Month: September 2021

Knowing that, some newly launched brands say they’re hesitant to spend big on paid social media ads, and are diversifying media spend sooner than planned. Instead, they’re relying on organic strategy, leveraging brand partnerships and content creators to acquire customers and build brand awareness. 

“Without the data being fed back, it’s more challenging to identify customers and leverage digital marketing to scale brand awareness,” said Elaine Choi, president of haircare brand Crown Affair via email. 

Crown Affair launched last January, relying on organic strategy by way of “digital word of mouth” and influencers to build its core digital community and online shopper base, layering in some paid ads on Facebook and Instagram soon after. “With the iOS 14 update, we’ve lost the paid efficiency we’d been working towards, which we had planned to leverage to scale across paid channels,” said Choi. 

Had iOS14 not impacted targeting capabilities, Choi said Crown Affair’s paid ad strategy would have sooner become a bigger piece of the media budget pie. For now, organic strategy will continue to be a priority as the haircare brand looks for alternative ways to measure performance, like revenue against spend.  

With the update, Facebook and Instagram are no longer primary marketing channels for sustainable toilet paper and paper towel brand Cloud Paper, said co-founder Ryan Fritsch. “The new data privacy updates have hindered our ability to have insights into new customers which has led to lack of attribution,” Fritsch said in an email, noting that the changes have led to an inability to optimize ad content and an increase in cost-per metrics across the board.

With a shrinking data pool, these small advertisers are turning toward newsletters, in-house digital content platforms, influencers, brand partnerships and other organic strategies to build brand affinity and re-target online shoppers. 

At present, at least half of beauty brand Kulfi’s marketing dollars goes toward content creators and influencer relationships with the other half dedicated to in-house content creation and public relations. To scale, they’ll double down on their efforts like their in-house digital content platform Bite, hoping to layer in paid ads on Instagram next year after, said Priyanka Ganjoo, founder and CEO of Kulfi.

“[iOS14] means when we do get into paid, we just have to have a lot more of our own data,” said Ganjoo. “When we do, we’ll build that attribution because it’s going to be harder than it was before.”

It’s a similar story at clean beauty brand Ami Colé. Ahead of its launch in May, the beauty brand built up a newsletter with 6,000 subscribers, building its online community via email in hopes to sidestep iOS14 changes, said founder Diarrha N’Diaye. Still, the brand spends on social, especially Instagram, regularly tweaking ad spend to maintain its presence on the platform. 

“I’d be lying to you if [I said we] think we have the answer just yet,” N’Diaye said. “Right now, we’re just trying to figure out what is actually working.”

And that is the million-dollar question, marketers say, as it’s getting harder to justify customer acquisition costs on social media platforms with limited targeting capabilities. “You’re talking about locking in like $10,000 a month for multiple months without knowing what the return [on ad spend] would be,” said Kulfi’s Ganjoo. “For a small brand, that’s a huge commitment.”

There’s more crackdown on the horizon with iOS 15 expected to impact email marketing by way of mail privacy protection and “Hide My Email” features, meaning advertisers will need to continue to diversify their media mix sooner rather than later. Advertisers will need to broaden their target audience and find alternative ways to monitor social performance as new audiences replace the “lookalike and retargeting audiences of pre-iOS14 days,” said  Phil Lewicki, media supervisor at full-service creative agency Dagger. 

“Agencies and advertisers who have taken a proactive approach to these privacy changes will be on the forefront of creating new segments and strategies to develop or maintain high conversion and engagement rates,” he said.

During his time at ESPN, Wolf’s portfolio grew to include industry-shaking business stories, such as sports magnates Robert Kraft and Fred Wilpon’s decision to invest in the Overwatch League, alongside far-reaching reports, such as coverage of the aftermath of a deadly shooting at a Madden NFL tournament in Jacksonville, Florida. After ESPN Esports went belly up in 2020, Wolf moved to Dot Esports, where he is currently the chief reporter and investigative lead.

Wolf’s reporting chops have put him in the room with the likes of Mark Cuban, Adam Silver and Shaquille O’Neil. At this rate, his name is synonymous with esports itself, and he continues to carve out networking opportunities and access to the esports world for other journalists (including this Digiday reporter).

In 2022, he hopes to expand his talents into big-budget audio, film and television work through his new production company, Overcome.

New horizons

According to Wolf, he christened his production company Overcome to signal the stories he hopes to tell: “I really want to focus on stories of adversity and people who’ve bounced back from them.” 

