Month: August 2021

“We’re all so swamped and busy, and I think family time is really important to our people,” Hooda said. “We want to give them that time off to rejuvenate, reconnect with their families, recover and recognize that slowing down is OK.”

While Kinesso has long since offered Summer Fridays, a holiday break in December and discretionary PTO, the summer week is a recent decision to prevent stress and employee burnout brought on by the global pandemic blurring the lines between work and life. Per Hooda, these initiatives will stay in place even in a post-pandemic society and she hopes it sparks a broader conversation about what the future of work could look like in adland.

“We’re working with one assumption, which is: we’ve hired you and you are a strong, mature leader. We trust you,” she said. “We’re trusting you with our business, we’re trusting you with our clients, we’re trusting you with our people.”

With more than 2,000 employees (made up of Kinesso and its addressable activation company Matterkind), it’s the company’s latest efforts to mitigate industry-wide burnout, on top of things it already has in place like discretionary paid time off, holiday break, summer Fridays and a hybrid work model that was also instated due to the pandemic.

The new summer break is open to all U.S. employees and won’t impact paid time off. Kinesso clients and partners have already been given the heads up about the company’s decision, Hooda said.

“Our people stepped up and delivered when we needed them,” she said, flicking at staff productivity during the pandemic. “So why shouldn’t we do the same when it’s our turn, as a business, to step up and deliver for our people?”

Fortunately for Kinesso, the company has been able to maintain its employee turnover rate, which has hovered around 18-20%, for the last few years thanks to initiatives like the ones Kinesso currently has in place, per Hooda. Glassdoor reports 2020 turnover statistics at 57.3%.

That’s not to say that the company hasn’t felt the impact the pandemic has had on work. In fact, Hooda said, the summer break initiative comes after employee feedback reported feelings of stress and burnout as the line between work life and personal life became more blurred during the pandemic lockdown.

Wu Mahmood, senior vice president of addressable strategy and activation at Matterkind, said burnout isn’t typically an issue. But in light of the pandemic, it’s been a struggle and the additional time off is welcome.

“The week off is a reminder that our people are our most important asset and by prioritizing their mental health we as an industry will be able to better service our clients,” Mahmood said.

Should a client have a need during that time off, Yerddy Lanfranco, vice president of analytics and marketing sciences at Kinesso, said it’ll be on a case-by-case basis as to how it’s handled.

“I try to be present in all aspects of life, thus when I am taking time off to spend with my family I try to be true to it and enjoy it,” Lanfranco said. “COVID has shown us that life is short and that we need to create memories that will always live with those who we loved the most.”

Across the industry, employees are grappling with blurring work-life balance lines in light of pandemic lockdown. And with the rise in Covid variants, the industry-wide conversation around perfecting the balance between productivity and employee wellness shows no signs of slowing down.

Per previous Digiday reporting, 60% of employees agreed that taking “mental health days” was important. However, the average worker last year left seven unused days of vacation on the table. 

“[Kinesso’s summer break] is a recognition that additional time off only works when everyone can take a break at the same time to truly disconnect,” said Marla Kaplowitz, president and CEO of the 4A’s. “If the old saying ‘Work hard. Play hard’ is embraced, employees need to take advantage of the vacation days offered to rest and recharge.”

For Kaplowitz, adland cannot afford to overlook employee well-being as it’s directly related to productivity, and it goes for both agencies and their client’s expectations of ad staff, she said.

“It’s a positive sign that we’re having these conversations as we’re not the only industry reconciling with the accelerated pace of work and expectations due to remote working,” she said.

Ultimately, Kinesso is bolstering itself, bracing for the “turnover tsunami” expected to hit as employees start looking for new jobs post-pandemic, according to the Society of Human Resource Professionals.

“We’re putting the power back in our employees’ hands,” Hooda said. “I think if we take care of our people, they will step up and do the right thing for the business.”

