Month: August 2021

“We’re now creating not just the short-form video, but we’re creating the equivalent of linear program on TrillerTV, where you can have a QVC-like experience for the brand,” said Triller CEO Mahi de Silva.

For marketers, it could be a win-win — another channel to experiment with as the conversation around diversifying ad spend continues to heat up, said Noah Mallin, chief strategy officer at IMGN Media. But for now, Triller remains just that for marketers: an experiment. It’ll take a bit more for them (and their ad dollars) to climb aboard the Triller train.

The six-year-old app boasts 65 million monthly active users, according to Influencer Marketing Hub, an online resource for influencers, agencies and platforms. For comparison, Snap recently announced it recently reached 500 million monthly active users, per CNBC, with TikTok eclipsing them at 689 million monthly active users, according to a blog post from agency Omnicore.

Triller is still pitching influencers with endless monetization opportunities, but it has layered in linear programming (i.e. Verzus, Triller Fight Club and Triller TV) and e-commerce opportunities, per de Silva.

“We see the opportunity to partner with traditional media companies, live events and live experiences, and [then]  being able to bring them to the digital world in a very different content consumption and sponsorship experience,” he said.

The pitch for long-form content was enough to get the attention of Captiv8 influencer marketing agency clients. At present, about 10% of the brand spend Captiv8 works with tends to go to experimental platforms, including Triller, said Krishna Subramanian, CEO and co-founder of Captiv8 influencer marketing agency, who did not provide specific spend figures.

Captiv8 regularly gets a lot of interest in Triller’s tent pole events with clients looking for opportunities to get a share of voice on all platforms, bettering their chances of going viral, Subramanian said. (Captiv8 didn’t respond to a request to detail clients.)

“With everything that continues to go on in the world, events are continuing to take on this ‘hybrid’ multi-screen format of in-person and virtual,” Subramanian said via email. “This allows for even more creativity in how brands partner with influencers during these types of events.”

Brands like Pepsi and Dr. Pepper have already moved to be early adopters of the platform, launching contests and activations.

Still, the platform has yet to break through with mainstream creators and advertisers. And it may be that they’re a day late and a dollar short, leaving TikTok to beat them at their own game. Last year, marketers held their breath as a potential ban loomed over TikTok. But as the threat evaporated, it was back to business (and ad spend) as normal, said Victoria Bachan, managing director of influencer marketing agency Whalar’s creator management division, Whalar Talent.

“And with it now feeling like there is stability around it, the advertisers are all racing and focused on TikTok as their priority,” she said.

It’s a similar story for clients — who have ranged from Mercedes Benz to Kellogg’s — at influencer marketing agency Takumi. Clients have been interested, but haven’t actually invested in the platform.

Triller still needs a narrative for them to be convinced, said Takumi CEO Mary Keane-Dawson. Its current strategy makes sense given the platform is moving past TikTok comparisons and instead setting its sights on becoming the go-to platform for live-streamed events.

“Ultimately, they’ve come to the party a little bit later,” Keane-Dawson said, noting that Triller is on the way there, but the branding, education and accessibility for creators is still a challenge for the platform. And if Triller wants advertisers, they’ll need to build an audience and woo creators first.

“Ultimately, there is still a challenge around the volume,” she said. “Clients and their agencies want to have the most time-efficient and effective means by which they can get their campaigns away.”

For Mallin at IMGN Media, Triller is still missing a piece of its puzzle: organic social activity. For example, TikTok is layering ad offerings and new features and product expansions on top of its existing, massive user-generated content, he said. Triller has yet to reach the critical mass of day-to-day usage that would support some of its pillars. 

None of IMGN’s clients, which have included Levi’s and Adidas, have committed ad dollars to Triller. Although the question has come up, per Mallin. When clients have asked about it as a platform, they opt for other platforms that have similar functions with a bigger user base like TikTok or Twitch, he said.

If this conversation were happening three to four years ago, Facebook would dominate the conversation. The good thing is that over the last two years, more platforms like Snap, Twitch, TikTok and even Triller are now at the table creating a better paid social ecosystem so advertisers’ eggs aren’t all in one basket, per Mallin.

“It does give advertisers more options and it does give audiences more options,” Mallin said. “And I think that’s always good.”