But Ryan Lamb, a childhood friend of Wolf’s who plans to join Overcome as a project manager, believes that there is a personal aspect to the name. “Jacob and I grew up with similar adversity in our households,” Lamb said, “and I know that’s something that still really kind of drives him and made him who he is today.”

It’s hard to deny that Wolf beat long odds to become one of the most prominent esports journalists. His parents split when he was nine years old, and he describes his upbringing as “lower-middle-class” following the 2008 financial crisis. When he was a child, his mother had to bail his grandfather out of jail; at age 18, he survived a near-fatal car crash when another driver T-boned him in an Atlanta intersection. “Our fathers were not a large part of either of our upbringings,” said Lamb, who grew closer to Wolf in part because of the parallels between their childhoods. “We both had a really solid self-upbringing.”

A prodigy with a pen

Kevin Morris, the founder of Dot and an early mentor of Wolf’s, describes him as a “prodigy.” 

Morris got to know Wolf when he was a precocious high school student, fresh from starting a record label in his hometown of Atlanta at age 15 and sneaking into nightclubs to see his artists perform. “He did so many of the things that make him a good journalist now back then,” Lamb said. “He was contacting promoters to get live events for our artists, collaborations for our upcoming releases, anything of that nature. Jacob does not take no for an answer, and that’s something I really admire about him.”

Though Wolf excelled in school, his true passions lay in gaming and esports. In 2012, Lamb introduced him to League of Legends, and he soon became hooked on the popular multiplayer online battle arena game. “One specific memory I have is Jacob and I just hard grinding through Bronze II and I [League of Legends in-game rankings] playing on Mac laptops,” Lamb said. “We probably used trackpads for the first nine or 10 months.”

By the time Wolf was 17, he knew he wanted to write about esports for a living. He started pitching endemic outlets in late 2014, scoring bylines at esports news sites such as Esports Heaven and Gfinity, and soon developed a reputation as the “most tenacious reporter” covering League of Legends.

In late 2015, he read ESPN writer Mina Kimes’ profile of League of Legends star Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok and reached out to her by typing her name into Skype’s public user directory. Propelled by Kimes’ words of support, Wolf applied to an esports job posting at ESPN — and was rejected after an interview.

Undeterred, Wolf continued freelance writing before ultimately moving from Atlanta to Austin in November 2015 to pursue a full-time gig at Dot Esports. “The talent to be an investigative reporter, somebody who actually breaks news — it’s not an untrainable talent, but it’s hard to train,” said Morris, Dot Esports’ editor-in-chief at the time. “When I see that kind of thing in somebody, I am happy to ignore all the other areas where they need to learn and improve as a reporter and writer and just work with them on that.”

Shortly after Wolf’s 19th birthday, ESPN Esports editor Darin Kwilinski sent him a job posting and encouraged him to apply. Wolf entered the interview process brimming with confidence, despite his past rejection. When ESPN editorial head Chad Millman asked him why Kwilinski wanted him for the ESPN Esports team, Wolf said he delivered a matter-of-fact answer: “Because I’m the best fucking reporter in this industry.” He got the job.

Becoming an authority

Over his next four years at ESPN, Wolf built a reputation as a reporter of breaking League of Legends news, becoming infamous for dropping scoop-laden “Wolf Bombs” outlining transfers and roster shifts during the off-season. “The brand-name recognition helped validate and give authority to his reporting,” Morris said.

In addition to these industry-focused reports, Wolf’s high-profile position at ESPN gave him the opportunity to explore new types of media and cover stories that reached far beyond the esports bubble — including the comeback tale of Timothy “oLARRY” Anselimo, a Madden NFL player whose right hand was mangled in the aforementioned shooting in Jacksonville. “Following his story is the moment that changed my career,” Wolf said.

The intensity of the shooting — and Wolf’s role as the only ESPN reporter on the scene for more than a day — required Wolf to report on traumatic and deeply politicized events when many of his peers were still learning how to do keg stands. “He called me after he had done a walkthrough of the crime scene,” Lamb said. “I don’t hear Jacob shaken up much, but I could tell he sounded just eerily disturbed.”

Despite these challenges, Wolf’s time in Jacksonville had a lasting effect on his career in more ways than one. Notably, he spun his interviews with oLARRY into a co-produced segment on “SportsCenter,” his first experience producing televised content. “This was how I discovered I really like this,” Wolf said. “That this was a part of me I didn’t know I liked.”