The crossover of interests between sports fans and sneaker heads was easy to identify, given frequent brand deals with NBA stars and sneaker manufacturers like Michael Jordan and Nike, so it seemed like a “natural evolution” for B/R’s editorial, according to John Marcelo, director of brand strategy, B/R Kicks at Bleacher Report. But the idea of creating an entire vertical that talks about shoes — and, later, sports lifestyle and off-the-court outfits — was also done in an effort to get new, non-endemic brands, like fashion houses and spirit manufacturers, interested in advertising with B/R.

Since launching, B/R Kicks grew a slate of shows that are distributed across parent company Turner Sports’ linear TV channel, Bleacher Report’s livestreaming app, and its social media channels. The shows are led by athletes, on-air talent and even musical artists, who talk about their own interests in fashion and athleisure wear.

The first brand deal signed to B/R Kicks was in 2018 and since then the volume of revenue has increased by three times, according to a company spokesperson. Since the start of the year, total revenue for the sneaker vertical has doubled over 2020 thanks to seven signed brand deals in 2021 with companies like JD Sports, Truly, Finish Line, and Crown Royal. 

B/R Kicks has “given us a real avenue into the fashion world, and not athletic wear fashion, but fashion and retail. Think Bloomingdale’s, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Armani — all of those conversations have started through the B/R Kicks lens,” said Stefanie Rapp, chief revenue officer at Bleacher Report. “The approachability of the brand is what has really driven those conversations for the fashion houses.”

One of its series that’s distributed on linear is a segment called “Fit Watch,” which runs on TNT on Tuesday. The shows hosts — Dwyane Wade, Candace Parker, Shaquille O’Neal and Adam Lefkoe — critique NBA players’ outfits that they see online.

“‘Fit Watch’ is something specifically that has opened doors for us with Bloomingdale’s and Saks. A lot of the shows that [Marcelo] produces open the door — it doesn’t always mean that that’s the exact thing we sell, but [an] entry point into [Bleacher Report],” said Rapp.

The goal of “Sneak This” is to further replicate the successes that “Fit Watch” has had with getting new advertisers to start conversations with Bleacher Report. In the 24 hours of going live, the show collectively earned more than 5 million views across all of the social posts and on the app, Marcelo said.

Media companies regularly realize their audiences have more interest than one particular vertical and want to monetize those other adjacencies, said Barry Lowenthal, CEO of media buying agency Media Kitchen. That’s why newspapers have many different sections — to give advertisers the ability to be next to content that is more in line with their brands, as well as to avoid controversial subjects elsewhere in the paper, he added.

While it’s not a unique distinction that they’re making, Lowenthal said, it is a smart business decision. Creating a larger ecosystem of content by adding fashion and lifestyle coverage through the lens of sports will enable B/R to monetize even more aspects of their existing audience. 

There needs to be proof of concept, however. Buyers for retail brands who are being introduced to a traditionally sports-focused company like Bleacher Report through a vertical’s sneaker and lifestyle adjacency are going to want to see affinity data between a football fan and a fashion house, for instance, said Seth Hargrave, VP of strategy at media buying agency Media Two.

“As we look at hard conversion data for our retail advertisers, the importance of affinities for other brands paints a picture of who we need to target and how they need to be addressed with messaging,” Hargrave said.   

B/R Kicks still generates only a fraction of the popularity of the B/R main channel, with 12,500 subscribers to the Kicks’ YouTube channel, compared to B/R’s 2.25 million. On Instagram and TikTok, however, there are better indicators that the B/R Kicks audience is both present and sizable. Kicks has more than 750,000 TikTok followers and 2.1 million Instagram followers, compared to B/R’s 2.4 million and 16.1 million, respectively.

“Choosing to ‘diversify’ can be a dangerous game and shouldn’t be done just for the sake of it,” said Niki Bell, a media strategist at Media Two. “At the end of the day, the question should be, ‘Is B/R Kicks providing value to the audience, and are they engaging?’ Otherwise, any ad revenue increase will be short-lived.”

“The question is how far can they stretch the environment before they seem inauthentic,” added Lowenthal.

But that’s not true.

While videos need to be a creator’s own original work, videos do not need to be exclusive to YouTube Shorts to be eligible to receive payment as part of the platform’s creator fund, according to a YouTube spokesperson. 

