The number of paid subscribers to Bloomberg Media, a 34% increase in the first half of the year. Of that, 40% of paid subscribers are from outside the U.S.

145,000: Number of digital subscribers that Gannett gained in the second quarter of 2021.

79%: Percentage share of The Wall Street Journal’s overall subscriptions that are digital-only subscriptions.

3 questions with Atlas Obscura’s Warren Webster

Atlas Obscura is both a publisher and a tourism company focused on all things related to exploration. Both sides of the business represented about a 50-50 split in revenue in 2019, but when the pandemic halted travel, CEO Warren Webster said his team had to rethink what exploration looks like from home.

Now that a variety of COVID-19 variants are coming into the picture, concerns are rising once again about whether or not the travel, tourism and hospitality industries will be hit as hard as they once were, and what the repercussions will be for media companies that are closely tied to these industries’ success.

Below is a sample from the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast during which Webster talked about COVID-19 variants and whether or not he’s worried about a repeat of March 2020.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. — Kayleigh Barber

With all of the COVID variants cropping up and heavily impacting under-vaccinated areas, are you sensing any hesitations from travel-endemic advertisers in what could be a reversion back to what 2020 looked like?

No, I think there is an incredible level of optimism right now among everyone involved in travel coming back. Of course we’re all watching carefully to see what these new variants and things do, and obviously, safety is top concern for everyone. On one hand, [some of these destinations] really need tourism revenue to come back. On the other hand, doing it in a safe and responsible way [is important]. But the overarching sentiment that I’m seeing is just incredible optimism about the next few months, and certainly next year.

Have you started doing trips again? Or are you still figuring out what makes sense for that business given the spread of variants?

We have started doing trips again, [but] not quite at the pace that we were at [in 2019]. We started ramping up our trip planning early in 2021 and had a couple trips go out throughout the year. Just recently, one of our signature trips [went] to Portugal very successfully. This fall and winter, we have a lot of departures planned for both domestic and international trips. We have a lot of interest — the demand is back for sure — and our community is booking trips at a higher rate than we’ve actually ever seen before, even pre-pandemic. A lot of it, however, is in 2022.

How are you ensuring safety for the travelers as you bring back your trips business? Are there extra precautions you need to take?

We basically follow the guidelines of the destinations that we’re going to and they vary depending on where it is. We just err on the side of caution generally, and if something feels unsafe, the last thing we’ll do is put any of our guests or our staff in harm’s way. And in a lot of cases, that does mean proof of vaccination.

[Right now] people are planning ahead, not quite sure yet about this year. We have an extremely flexible cancellation policy at this point because we just can’t predict if a trip is actually going to be able to go or not go. What we found is that, because the cancelation policy is flexible, the overwhelming majority of our guests have stuck with it and will continue to rebook if their trip got canceled for whatever reason, which is great.

What we’ve covered

Medium will begin offering writers a 50% cut of the subscriber revenue their content generates:

• Medium’s new referral program is meant to supplement the revenue writers get from the current version of the program, which compensates writers based on how much time users spend reading a writer’s output.
• Medium also plans to introduce more stringent eligibility requirements that will require new Partner Program participants to secure a modicum of traction on the platform before they can make any money.

Read more about the changes to the Medium Partner Program here.

Quartz refocuses subscription program on email newsletters for paying readers:

• Quartz will make four email newsletters the core of its subscription program, after determining that most of its paying members were accessing its content through email.
• According to a March 2021 survey, 75% of Quartz’s members said they were primarily accessing Quartz’s content through email, according to Quartz editor-in-chief Katherine Bell.

Read more about Quartz’s focus on email newsletters here.

Digiday+ Research: Publishers have scaled back their third-party cookie prep:

• According to new Digiday Research, many publishers that previously planned to remain diligent in their post-cookie planning have hit the snooze button following Google’s announcement that it was delaying the banishment of third-party cookies by about two years.
• However, a growing majority of publishers surveyed said they are actively preparing for the end of third-party cookies.

Read more about publishers’ changing approaches to the death of third-party cookies here. 

Unified ID 2.0 quietly amasses more support from the agency world, but publishers aren’t as convinced:

• The Unified ID 2.0 alternate identifier is quietly gathering more support among agencies, but it hasn’t picked up as much speed among publishers.
• Major publishers, including The New York Times, have said they won’t experiment with identity technologies, including UID 2.0.

