Month: August 2021

Travel, to no surprise, was one of the largest industries impacted by the pandemic and publishers like Atlas Obscura that cover exploration, wanderlust and gastronomy had to quickly adapt and figure out both what content output and brand deals would like in this new reality. 

Luckily for Atlas Obscura, the concept of exploration meant more than its tourism and trip-planning business, which accounted for about half of the company’s revenue in 2019. In the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, CEO Warren Webster talked about how his team adapted exploration to mean everything from learning about new subjects or trying out new skills from experts online in a new courses business, as well as leaning into the road trip model for discovering a new place. 

And while some travel-related advertisers had to pull back on spending, others in the auto and food categories filled the gaps and Atlas Obscura walked away from 2020 in a strong position, Webster said, though he did not provide exact figures. Now as travel is slowly returning, the company is bringing back some of its paused 2019 revenue streams and adding its successful 2020 innovations to build toward a successful year.

Of course, some hesitations still loom around the coronavirus variants, but Webster said that both his team and advertisers are optimistic and eager to get back into in-person experiential events and programming. 

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

New definitions of exploration

We are in the travel business, however, we’re really about exploration and exploration can happen anywhere. You can travel halfway around the world or you could explore in your backyard or take a road trip. That really helped us because going back to March 2020, obviously, our far-flung trips all had to come back and we pulled all our travelers back to the U.S. as quickly as possible. We essentially closed our trips business for the time being and we really started focusing on what can we do to satisfy the curiosity of our readers, our community, while they’re stuck at home. We launched an initiative called Wonder-From-Home. We’re a media company, plus we’re a trip operator and an experience company. So while we couldn’t operate the trips, we still had a lot to do with our media business and ended up having, in some ways, the most successful year we’ve ever had. We more than doubled our brand partnerships, revenue 2020 over 2019.

Hard hit categories are coming back into the mix

It’s often assumed that our endemic advertiser is a travel company, but because we touch on so many things — exploration can mean exploration into food exploration, into places, into people, into history and culture — we cover sort of a wide swath, so we weren’t necessarily completely tied to travel partners. But one of our favorite categories in the catalog and the groups that we really have a lot of love for, because we’re all sort of in the same in the same boat, are DMOs. So all the different destination marketing organizations, the tourism bureaus, the the organizations that help destinations succeed, through tourism. We definitely saw those have to sort of hunker down over the last year, and it’s very exciting to see them coming back now, both domestically and around the world. We’re doing a lot of work with DMOs ranging from cities to the whole countries and regions.

In some cases we’ve seen an increase in spend. In some cases, they’ve had to hold back a bit. Overall, I would say what they’re realizing is what we’re seeing, where we have this community of millions of travelers who are explorers who are ready to go on that road trip or go on that trip overseas and these DMOs want to be the ones that are thought at first. So in some cases, we’re seeing a big increase from prior spend.

Modifying the experience business for virtual

In addition to our trips business, we had our experiences business, which was instead of getting on a plane and going somewhere halfway around the world, just spending a couple hours, doing a fun activity, or learning a new skill, or taking a tour of something cool and hidden and unusual. And we had hundreds of these things running and we also had to stop obviously doing the in-person version of those. We looked at the types of programming that we could take from that and the instructors or the hosts, and turn them into online versions. We found that actually, we could just host so many more people on the online versions of these things that there was a big appetite for them when people couldn’t get out and do these activities on their own. And we launched a new product called courses that is more than just that couple hours doing an activity; it’s really digging into a subject. We have a bunch of those running and so far we’ve had about 5,000 people go through our courses.

And it comes only a month after Omnicom Media Group formally endorsed UID 2.0 in a bid to spur more industry adoption and move the issue of new identifier solutions forward. This news comes after major publishers, including The New York Times, have said they won’t experiment with identity technologies, including UID 2.0.

What exactly is a closed operator? In short, it’s a company that can use UID 2.0 within its own data ecosystem, employing first-party data that never leaves its walls. That sounds a lot like a walled garden, but both The Trade Desk and IPG’s Kumar insist that’s not the case.

Any company signing up as a closed operator is “going to house [UID 2.0] inside their own infrastructure, to generate their own version of it without going outside their walls,” said Bill Michels, general manager of product at The Trade Desk. “The tool will talk back to the main system, so as we make updates it will automatically be refreshed.” 

Added Kumar: “It allows me to tie an identifier to first-party data, and that data doesn’t have to leave my system. In all other cases, you have to take your data and get that ingested into an external system, especially a closed system. But here, I’m not allowing the first-party data to leave my walls.

Kinesso and Axciom clients get a UID identifier, without giving up their own first-party data, which means those clients aren’t “compromising” their own data security, Kumar said.

Part of the growing appeal of UID 2.0 is the universality of participation in its development and management but its ability to get used within the privacy-compliant walls of each company using it. In some ways, UID’s rollout isn’t terribly unlike a car rental company.