While finishing his stint at ESPN, Wolf pushed to publish more video and livestreamed content on the site, with some success. Ultimately, he left the organization feeling disappointed by ESPN’s esports strategy and discouraged by what he felt was an unwillingness to fully invest in the space. He took his enthusiasm for multimedia content back to Dot, where he stressed to the organization’s leadership that he was interested in pursuing long-form video and audio content. “I made very clear that either you can support this in-house, or you can give me the flexibility to do it out-of-house, or we don’t have a deal,” Wolf said. With Dot’s blessing, he founded Overcome to be a home for this multimedia content.

In 2014, when Wolf first started covering esports, he was a young man in an even younger industry. The beat has grown considerably since then, but there is still ample room for teenaged writers to be taken seriously in the esports journalism world. Pablo Suárez, one of Wolf’s investigative colleagues at Dot Esports, was only 18 years old in June 2021, when he was nominated for Journalist of the Year at this year’s Esports Awards. (Wolf took the same award home in 2018.) In large part, this kind of precocious career path is possible thanks to Wolf’s legacy as a skilled and influential journalist who got a young start. “I can’t imagine that he hasn’t influenced a whole generation of writers,” Fazio said.

Now at age 24 and on the cusp of another career shift, Wolf hopes to continue inspiring other esports writers as he moves into new forms of media. “What I want to do in my future is tell these stories that are bigger than esports and gaming, but are nuanced,” Wolf said. “Right now, I see this huge sort of inflection point for the entertainment industry — podcasting, film, television.“

This moment isn’t just an inflection point for the industry: it’s an inflection point for Wolf, a journalist who molded and was molded by the esports industry as they both came into their own. With the world of esports entertainment entering this new phase, Wolf is ready and willing to continue his evolution alongside it.

The Knoecks are two of 4.4 million people in the U.S. who started a business in 2020 — a 24% increase from 2019. But what’s more remarkable is that Stephanie remains a full-time senior director of client success at WorkReduce, a flexible staffing provider for the media and marketing industry. She’s still a career marketer, with no plans yet to step away.

And she isn’t alone. In the U.S., 34% of people started a side hustle this year, according to automated work platform Zapier, which surveyed 2,000 adults. Of these new part-time business owners, 38% were motivated by wanting to spend their time on something fun and creative, and 33% wanted to diversify their income streams, according to the same report.

While some employers may regard employees having a side hustle as an unwelcome distraction, others are actively encouraging their staff to pursue them. WorkReduce has developed somewhat of a side hustle culture and Stephanie’s colleagues have set up an eclectic mix of businesses, ranging from bike shops, doggy daycare businesses to podcast and YouTube channel hosting. 

Founder and CEO Brian Dolan said it’s become an unintentional trend fostered by its fully remote and flexible workforce. For Dolan, it’s about reconciling the fear of distraction and resignation amongst side hustlers, with the benefits of engagement and satisfaction, especially in the face of the widely reported “Great Resignation” — citing the 1,000 open roles across the five ad agency holding groups WorkReduce services. 

Just one WorkReduce employee has resigned to go full time on an outside venture. Not many have asked for reduced hours to focus more on these, but Dolan claimed he’d “jump through hoops” to accommodate staff who were delivering in their day job.

“There’s been a reckoning of how people think about work. We’ve seen a lot of people exit the ad industry. As an employer, you cannot afford to miss out on talent that your competitors are going after,” Dolan said.

“We’re trying to build the most diverse and talented workforce we can. If you’re doing that, you will attract people who have other interests, and those can go commercial at any time. Why not embrace that, if you want people to be their best selves? Your career doesn’t have to be your entire life.”

Naturally, staff need to be trusted to run their side hustle around their main work. Dolan said that once an employee took it too far and stopped attending meetings and hitting their objectives — they were fired. 

Meanwhile London-based independent creative agency Here Be Dragons offers one-off “no-strings” cash injections, tech equipment and mentoring to junior staff who submit a side hustle business plan — even those leaving the company. So far one has left to start a jewellery business.

“Junior members of staff were most affected by the lockdown. Some didn’t even know what the workplace was like pre-pandemic. They joined a world of Zoom calls and probably thought ‘Is this it?’,” said Here Be Dragons founder and CEO Paul McEntee.

“We saw those as the most fragile, as their long-term view on ‘work’ was blown apart.” The generation entering the workforce are shunning traditional career routes in favor of new “pioneering parths,” he added.

“We have to prove we’re a good employer, by looking at personal progression, not career progression. What is best for that person, rather than the company? It changes the focus and cuts through the corporate bullshit,” said McEntee.

Independent trends forecaster Shivvy Jervis believes that with the rise of automated platforms and freelance consultants, starting a business has never been more accessible. Plus, side hustlers develop new skills which can be beneficial for their employers too.