1. ViacomCBS employees won’t be returning to their offices until October 18 at the earliest, CEO Bob Bakish said in a memo to staff sent Aug. 4.
2. Politico announced on Aug. 4 it is putting its office reopening plans on pause, after setting September 7 as the return date. A new date was not announced.
3. The Washington Post said on Aug. 3 it would delay its return to office deadline from Sept. 13 to Oct. 18. (On July 27, the Post said everyone employed by the publisher would have to be vaccinated by Sept. 13, unless they receive religious or medical exemptions.)
4. The New York Times pushed back its return “indefinitely” (though its offices will remain open for those who want to go in voluntarily, with proof of vaccination). 
5. NPR postponed to Oct. 17. 
6. Group Nine says mid-October is the soonest employees would be asked to return, and it will give employees a 30-day notice. The company plans to provide an additional 60-day grace period for anyone that needs extra time.

A Politico reporter told Digiday the “general consensus” among her colleagues is that the company’s decision to put its return to work plans on hold was “reasonable,” given the spread of the delta variant. It could also give Politico’s management more time to figure out how to adopt a hybrid work environment, she said.

However, the Politico employee expects management will “try to get us back to the office before the end of the year.” She said she is “more than ready” to return to the office, and that she feels “most people want to get back to the office as long as it’s safe.”

But not all agree. Adriana Balsamo-Gallina, a staff editor at The New York Times, said management is giving staff a four-week heads-up before they are required to show up three days a week — which is not “a realistic amount of time for people to uproot their lives that they’ve established” since the pandemic started.

A Times spokesperson said the company has been “flexible” throughout the pandemic and “will continue to consider our employees’ needs in all we do.” The spokesperson noted that the company has said it will give “at least four weeks” notice before reopening, and “will aim to give employees as much notice as possible to help them plan their lives.”

Balsamo-Gallina doesn’t believe a mandatory return to the office this year will work for everyone, as many people have moved over the course of the past 18 months, and others have had major shifts in their personal lives. “It took us a year and a half to get into this, and it will take a while to get back out,” she said.

Politico, like the Times, did not set a new date for a reopening. Robert Allbritton, founder and publisher of Politico, wrote in a Aug. 4 memo to staff shared with Digiday: “Given the fluidity of the situation, I don’t believe it makes sense to specify a new target date.” He said the company will provide at least 30 days’ notice before reopening.

A Washington Post employee found it “interesting” that the Post did not follow The New York Times’ lead in pausing its return to work plans for the time being and instead set a new date in mid-October. The employee called it a “noticeable departure” from the way media companies have mimicked each other’s plans (from office shutdowns to phased returns) during the pandemic. A Post spokesperson did not provide a comment by press time.

A second Politico employee said she was hoping the company would postpone the return to the office when she saw other organizations making that decision, especially because she was worried about the delta variant. The employee was also glad to hear that Politico would mandate proof of vaccination for when the return does happen. (Starting Aug. 9, vaccines and masks will be required to enter Politico’s Rosslyn and New York offices, Allbritton announced in his memo.)

“I think it’s the responsible thing to do,” she said. “I want to see my coworkers again soon but want it to be safe for everyone so I don’t mind waiting some more.”

For the past few weeks, the Post employee assumed an announcement of a delayed reopening was coming soon. The employee said there is still “general confusion” among media companies’ management on how to handle the persistent pandemic while trying to come up with a plan for a return to work. For many, it remains unclear how often employees will be expected to work in person and when they will return en masse, especially because “not everybody is interested” in coming back, they said. “I’m not sure how I feel about it,” the employee admitted.

Kathy Zhang, senior analytics manager at The New York Times, said she was glad management postponed the deadline for when employees will be required to work in person “until we can get a better handle on this pandemic.”

Unions have been actively pressing management at publishers to come to the bargaining table on this issue. For example, The NewsGuild of New York (which represents the Times, New York Magazine, The Daily Beast and The New Yorker, among others) wrote in a statement shared on July 31: “Any return to office is a mandatory subject of bargaining and a status quo issue. That means employers cannot force Guild members back into the office without bargaining first with us over the terms of a return-to-office plan, along with the accompanying health and safety safeguards.” The Times Guild says it played a role in The Times’ decision to cancel its September deadline.

“I hope [management] takes this opportunity to bargain with union workers in good faith over my colleagues’ flexible work proposal,” Zhang said.

Jack Skeels and Greg Morrell, respectively the CEO and president of management consultancy Agency Agile, have been pushing hard for agencies to adapt their approach to the RFP process. Rather than regurgitate a list of work done for a number of other clients in their pitch, agencies should ask to problem-solve together with the client to figure out their compatibility, Morrell explained.

Agencies should “use the pitch as a moment to dialogue and challenge, rather than just bringing a bunch of slides,” said Morrell. “Reframe the moment to do exercises together to see what problem-solving looks like. Both sides get a real experience of what it’s like to work together.”