Read more about why agencies are gaining interest in Unified ID 2.0 here.

How Overtime is positioning itself as a content partner for college athletes’ NIL deals:

• Overtime is finally able to work with college athletes and is creating a content studio specifically to make content for this cohort that will help sell out name, image and likeness (NIL) brand deals.
• NIL deals fall right into Overtime’s sweet spot as they treat the athletes like influencers and rely on who the person is rather than the number of points they earned in a game, said CEO Dan Porter.

Read more about Overtime’s new college athlete content studio here.

What we’re reading

How The 19th has changed since its launch:
The 19th only launched a year ago, but the news outlet has changed pretty meaningfully over the past 12 months, according to The Washington Post. Its original focus on issues pertaining specifically to women has expanded to broader topics concerning gender, sexual identity, race and economic class. The shift seems to be paying off. The 19th has 10,500 paid subscribers and secured $13 million in funding.

Stacy-Marie Ishmael is a standard-bearer for newsrooms’ burnout issue:
When Stacy-Marie Ishmael and Millie Tran jointly resigned their Texas Tribune posts in March, they drew attention to the growing issue of journalists burning themselves out from the past year of reporting on and living through the pandemic. In an interview with Poynter, Ishmael explained why she chose to quit her job at Texas Tribune and how news organizations need to take greater accountability for their working environments.

Fake news sites are receiving billions of ad dollars:
Advertisers are spending an estimated $2.6 billion on ads running on fake news sites, according to a study conducted by journalism organization NewsGuard and research firm Comscore. The analysis specifically looked at ads being bought programmatically, so part of the problem is likely that advertisers, agencies and ad tech companies aren’t doing a good enough job of managing what inventory they are buying.

Google will increase priority for faster-loading sites in search results:
Google is updating how sites’ user experiences impact their rankings in its search results, according to The Wall Street Journal. While the search giant already takes factors like page-load speed into account, by the end of August the company will use loading times, interruptive features and delayed loads as a tiebreak when evaluating evenly matched sites.

For Princeton researchers including Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, a Ph.D. at the University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, the key sticking point was a contract Facebook requires research institutions to sign before accessing its data. In particular, he and others on his digital tech policy research team were concerned that agreeing to the contract would give Facebook the right to remove information from their research findings had they actually went through with the project.

“It doesn’t make sense for us to do research for six months and then not be able to publish it,” Papakyriakopoulos told Digiday.

The Princeton researchers and the school’s lawyers were concerned that, if the research findings revealed how Facebook’s ad targeting technology and tools worked or how the company’s system determined ad prices, the contract would give the company the right to remove those findings from research before publication. “We sought to clarify whether Facebook would assert that information about how the Facebook advertising platform was used to target political ads in the 2020 elections is ‘Confidential Information’ that the agreement would allow them to ‘remove’ from our publication,” wrote the researcher team in an August 5 post published on the center’s blog.

The contract Facebook requires researchers to sign to access data through its Facebook Open Research and Transparency platform, or FORT, states that research findings resulting from analysis “may not disclose any Confidential Information or any Personal Data” and gives Facebook the opportunity to review publication drafts “to identify any Confidential Information or any Personal Data that may be included or revealed in those materials and which need to be removed prior to publication or disclosure.” According to the contract, Confidential Information includes information relating to Facebook’s products and technology, its data processing systems, policies and platforms, in addition to personal information pertaining to its users or business partners.

“The questions these researchers ask and conclusions they draw are not restricted by Facebook,” a Facebook spokesperson told Digiday regarding the Princeton researchers. “We simply ask academics to sign a research data agreement to ensure no personal data or confidential information is shared. Today, hundreds of researchers at more than 100 universities have signed the agreement.”

The company said it does not approve or reject research papers. “As of now, we have not rejected any research papers as a part of our standard review process to ensure no personal data or confidential information is included,” said the Facebook spokesperson.

Facebook’s FORT data platform is an example of the company’s increasingly restrictive approach to engaging academic researchers in an environment that’s drastically changed since the 2016 Cambridge Analytica political ad targeting scandal, which involved the use of data originally derived for psychographic ad targeting from Facebook data that was scraped for academic research. Critics often refer to tech companies’ justifications for academic research data limits as “privacy-washing.”