“Providing a flexible working environment enables employees to pursue skills outside their normal range, which allows improvement for the workforce not at the company’s expense — a win/win,” said Jervis.

Encouraging employees to take their focus off full-time work seems counterintuitive. But HR expert and author of the book “Human Experience at Work,” Ben Whitter, said business progress is now more closely aligned “with the wants and needs of human beings.” 

Side hustles are key within this because they allow people to build the lifestyle they want, rather than having something imposed on them by an employer, he added. 

“People are more interested in experiencing joy and freedom rather than being stuck chasing promotions and unnecessary status symbols,” said Whitter.

“Make no mistake, employers are on notice. If they can’t support people to live their best life then employees will continue to take matters into their own hands. The costs associated with this will be too much to bear for many organizations.”

Publishing weekdays at 7 a.m. ET, The 7’s launch is sponsored by American Express Business. The deal runs the rest of the year across formats for The 7 though terms of the financial agreement were not shared.

Each briefing will be available as an emailed version and in text and audio formats accessible via The Post’s homepage and across properties. App users can also choose to receive a mobile push notification when The 7 drops. People can choose to listen to or read the briefing, thanks to The Post’s integration with text-to-speech technology from its corporate half-sibling Amazon (the latter’s founder and executive chair Jeff Bezos owns The Post).

The 7 joins The Post’s roster of morning editorial products (and a total of about 50 newsletters). Many of them curate a simple list of the most popular or interesting headlines of the day, such as The Post Most and Today’s Headlines. Foreign policy briefing Today’s WorldView and a suite of 202-branded politics newsletters contain more analysis and exposition from their authors.

A brief briefing

What makes The 7 unique is how short it is: The first installment is roughly 400 words long. By comparison, on Sept. 7 The New York Times’ morning newsletter, The Morning, was around 1,700 words. The 7’s inaugural briefing included stories about the Justice Department’s efforts to challenge Texas’ new abortion law, the millions of Americans losing unemployment benefits this week and the death of “The Wire” actor Michael K. Williams. 

Written by The Post’s multiplatform editor Tess Homan, The 7 takes an Axios-esque approach to a briefing, with each headline followed by a few bullet points containing the most important details and links to Post articles for deeper reading.

The “accessible and digestible” format of The 7 means readers can consume The Post’s news faster and easier, which will keep them coming back to the briefing, said Coleen O’Lear, head of mobile strategy at The Post. “Habit is one of our biggest goals. We want to have a deeper habit with our current readers, as well as track new audiences who might not come to The Post every day and help them navigate the news and navigate their day,” she said.

While readers can certainly click through the links in The 7 to read full articles, The Post wants people to read or listen to The 7 in its entirety, every weekday, in its own native environment, according to O’Lear. In other words, it is not necessarily designed to feed traffic back to the Post’s website. “We want to show the breadth of The Washington Post’s coverage and show it very quickly so that readers can consume it far more quickly than most articles,” she said. 

The Post declined to share how many newsletter subscribers it has. A Post spokesperson said the company has seen 10% growth year over year in the number of people who open its newsletters. The Post also declined to say what other sponsorship and advertising opportunities The 7 will offer. “As we learn how readers engage with the product and the content, the sponsorship offering may evolve over time to best complement that,” a spokesperson said.

A mass of morning newsletters

There’s a lot of competition in the morning news newsletter space, according to Melissa Chowning, founder and CEO of audience development and marketing firm Twenty-First Digital. Media companies like Morning Brew have turned them into a whole business. Morning Brew expects to nearly double revenue this year, after bringing in $20 million in 2020 with 3 million subscribers across five newsletters. 

Of course, there’s good reason for publishers like The Post to be putting out more newsletters. The 7’s launch signals “a smart strategy to get people to spend more time with the brand. The more time someone is spending with the brand, the better The Washington Post understands who that user is and can build that direct one-to-one relationship with the user,” said Kerel Cooper, CMO of email marketing platform LiveIntent. The Post can then create audience segments, curate content for them and offer those audiences to advertisers, he said.

Chowning sees The 7’s launch “as a top-of-funnel play for new subscribers.” The Post can gather readers’ emails, build a relationship with the newsletter “and aim to convert down the line,” she said.

Publishers are increasingly using email as a way to build their subscription businesses. A LiveIntent survey from Aug. 2020 found 71% of publishers were using emails for subscriber acquisition goals. After The Times’ morning newsletter hit a milestone in January 2021 of over 1 billion unique opens since its May 2020 launch, it doubled down on its newsletter business in August with a suite of 18 subscriber-only emails. Also in August, Quartz announced it was refocusing its subscription program around its newsletters (most of which publish in the morning) after the publisher found 75% of its paying subscribers were driven to most of Quartz’s content from their inbox.