YouTube is restricting against repurposed videos but that applies to content like unedited clips from TV shows and movies. And while a video carrying the TikTok watermark would not be eligible for the YouTube Shorts Fund, a video that a creator had previously uploaded to TikTok can be uploaded to YouTube Shorts — sans TikTok watermark — and qualify for the monetary reward.

YouTube has said individual creators can receive up to $10,000 in a given month from the $100 million YouTube Shorts Fund. However, as with TikTok’s and Instagram’s creator funds, which creators receive payment is entirely at the platforms’ discretion, and while the platforms have posted eligibility requirements, the process for deciding who receives money and how much money is pretty opaque. “It’s not like there’s an ad CPM. None of that’s really published out there. It’s an amorphous thing,” said the creator who has received money from the TikTok Creator Fund but declined to say how much.

The unnamed creator’s concern around the YouTube Shorts Fund’s restrictions appears to be founded in the growing competition among the major digital video platforms. Specifically, in how platforms like Instagram and YouTube are trying to take on TikTok without taking on TikTok’s hand-me-downs.

Last year Instagram began notifying creators that their Instagram Reels containing TikTok’s watermark would not be eligible to be featured on the platform’s Explore page. In February 2021, the Facebook-owned platform announced it would make watermarked Reels harder to discover on its platform, such as in its Reels tab. YouTube’s decision to bar videos carrying other platforms’ watermark fits with this trend.

While the short-form video platform war seems to be benefitting creators by spurring the formation of these creator funds, it also seems to be triggering the tension inherent to the relationship between creators and platforms: Creators may have content the platforms want, but the platforms ultimately hold the purse strings and can cinch the money bag just as easily as they open it.

“I made close to a quarter of a million dollars last. The year before I made $30,000. And I’ve had months where I made nothing,” said the creator. They added, “it’s a gamble. You’ve got to be on as many platforms as possible gambling, rolling the dice as many times as possible from the platforms competing with each other.”

It sounds like a big deal. After all, marketers are managing campaigns at a time when the support systems for their ads are going through all kinds of contortions. But with a week’s worth of perspective to draw on, marketers are coming to terms with what these changes mean and don’t mean for their campaigns. Here’s a primer that outlines all the main points.

Start with the basics: the easiest way to think of Facebook’s latest change is that it controls what MPPs can share with advertisers not what they get from the social network. Last April, Facebook stopped sharing ad impression events via the AMM initiative. The latest move quashes the other bits it continued to share and subsequently sunset AMM.

So why the confusion? Some marketers heard the news and thought the end of AMM would impact the data MMPs got from Facebook — which it doesn’t. Kochava has already tried to ease these concerns across its own clients. It has assured them that it will still receive the granular data from Facebook they need to stand up their measurement and attribution plans as well gain insight into the performance of their ads, whether it’s through seeing metrics like return on investment or lifetime value, for example.

What does this mean for advertisers? Given there are no changes to how MMPs access and report data from Facebook the vast majority of marketers can breathe a sigh of relief — they won’t see much difference in their advertising. Advanced advertisers, however, could be in for a tricky period. These are the advertisers that were exporting raw, log-level data for in-house modeling. Once AMM goes, so does the ability to do this. Still, there aren’t many marketers who were equipped to do this at any real scale. Indeed, this type of user-level data from Facebook was already sparse on iOS devices thanks to Apple’s App Tracking Transparency changes.

“The impact of this is going to be small relative to other changes but it will be significant to many advertisers that did their own analysis on measurement and performance because they’re going to have to rely on MMPs to do that for them,” said Mark Kellogg, head of technical partnerships at mobile analytics company Kochava.

So good news for MMPs: Yes, potentially. The most affected advertisers will become more dependent on MMPs at a time when they were in trouble following the restrictions placed on how data can be gathered on Apple’s device users.

Could the most affected advertisers take their dollars elsewhere? Sure, it could happen but the abundance of data Facebook has access to — means advertisers find it very difficult to walk away. In fact, many marketers aren’t even considering such a move, according to four ad execs interview for this article. Facebook represents a valuable user class wrapped up in a tonne of data for targeting and attribution.