Michels explained how its development involves three main participant groups: 

Administrator: the holder of the keys, which ensures users agree to abide by a set of rules. Currently, The Trade Desk is the sole administrator, but Michels said the company is looking to see who else will take on that role. 

Operator: there can be any number of them — IPG is currently its first closed operator. They have a distributed version of the API that allows a UID participant to generate the identifier info. This makes them like a combination of the rental customer and the car being rented.

Compliance management: essentially the police who make sure participants (operators) are abiding by this set of rules, such as not sharing IDs outside their data systems, or joining directly identifiable information with browser behavior. 

“It’s a fabric, everyone can stitch this into any other ID they’re using,” said Michels. “The success of UID 2.0 doesn’t come at the expense of any other third-party identifiers. They can all work together.”

Why then haven’t that many major publishers signed on to UID 2.0 yet? Kumar said he thinks they’ll show up once there’s more demand — and likened the situation to 10 years ago when programmatic was in its infancy and only had access to remnant inventory.

Michels noted that The Trade Desk is focused on signing up publishers in the connected TV space, with AMC Networks, Fubo and Tube already secured. “We think the value exchange between consumer and publisher there is great and explicit, which is why they need” UID, he added.

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. 

“We have always been a talent-first company. People don’t come to Overtime for the score of the game or find out that somebody got traded. They come to follow and see the stories of high school, college, professional athletes, our [in-house] talents, and everything else like that,” Porter said. 

Overtime’s approach is to make connections directly with the athletes but unlike an agency, the company is not trying to represent a large cohort of college athletes and get as many endorsement deals for each of them as it possibly can. For example, Porter said that Overtime will not represent an athlete for an appearance with a local pizzeria in their college town or posting single photo #ad on Instagram.

Instead, Overtime will be a content partner to college athletes. This week, the publisher launched a new College Athlete Creator Studio that will use its video production operation and in-house creative staff to create new shows, podcasts, and merchandise with both male and female college athletes. That content will then be distributed across its owned and operated platforms to an audience of more than 35 million monthly unique viewers — something these individuals on their own do not have access to.

Each project being made in the creator studio will be based on the student athletes’ skills, interests and their personalities and will not be a part of existing shows or series by Overtime, he added. Once the athlete is signed on and the plan is in place for what the content will look like, Overtime’s sales team will start selling the projects to advertisers.

The athletes themselves will earn a standard talent fee, according to Porter, that is based on a number of variables including the athletes’ existing popularity and social following, how much the company is expected to make from potential brand partners, and the reach once the content is distributed. He would not disclose what Overtime has paid for talent fees in past partnerships with professional and high school athletes, but all of these factors can lead to giant discrepancies in what this cohort of talent could potentially be paid.

For example, Team Whistle, another digital sports media company that just recently started working with college athletes, will pay its talent anywhere between $10,000 and $150,000 for video appearances.

And beyond that, Porter said there are opportunities for college athletes to earn money on top of the talent fees, including merchandising deals and creating longer term relationships with brand partners that lead to deals down the road that circumvent Overtime altogether.

Porter said he expects the Creator Studio to be a multi-million dollar line of revenue, however, the timeline for how long that will take is still questionable and dependent on brands’ willingness to work with this cohort for the first time. In the meantime, the company is investing $1 million into getting the first batch of projects with college athletes off the ground and has made hires to its internal talent management team in order to focus on this new talent demographic. 

“It ​​has tremendous upside, [but] I think some of it is going to depend on how quickly the various brands step up and help empower the athletes. If they take a wait and see model, then it’ll grow more slowly,” he said. Existing advertising partners are already expressing interest, Porter added, but at the end of the day, “they want to know that it’s kosher.” 

Overtime has expressed interest in this age group of athletes in the past, however the strict rules on how the publisher could work with this cohort of players aged 16 to 22 stagnated that interest. One of the ways in which Overtime tried to bypass the NCAA’s rules was creating its own league of professional high school aged basketball players that gives unbridled access to both the game coverage and the athletes’ personalities for a slew of new content.

“What’s so exciting about it is essentially there’s a new group of talent that is now on the market,” said Gabe Gordon, co-founder and managing partner of Reach Agency. “I would liken this akin to social influencers 10 to 15 years ago that had reached a certain level of scale and were an alternative to traditional celebrities or traditional sports athletes.” 

The age range of customers that a college student can potentially sway the purchase decisions of could be problematic, however, Gordon said. And therefore, the more creative the content and the more it represents the individuals that are working with the publisher, the more likely it will be that advertisers will see the results they want.

“I do think that these athletes are great to appealing to very lucrative consumer groups like Gen Z. But outside of their age group it has to be more specific to where they can really provide value,” which does back to the focus on personality and passions of the athletes, versus their talents on the court or on the field, Gordon said.