The TikTok takeover

The key hits:

• The pace of videos is speeding up, with a heightened emphasis on the opening two seconds.
• Visual effects artists are in demand to recreate TikTok’s effects for use on other platforms.
• TikTok (and the pandemic) has helped to open audiences to less highly produced clips. 

Over the course of several months this year, Group Nine Media’s Thrillist started to see viewers of its Snapchat Discover channel drop off earlier than they had in the past. “It was harder to get people to stay and tap through the editions. Even halfway through the edition, watch time started to drop off,” said Erin Weaver, senior director of audience development at Group Nine.

It turned out the falloff wasn’t a Snapchat-specific phenomenon but a TikTok-induced impact. “The cuts were too slow,” Weaver said.

TikTok’s surging popularity over the past year and a half appears to have coincided with audiences on other platforms adopting similar behaviors and programming preferences, such as a lower tolerance for slow-paced videos. That is particularly true of platforms that share an aesthetic and audience with TikTok, like Snapchat, which is oriented around short-form vertical video and is popular among teenagers and twenty-somethings. But media companies — including BDG, Donut Media, Group Nine, Tastemade and Team Whistle — are finding that applying their TikTok video strategies — such as quicker cuts and more visual effects — can improve their videos’ appeal to audiences on the likes of Instagram and even YouTube as well.

“In the past two years, in particular through quarantine when everybody’s been at home consuming all of this, has been when we’ve really seen [TikTok] start to influence YouTube and other platforms,” said Jesse Wood, chief creative officer at Donut Media.

Two seconds or less

TikTok’s biggest impact so far on the broader digital video landscape is how it seems to have shrunk the window for videos to capture audiences’ attentions. “You get roughly two seconds to get people’s attention now. On Facebook, it used to be 10. On YouTube it was 30 seconds,” Weaver said.

“The first two seconds are now the most important two seconds on every platform,” said Wesley Bonner, head of social and audience development at BDG.

When BDG began using TikTok roughly two years ago, the platform advised the media company on the importance of a video’s opening frames, recommending that BDG include a video’s headline text within the first second or revealing the final look for a makeup video off the bat, according to Bonner. That may sound counterintuitive when juxtaposed with traditional TV’s tease-only ethos, but the idea on TikTok is to give people the final result so they are more inclined to stay to see the process. And it doesn’t only work on TikTok. “That’s one we pretty much do across the board now,” he said.

TikTok’s accelerated pace seems to stem from its origin as lip-synching app Musical.ly. In addition to people singing, dancing and acting to the beat of a song, videos are being edited to the beat. “That’s something that naturally as a viewer you start to notice how fast the pacing is. Every couple seconds, there’s some sort of visual stimulation on screen,” said Lauren Arso, gm of social at Tastemade.

To regularly refresh what’s seen on screen, though, means recording more clips with different looks. For example, when Tastemade is shooting an action shot for a food video, “we’re thinking through what are two or three different action shots we can get and what are some creative angles we can do.”

The visual effects ripple effect

Within the past 18 months, TikTok has influenced Team Whistle’s digital video creation as well as how it hires the people to make those videos. “We’ve increasingly emphasized that any newly onboarded social programmers have chops with [Adobe’s visual effects editing software] After Effects,” said Joe Caporoso, evp of media at Team Whistle. 

Those visual effects skills have become even more important for two reasons. First, TikTok has made visual effects a bigger means of captivating audiences, similar to what Snapchat has done with its augmented reality filters. Second, as other platforms like Instagram have rolled out rivals to TikTok, they have begun to penalize posts repurposing TikTok videos and carrying the latter platform’s watermark. As a result, video makers are pressed to recreate TikTok’s native visual effects to replicate them in videos posted as Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts or native Facebook videos.

The ability to internally recreate TikTok’s visual effects can also be a boon business-wise. Visual effects have become a bigger component of Team Whistle’s branded content campaigns this year, and being able to apply them to other platforms opens up the distribution options, which is advantageous heading into the heady holiday marketing period. The interest in visual effects in branded videos is “not going to change in Q4,” Caporoso said.

Redefining production quality

TikTok is not solely responsible for shifting the standard for production levels. The pandemic-impose production hiatus and shift to remote production primarily precipitated the proliferation of professional videos that were shot on people’s phones and in people’s homes. But TikTok has helped people realize these videos can still be quality content.