“It’s important to have a conversation, not a presentation,” added Skeels, who noted the agencies that Agency Agile has consulted with have a 90% win rate. “It’s a test of whether the client can have a difficult conversation with the agency.”

Individual agencies and prospective clients may be finding different ways to approach working together, but there’s actually some industry-wide effort as well. Marla Kaplowitz, president and CEO of 4A’s, the industry body that represents agencies, said her organization is in the early stages of working with the Association of National Advertisers, which represents marketers, to develop a central repository of basic information on each agency, including clients, work, staffing, etc., that has to get produced over and over again for the Request for Information portion of a pitch. That frees up agencies to concentrate on the solutions/ideas part of a pitch.

But Kaplowitz also believes agencies should pursue alternatives that help avoid being put in review in the first place. During her time running MEC (a GroupM agency that was eventually merged with Maxus to become Wavemaker), she worked with a client to instate regular check-ins, which resulted in regularly rotating personnel on the account, and both sides agreeing to communicate more constantly. “It was really productive because we embraced radical candor,” said Kaplowitz. “It created this big opportunity for both of us to consider this different way.”

Pitch consultants like Avi Dan, who’s been doing this for decades, see a recent change in the nature of the RFP, brought on mostly by marketers’ continued push to in-house what used to be agency functions. “I’m seeing more RFPs for project work, or for tactical reviews with shorter time frames, and that’s all because so many clients have in-house agency functions,” said Dan. “Once you have in-housed, you can manage your resources much more nimbly.”

In the end, though, Dan doesn’t envision marketers changing their ways, even if the constant churn of reviews can sometimes be the result of dysfunction within the marketer’s company. “For most clients, it’s an emotional decision to find a new agency,” he said. “A good consultant would help them think through whether to go through the trouble of a review — that’s our value.”

For her part, Kaplowitz also believes in the value of the consultant, if only to help with communication during the RFP process. “Too many times, when there’s no search consultant, an agency will get ghosted by the marketer,” she said. And just like no one likes to go through an RFP, no one likes to get ghosted either.

Color by numbers

Original, Digiday+ research (overseen by Max Willens, senior editor of research and features) captured agencies’ and marketers’ sentiments on the changing nature of third-party cookies in snapshots from Q1 2021 and early Q3 (the major change during that time frame being Google’s decision to delay cookie deprecation until 2023). Interestingly, they’re going in opposite directions.

As the chart indicates, in Q1, agencies were slightly more worried about their future ability to target and measure ads (70% target, 72% measure) than brands (67% target, 66% measure). By early Q3, however, a significantly higher share of brands registered concern (85% target, 77% measure) about those things, while fewer agency respondents expressed worry: 49% are worried about targeting, and 59% worry about measurement. (Editor’s note: The respondents — and the exact number of them — in each sample was not identical over time.) In two weeks, we will share the results of how these groups are preparing for the end of cookies. the survey’s been done–max just asked that I space out the survey results over the month of August.

Takeoff & landing

• Publicis Groupe announced a global partnership with TikTok, focusing especially on commerce opportunities for Publicis clients on the platform.
• Barbara Kittridge, evp of business development at Havas Media Group, left to become senior vp strategy and partnerships at creative specialty agency Crews Control.
• Deloitte Digital hired Kenny Gold, most recently executive director of social media at WPP’s Grey Group, to be its first head of social, content and influencer.
• Two ex-Facebook executives, Athar Zia and Jay Shah, last week launched BLKBOX, an independent, SaaS-based, automated media buying platform that aims to triple the value of ad spend and reduce campaign-planning time.

Direct quote

“There’s absolutely a reason and a need for the open web to stay viable, to stay strong. First, because it gives marketers and brands and publishers the necessary oxygen to have ad-supported content, which society is better for having. I love subscription businesses but I don’t believe subscription businesses are the future for advertising. I think an ad-supported ecosystem in general is better for content creators, and certainly better for brands and advertisers and the ecosystem around agencies … I do know, as a former agency head and someone who spent a lot of time with large marketers … marketers and agencies are looking to support the open web and looking to create internal competition not only between Facebook and Google, but across the various channels as well.”

Laura Desmond, founder and CEO of Eagle Vista Partners, and former global CEO of Starcom Mediavest Group, talking with Beet.TV.