Poking holes in Facebook’s FTC defense

It turns out that Facebook’s justification for why it would not negotiate the contract with the Princeton researchers employed an argument that has now been debunked by the FTC. Facebook told the researchers its contract was non-negotiable because the stipulations therein were mandated by Facebook’s 2019 settlement with the agency involving consumer privacy violations. “We pushed back on this ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ approach,” wrote the researchers, who added, “Facebook later conceded in a subsequent email that they were under no legal mandate and that their approach was simply based on their internal business justification.”

Facebook’s contention that its agreement with the FTC prohibits negotiations for data access by academic researchers came to the fore on Aug. 3, when the company’s product management director Mike Clark wrote that the FTC Order was justification for Facebook’s decision to disable accounts and apps associated with NYU’s Ad Observatory Project, a political ad targeting research effort that had already been under threat of shutdown by Facebook since October 2020. 

“We took these actions to stop unauthorized scraping and protect people’s privacy in line with our privacy program under the FTC Order,” he wrote, noting that the NYU project’s “ongoing and continued violations of protections against scraping cannot be ignored and should be remediated.” Clark said the NYU researchers should have tapped its sanctioned FORT data instead.

In response to the Facebook post, the acting director of the FTC’s Consumer Protection Bureau, Samuel Levine, wrote, in a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg published on the agency’s site, that its agreement with Facebook “does not bar Facebook from creating exceptions for good-faith research in the public interest.” Notably, he added, “the FTC supports efforts to shed light on opaque business practices, especially around surveillance-based advertising.”

But even back in May, Laura Edelson, an NYU Ph.D. candidate working on that now-shuttered NYU project, told Digiday the FORT data wasn’t of interest because there were restrictions on the level of ad targeting information Facebook made available in the data set. Facebook said those limits were “one of several steps we have taken to protect users’ privacy.”

Blueprint aims to integrate multiple elements of media planning, buying and analytics for marketers looking to take those responsibilities in-house, or for small agencies looking to enhance their media-side abilities. “Nothing great really exists to empower marketers to simplify, add transparency to, and enrich cross-channel data for media buying,” said Silverstein. “I want to empower brands to license this directly and take it in-house.”

For agency clients, “it’s very much a hybrid model, where we’re not going to hand over a piece of tech to the end-user and give them a bucket of hours or make them pay for enablement — like many do — to figure out how to use it,” said Silverstein. Instead, he said, Model B helps agencies get up and running over a time frame to eventually transition and license the tech directly.

For marketers, two of which are already using Blueprint, Silverstein said the goal is to wean them off requiring a media agency and become self-sufficient. “It’s not cold turkey — it’s giving them a succinct roadmap to get to where they don’t need that [agency].”

Pricing is dependent upon a multitude of variables, but starts at $10,000 per month, said Silverstein, adding the company is willing to structure agreements that focus on outcomes/results by including an element of performance-based pricing. “We feel very confident that our solution is much more cost effective than anything currently in the market,” he said.  

“Launching advertising with Blueprint made it surprisingly simple to scale our program across 30 audiences and three different marketing channels,” said Hodges Markwalter, COO of Blueprint client Viva Finance, a fintech provider looking to change the lending business. “Initial results have exceeded our expectations by delivering conversions at one-third of the cost we had budgeted for. We’re excited to see where this new platform can take our business.”

Without giving specific figures, Silverstein touted Viva’s success as reaching a cost per origination that was half of the company’s goal, predicated on performance based on organic channels. He called it a “perfect use case” for Blueprint.

Though Blueprint has no agency clients yet, its second client has some consumer cachet: Ayesha Curry, who is launching an e-commerce brand called Sweet July. The wife of basketball superstar Stephen Curry, Curry said in a prepared statement: “Blueprint has made launching Sweet July much easier than I thought. I looked at several solutions but Model B’s technology is much more seamless. After talking it over with my team, it was a no-brainer.”

Though it was built on the back of existing extract, transform, load (ETL) software from a major tech vendor, which Silverstein declined to identify, Blueprint is now 80 percent powered by originally developed algorithms, with the goal of being fully proprietary in the near future. 

A veteran of building products in agencies including 360i and Edelman, Silverstein joined Model B three months ago to get Blueprint up and running. He said he was drawn by the firm’s serial entrepreneur founder, Aptin Buergari, who looks to build tech solutions that fix broken models. 