TikTok “has definitely shifted the standard and requirements and expectations for the audience in terms of production value,” said Wood.

While the media companies interviewed for this article, including Donut Media, still aspire to high production levels, they have also observed a different bar for quality. For example, the blurry background that corresponds with a shallow depth of field may be associated with a cinematic aesthetic, but contrasted with the score of TikTok videos filmed on people’s phones, such cinematic videos can come across as commercials. 

Group Nine’s PopSugar saw TikTok’s redefinition of production quality come into play for a mental health series it produced for YouTube earlier this year. The series’ videos incorporated clips from interviews with mental health experts that were recorded over Zoom. Typically, the Zoom-shot clips feature a limited picture and audio quality and have coincided with viewers dropping off when those types of clips appear. However, said Weaver, “we didn’t see any of those drop-offs the way that historically we would have on other channels pre-COVID, pre-TikTok.”

What we’ve heard

“Even though we’re back in the studio, our best video is still someone in front of a green screen talking to the camera.”

— Digital video publisher

What we’re watching

Two decades after its debut, the advertising industry’s attempt to institute a universal ID system for ads and cut down on overexposure is gaining some traction among media companies.

If you’re unclear on what Ad-ID is or need a refresher on how it works, we made a video explaining it (there’s also a written explainer for the text-minded).

Numbers to know

3.42: Number of streaming services the average TV household is expected to subscribe to by the end of 2021.

$950,000: Price to run a TV ad during the NFL’s Thanksgiving slate of games.

$1: How much Hulu will increase the price for both its ad-supported and ad-free subscription tiers in October.

17: How many months ahead of time Fox Sports will start selling ad space for Super Bowl LVII.

76 million: Number of expected subscriptions to streaming services among Latin American households by the end of 2021.

Stay tuned: Measurement’s free-for-all phase

Based on the uptick in measurement providers in my inbox as the Media Rating Council has suspended Nielsen’s accreditation, right now appears to be the biggest opening yet for companies to usurp the dominant measurement provider’s position.

But from conversations I’ve had with executives at measurement firms, media companies and ad agencies, I’m thinking the more likely outcome is that the days of any single dominant measurement provider are done. Either that or Nielsen will reclaim its perch (which for the purposes of this item is a less interesting idea).

Nielsen has been the gold standard for measurement for decades. While many questioned the accuracy of its panel-based approach, TV networks and advertisers have continued to cling to it, if only because Nielsen’s viewership numbers have become ingrained as the basis for their deals. Nielsen’s role has been further reinforced as connected TV platforms and streaming services have adopted it. But that is unraveling after the MRC confirmed the VAB’s claim that Nielsen undercounted TV viewership during the pandemic.

Now there is no gold standard for measurement, and eventually, there may not even be a standard.

Nielsen rose to its position by virtue of the uniqueness of its panel and retained its roost through its continued usage over time. At some point, Nielsen became not so much a measure of actual TV viewership but a yardstick against itself. Ad buyers and sellers knew — they had to have known — that Nielsen’s numbers were more indicative than empirical.

• Maybe 100 million people don’t actually watch the Super Bowl, but it’s pretty clear that plenty more people watch the NFL’s championship game than any other program on TV and, at the least, Nielsen put a number on it.
• Maybe a connected TV campaign didn’t actually reach 3.2 million people, but if Nielsen said it did and that the linear TV delivery fetched 5 million people, then that’s enough to compare the cost efficiencies.

Now, the snowballing effect of Nielsen as a measurement standard seems to be melting. What that appears likely to create is a sea of measurement solutions sans any singular standard.

There’s an argument to be made that the new standard will not be any single company’s measurement solution but the concept of census-based measurement, i.e. counting audiences on media properties directly as opposed to relying on a panel of people and projecting their behavior across the broader population.

But then what becomes the difference between Measurement Provider X and Measurement Provider Y? And how do ad buyers and sellers decide on what metrics to base their guarantees and judge their performance and evaluate the full playing field?

Either there is some meaningful differentiator, which then would likely lead to a fragmentation of measurement solutions as ad buyers and sellers find reason to support some but not all and maybe not even all the same ones. Or there is no meaningful differentiator, in which case the door is left open for Nielsen to repair itself to remain in the fray and potentially even retake its position.

Nielsen was ubiquitous because it was unique and unique because it was ubiquitous. But it had to be one before it could become the other. In this potential post-Nielsen era, it will be hard for any other company to become both.