Speed reading

• Digiday senior news editor Seb Joseph explains the impact on marketers and agencies of Facebook’s announcement last week it will cease its Advanced Mobile Measurement program.
• Twitter recently updated its Agency Playbook, and Social Media Today breaks down the important elements of those changes.  
• The Hollywood Reporter explains what House of Max is: the branded content studio helping advertisers incorporate into HBO Max’s ad-supported tier, which launches in Q4 2021.

• How publishers are moving to contextual video campaigns with their in-house teams and partnerships
• Which steps publishers are taking to categorize their pages for contextual campaigns
• The key challenges around standardization, performance and advertiser demands

In a recent Digiday and Facebook focus group, a range of brand and agency participants gathered to unpack their brand suitability experiences under Chatham House Rule. Their conversation highlighted the roles they expect platforms to play, how they’re running social campaigns within ever-changing news cycles and how they are under constant pressure to change and adapt as messaging and sensitivities evolve.

By agreement at the start of the roundtable, participants’ names and affiliations are not revealed.

Exploring the brand suitability conversation

Amid an industry-wide shift of the conversation from brand safety to suitability, participants in the focus group agreed that defining and clearly understanding brand values is one of the first steps in developing brand suitability strategies. 

Some emphasized the essential step of reviewing tactics and ad formats on social media platforms. Agencies, in particular, identified their ability to help clients understand that with different ad formats there come various suitability preferences. And the participants mentioned that working with third parties can help advertisers navigate these waters. While Facebook has shown alignment through its mapping of policies to GARM and 4A frameworks, it is taking industry and third-party partnerships, our participants said, to work across the spectrum of platforms and formats, assigning specific tolerance rules to different categories of ads, channels and experiences. 

Two types of vendors figured largely in the discussion — verification and social targeting. Both put a lens on the same content, but both are working with it from entirely different angles. Participants from the agency space shared experiences about how social targeting vendors have helped them find the best and most brand-suitable content that their partners can trust, while verification vendors have helped evaluate social content for hot spots, to better align advertisers with suitable environments that match their brand values.

Agencies and advertisers are doubling down on anti-risk planning — but nuanced responses matter

Agencies are helping their advertising partners apply brand suitability frameworks to provide assurances their ads are appearing near brand appropriate content. 

Key steps that agencies are taking, as our roundtable highlighted, include building plans for global crises and conducting risk assessments. The takeaway is that agencies are doubling down on consultations with their clients as they look to the rest of 2021 and beyond, so they can have a plan in place to ensure their brand partners appear within appropriate content. 

While some clients have asked their agencies to keep their advertising out of the news completely, that isn’t the only approach our focus group said some clients have requested. 

The advice the focus group landed on was that it’s key to know the brand’s values, have corporate buy-in and understand the content categories they are willing to appear within before approaching the marketplace. Ensuring the brand has different products and targets at the corporate level while having a solid stance on suitability from either corporate or the brand were also high on the list of essential elements to consider with suitability. 

Adapting to change and a push to adopt new brand suitability tech

A throughline in the conversation was that agencies must be willing to adapt to the changing values of their brand partners. Whether it’s specific topics surfacing in the news, or adapting to shifts in targeting and environments, such as the rise of in-game advertising, knowing what questions to ask the client to ensure they’re targeting the right audience for the right reasons is critical. 

Another changing space for agencies and advertisers is video and image recognition technology. As access to video becomes less expensive, and given the massive volume of videos uploaded every minute, the push for third-parties to scale recognition technologies that can help ensure brand suitability is growing. 

The focus group noted that advancements in AI technologies are empowering companies to remove more hate speech from their platforms more of the time. Facebook, for example, has been able to proactively identify approximately 97% of hate speech content, compared to 23.6% in Q4 of 2017. 

Brand suitability is a group effort

The focus group agreed that the conversations are more commonplace and even more nuanced around safety across social platforms than even a few years ago when GARM, 4A’s and their partners were working together to develop and execute ad placement strategies. Preferences in the digital space are also evolving from a focus on brand safety to brand suitability. 

As agencies and advertisers turn to 2022 and all the ways brand associations will evolve in the years to come, what is clear is that the heart of responding and making progress in the brand suitability effort is still the partnership. 

From verification and social targeting vendor collaborations to risk planning that keeps a nimble and nuanced approach at its core, to the newest tech to help control what ends up brand adjacent in video and other content across platforms, the drumbeat of the focus group was clearly that no brand or agency can effectively execute suitability preferences alone. Brand suitability, it became clear, is a cooperative effort. And rightly so, as the roundtable highlighted, in that achieving brand suitability goals is the pathway to a better digital ecosystem for all.