Blueprint isn’t the only solution launching today. Frequence, an ad sales automation software company, is rolling out SmartProposal, which aims to help local media ad-sales operations optimize media campaigns. According to a company spokesperson, SmartProposal uses machine-learning tech to analyze data points from thousands of media campaigns to generate campaign proposals designed to help media sellers close more business and generate added revenue.

For example, a survey by Office Furniture Online reveals that one third of knowledge workers have argued over what music gets played in the office. 

This may sound ridiculous, but neuro-linguistic coach Rebecca Lockwood insists that if music is selected carefully, it can improve staff morale and boost output. In fact, music could be one of the secret ingredients bosses use to create harmony so that people are both comfortable and productive.

And while the continued spread of the delta variant has caused widespread delays to office reopenings in the U.S., many workers are already back at their desks on a voluntary basis. For some that have returned for a couple of days a week, it’s been a surreal experience to find themselves with an entire floor to themselves. But for others, the experience has been positive.

At the New York office of magazine, website, and events business Future the mood is upbeat.

Lori Fromm, vp of Women’s Lifestyle magazine, was working as associate publisher for Hearst when its high-profile title Marie Claire was purchased by Future last May. She made the move too, but has only recently met her new Future colleagues face-to-face.

“Honestly, I was surprised by how excited I was to be returning to the office. I felt like a third grader preparing for her first day of school,” she said. “I packed my work bag and a lunch the night before and went to bed early. I dressed up, walked to the train and put on my game face.”

Future’s chief revenue officer Jason Webby felt the same. He joined the company in July 2020, but it was months before he saw his new colleagues in person.

“It wasn’t until I went into the office for the first time this June that I realized how much I missed being in the same room with my co-workers,” he said. “The office isn’t as full as it will be. In August we transitioned back to two days a week, but it will be three days a week in September.

“Those of us who are in now, seem really happy to see each other. There’s an element of fun that’s missing when you just go from video call to video call from home. Facilities are open, and I’m taking full advantage of our espresso machine.”

In the U.K., Kat Riekemann, account manager at PR company Words + Pixels, had looked forward to returning to the office, but she felt a little nervous. She had managed to meet some of her colleagues during and between the various Coronavirus lockdowns.

“I was anxious about returning to the intense work life I was used to before the pandemic,” she said. “However, since the restrictions have eased it has made a big difference being able to see colleagues face-to-face, have discussions and chats, and joke in person. I’ve found that it’s positively changed how I communicate with others remotely.”

Riekemann goes into the office two days a week and she is pleased that there are no plans to return full time.  

“I think the office socials will change too. I’ve enjoyed the new social activities that aren’t completely focused on drinking,” she said. “We’ve started doing breakfast meets on a Monday morning, where the company provides a selection of breakfast foods for the team. Having the space to socialize, catch up on the weekend and ease back into socializing without the evening pressures has helped me massively in returning to an office environment.” 

Natasha Lee is a global process expert for an automotive industry supplier based in Munich, Germany.  She said going back to the office has been a strange experience.

“Having spent nearly 18 months in the shadow of COVID-19 it was great to be back, but at the same time I felt like a fish out of water. I felt like I was doing something quite naughty,” she said. “It was like a great escape back into the wild. The vibe improved as people relaxed and contact among colleagues increased.”

She said her company is managing the return well so that people feel safe. Employees are asked to still wear masks when not at a desk. 

And Lee said it was great to be part of a work family again. “We are aiming to be in the office three days per week. I will select my days in line with my, let’s say, favorite colleagues.”

Tell us about the difficulty in hiring you’re seeing right now. 

There’s a lot of people leaving agencies to go to tech companies and clients. The pipeline to backfill those roles can’t keep up with the demand. Also, once someone’s been given an offer they don’t just start the next day [so roles are empty for a while]. And anyone who’s half decent in this industry has lots of offers to mull over. 

People leaving agencies for tech companies or clients isn’t a new problem. Is it getting worse now? 

It’s the same. It might be a bit more pronounced now with more people hiring [to fill roles once hiring freezes due to the pandemic lifted]. Agencies are like talent nurseries for these other companies where people might get a better offer. 

Why do you think agencies are feeling the talent crunch so much right now? 