What we’ve covered

Women of Color Unite’s Cheryl L. Bedford is fighting ‘exclusion by familiarity’ in entertainment:

• Women of Color Unite operates two programs that are aimed to help women of color get in the door and move up the Hollywood ranks.
• Its #StartWith8 program originated after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and gets established people in Hollywood to commit to giving their time and energy to support eight women of color apiece.

Listen to the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast here.

Barstool Sports will launch a channel on Sling TV:

• The bets-focused sport outlet’s channel will be programmed with a repository of existing programming.
• Barstool Sports will also carry a number of live college football pre-game shows.

Read more about Barstool Sports here.

What we’re reading

How Agnes Chu is building up Condé Nast’s entertainment business:
After taking the reins of Condé Nast Entertainment in 2020, former Disney+ executive Agnes Chu has overseen a division of the magazine publisher that has increased its revenue by 33% this year, according to The Information. But, while Chu is boosting CNE’s traditional entertainment bona fides by bringing in other Disney alum, CNE’s business is still largely dominated by ad-supported digital videos posted online and to platforms like YouTube and Facebook.

Amazon preps its own smart TV:
Amazon aims to debut its own branded smart TV in the U.S. potentially this fall, according to Insider. The Amazon-branded smart TV will mark the e-commerce giant’s entry into the burgeoning smart TV landscape, which is a growing segment of connected TV viewership and where smart TV makers like Samsung and Vizio are toeing up against the likes of Amazon and Roku in the broader CTV platform war.

Documentaries have become prized programming:
Streaming services like Netflix have been increasingly investing in documentary films and shows as audiences have gravitated toward the nonfiction fare, according to Variety. However, the uptick could come with downsides, such as lowering standards for factual programming and a narrowing focus on proven genres like true crime.

“We’ve all learned how to merge work and life in a way that we hadn’t before,” said Amy Nelson, president of SaksWorks, Hudson Bay Company’s new co-workspace company. “Now, we pop out of our office and go down to the garage for a run on the treadmill. And we no longer go to 15 different places to get things done. We want that for the next phase.” SaksWorks will launch in five locations, including NYC’s Brookfield Place shopping center, in September. 

To seamlessly fit into consumers’ new, ultra-convenient lifestyles — where everything is a few clicks or a short walk away — malls’ transformation into one-and-done destinations is being revisioned and accelerated. In addition to the gyms and array of restaurants they started to welcome pre-2020, they’re increasingly offering workplaces and even residences. At the same time, they’re expanding their retail offerings to include grocery and drugstores. In short, they’re taking the suburban shopping center and making it immersive. Providing efficiency is the point, but — an added perk — they’re also simplifying the new shopping process. One stop means less door touching, sanitizing and fussing with a mask.

“We’re definitely entertaining more co-working spaces at our properties,” said Carina Donoso, senior director of retail experience and incubation at WS Properties, owner of shopping centers including Boston Seaport and Tampa’s Hyde Park Village. “We’re also making sure that our food and beverage businesses have ample seating, because people who are working from home may want to relocate for an afternoon to a cafe.” 

Industrious, an 8-year-old company offering 100-plus co-working spaces around the U.S., kicked off 2021 with a “work from mall” focus, said co-founder and CEO Jamie Hodari. It began testing the concept of inserting its locations in malls in 2013, and has since opened 200,000-square-feet of office space in shopping centers across the country. Its latest is in the One Colorado Shopping District in Pasadena, opened in July. According to Hodari, the hybrid work model of people WFH part-time amplified demand for a workplace that’s “integrated into a broader set of amenities and experiences, rather than high up in a tower.” 

Currently, Industrious’ Scottsdale Fashion Square location is nearly at capacity. Plus, its Walnut Creek occupancy has more than doubled since the first quarter, and its Short Hills Mall location in New Jersey is among its most-used locations, Hodari said. “We were a little skittish, not knowing whether a Fortune 500 company would feel comfortable holding meetings in a mall,” he said. “But our [mall locations] have exceeded our expectations in every area, including customer satisfaction and retention.” 

Ethan Chernofsky, vp of marketing at foot traffic analytics firm Placer.ai, said the current Holy Grail mall setup is a 360-degree workplace environment, with fitness centers that local workers and residents can use any time of day, and restaurants, so they can take advantage of their lunch hour. “For regional malls, a workplace element and a big residential component in the immediate vicinity are key,” he said. 

A decade in decline
Over the last decade, malls’ reputation has been crumbling, fueled by the instability of their key components: Popular department store anchors have closed their doors, and traditional “malls stores” have been in and out of bankruptcy. More than 60 major retailers filed for bankruptcy in 2020. What’s more, e-commerce has been on the rise, especially in the last 18 months. Shopping centers and retailers that began using vacant stores as fulfillment centers only exacerbated the problem, reducing potential draws to the mall.