We all just went through a once in a century crisis. Every company is fighting to preserve all jobs, not to lose too much money, not to damage cash flow, not to hurt the balance sheet. Hiring is a massive cost. Property and hiring are the two biggest costs for any company. So hiring has gone on freeze for a lot of companies — it’s not just an agency problem — and the demand has not gone down for talent. All of those jobs need to be backfilled. There’s more competition and choice. 

With roles being left open for a long time there must be a lot of pressure on the employees still at agencies to pitch in and take on more work. 

It puts more pressure on the people who’ve kept their jobs and stayed because they’re shouldering a lot more work while they are trying to backfill those roles. That’s where the trouble is. Imagine having to do [the work of] four or five people, think about what that’s doing to your brain. I don’t think a lot of people who may be in leadership teams really have an understanding of, or empathy for, what it’s like [to have to take on that work load]. 

What should agencies do to be more competitive in this environment?

It’s difficult. There’s competition from all sides. I don’t have a good answer for that. But something has to change. Lumbering people with more work than they’re paid for — people get paid for one job, and no matter how big that title is or what they’re paid they’re paid for one job, not ten or twenty. That’s a big issue [for people] right now, especially if you’re on a demanding account with a lot of high volume work. 

Even as new Covid variants threaten a return to mask mandates and potential lockdown, advertisers say out-of-home has proven too promising a marketing channel to press pause.

“As people are rediscovering their same surroundings in new ways, with less crowded transit, outdoor dining and outdoor entertainment we would expect brands to start returning to the same formats in new ways,” Pittson said of OOH efforts.

By the end of the year, the Out of Home Advertising Association of America predicts OOH will see 10-12% revenue growth, a steady recovery after the U.S. OOH market fell by $1.3 billion in total ad revenues in 2020. It was a significant drop from $8 billion in 2019 to $6.7 billion in 2020, a 16% decline, per the OAAA’s research.

This time last year, OOH made up less than 5% of R/GA’s client media planning — and that’s if it was included at all. But since May, the trend has reversed with OOH returning to pre-pandemic levels, eating up anywhere from 20-30% of client media planning, according to Ellie Bamford, senior vice president and global head of media and connections at R/GA, who did not provide exact figures. R/GA has served clients like Uber and Ally Bank.

“There’s something very powerful about showing up in people’s everyday moments in their life,” Bamford said of OOH ads. “We’ve all grown sick of the social bombardment and no one even notices a banner ad anymore. We’ve moved past it.”

However, digital media’s oversaturation and pay-to-play nature is just one piece of the puzzle that’s sending marketers scrambling to find alternative marketing solutions — especially as iOS updates, like tracking notifications and user opt-out options, have left a shrunken data pool for advertisers and attribution.

“Basically, the punchline with iOS is it’s becoming harder and harder to reach your target audience through digital ads,” said Melanie Travis, CEO and founder of Andie swimwear, which recently launched landed its first billboard in Beverly Hills. “So a brand trying to navigate the waters needs to start diversifying more, faster than ever before.”

The pandemic has also pushed more marketers to OOH. Lockdown cut travel and traffic off at the knees, making for significantly discounted OOH ad rates that many startups sought to take advantage of as vaccine rollout promised a soon return to normal life, as previously reported by Digiday. 

Technological advancements in digital billboards have also improved OOH, making the channel even more promising as measurable, cost-effective, flexible and brand safe. 

For these reasons, startup emergency kit brand Judy, will continue OOH efforts with 7% of its total marketing spend, per Judy co-founder Simon Huck, who did not provide exact figures. After a micro-campaign with a single billboard in Dallas, Judy recently launched a multi-city campaign with billboards across Los Angeles, Austin and Miami.

It’s a similar story for dining app Seated, which recently launched a major campaign with billboards, spots on transit, wallscapes and murals throughout New York, Atlanta, Dallas, and Boston. Doubling down on its commitment to OOH, the budget for this campaign is three times what it was for previous campaigns, taking up 60% of monthly ad spend, up from 25%, per Bo Peabody, co-founder and executive chairman, who did not share exact budget figures.

Over at Andie, CEO Travis said the brand will keep up with OOH in its media mix as digital OOH continues to make strides in attribution and measurement capabilities. 

“Anecdotally, I think it’s doing really well. But I think it’s up for a month and I want to see what impact it has,” she said. “What are all the different ways you can quantify the success of out-of-home?”