The widespread narrative leading up to the pandemic was that grand, unique experiences would be needed to keep malls thriving. In the 10 months leading up to March 2020, NYC’s $25 billion Hudson Yards property debuted with the Vessel, a 150-foot interactive art installation perfectly suited to selfies. The attraction closed in January after multiple suicides. And New Jersey’s American Dream mall rolled out a record-sized waterpark, a 16-story ski slope and an NHL-regulation ice rink, among other attractions. 

Both Hudson Yards and American Dream were big bets that had a fair share of issues pre-pandemic. Those included years-long opening delays — 16, to be exact, for the $5 billion American Dream. When Hudson Yards opened, 15% of its stores were still vacant, and tenants were anxiously awaiting promised tourist traffic. After announcing eight months before that its retailers would open in March 2020, it revealed it would instead open stores in stages through September 2020.

Though a challenge to pull off, there’s still a place for “regional retail and entertainment hubs, where people will spend 6-8 hours of a day,” said Chernofsky. But on the other extreme, successful malls are more often championing “a work-play-live environment that has it all.” It’s the malls that have remained heavily reliant on retail that are becoming irrelevant — and shuttering.

A new type of strategic planning
“The notion that the mall as an institution is struggling is largely based on an unfair [grouping] of top-tier malls, and even a tier or two below, with these regional supermalls,” Chernofsky said. Known as Class A malls, top centers bring in more than $500 in annual sales per square foot. They were thriving pre-pandemic, though still at the mercy of mall headwinds. Recently, Class C malls — defined as those making less than $300 per square foot — determined to turn things around have also begun implementing new office and residential spaces. 

“A large percentage of [malls] aren’t serving the same purpose that they were created to serve, but they’re [hosting] exciting things that debunk all the negativity around them,” Chernofsky added. 

Case in point: Some of SaksWorks’ locations will be in spaces once occupied by Lord & Taylor department stores. HBC sold Lord & Taylor in late-2019, and it’s now online-only.

A big difference-maker is whether a mall is being run by strategic planners or just a landlord. According to Chernofsky, vacancies at malls are not necessarily a sign that a mall is in trouble. Many times, they’re a “self-inflicted” scenario by a choosy developer. “It’s hard to fill a space because they know exactly what they want in it,” he said. “They have a plan and a vision, and it’s catered to the audience they want to serve.” 

For example, they may be gunning for a co-working space that will clinch steady foot traffic in off-peak retail hours of Tuesday through Thursday from 4 a.m. to 4 p.m. Industrious hosts people from 60-65 companies at each of its locations. “Those people are hosting meetings, and they have people coming into the mall for all sorts of reasons,” said Hodari. “Then they grab lunch, they shop.” The foot traffic at Fashion Square “nearly doubled” in the year after Industrious opened there, he said. 

Increasingly, such decisions are being informed by data on what locals want. For mall properties, “a chief insights officer is going to be the [key] role of the future,” Chernofsky said.

For its part, WS Properties is setting its sights on more health- and wellness-focused tenants and is dedicating spaces to short-term pop-ups. Its Boston Seaport has The Current, made up of nine 180- to 380-square-foot rotating shops. At the same time, it’s educating those tenants on keeping regular shoppers engaged — even when they return to their screens. “We tell them, ‘The consumer journey starts here,’” said Donoso. “Their social media, their website and their physical store design have to be fabulous. Today, they’re all part of the same ecosystem.”  

In general, malls have already nearly nearly bounced back to pre-pandemic levels. Placer.ai data, based on insights from 100 American malls, shows that July 2021 visits were down just 0.2% compared to the same timeframe in 2019.

And many retailers that have been mall mainstays still see much value in being there. “For some of our customers, the mall is still very critical to their afternoons; it’s where they hang out, and we want to support their habits and lifestyle,” said Alfred Chang, co-CEO of Pacsun. Likewise, Footlocker CMO Jed Berger said, “In certain areas, the mall traffic is phenomenal. And we want to be there to celebrate sneaker culture with our communities.” 

In addition, retailers that have never considered a mall location are newly going there, with many seeking an alternative to high customer acquisition costs online. 

“‘Do we want to be in a mall?’ is a debate we’ve been having internally,” said Jeff Lotman, owner of L.A.-based Fred Segal. “At the end of the day, there are a lot of people there. Our customers go there. And why do bank robbers rob banks? Because that’s where the money is.”