Month: September 2021

“It’s just time to change the channels we use to talk — and listen — to each other,” wrote Mary Elizabeth Williams, a staff writer for Salon and its longtime comments moderator, in an Aug. 31 post explaining why “Salon is closing comments for good.” Rather than ending the conversation, she suggested that readers engage with others in the Salon community on social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. 

Salon’s commenting capability served a dual purpose. The site, which is heavily reliant on revenue from open programmatic advertising, had required people to log in with an email address to comment on the site. That was a means of gathering emails, which enable matches to data from identity tech providers, in turn allowing advertisers to reach specific people via targeted — and arguably, higher priced — ads. Salon has implemented identity technologies from Amazon, Neustar, ID5 and LiveRamp, which use those email connections once the data is encrypted for privacy purposes, according to Justin Wohl, Salon’s chief revenue officer. 

The thing is, the comments section wasn’t generating many of those data connections. “Less than half of a percent of all of our unique users are commenters,” Wohl told Digiday. Salon reaches an audience of approximately 10 million monthly unique visitors, according to the company.

So, not only were comment logins not generating much coveted first-party data, Wohl said removing the feature isn’t exactly a drastic shift away from Salon’s conversational DNA. 

Why Salon ditched comments

There’s another editorial product that is helping Salon collect email addresses in the hopes of generating more valuable ad impressions: email newsletters.

When people click through to the site from an email newsletter, their hashed email address is passed through to ID vendors, which attempt to match it to the identity of someone advertisers want to reach. Wohl said Salon’s newsletters “have been seeing steady growth.” Over the last six months, after weeding out email subscribers who were not opening or clicking through from its email newsletters, the publisher’s open rate has risen from 16% to 32%, he said. That improved engagement gives the company incentive to invest in additional newsletter titles, such as a new weekly food newsletter, “The Bite,” set to launch the week of Sept. 6, per Wohl.

Over the past decade, several publishers have blamed toxic verbal combat and trolling for decisions to remove comment capabilities from their sites. However, these days, it’s not just trolls whom Salon’s content moderator had to bounce out, said Wohl. “The nature of commenting in the last year-plus has changed,” he said. “There’s disinformation and misinformation and COVID lies and anti-vaxxers and a lot more chatter which is difficult to police and moderate.” Ultimately, he said, those bad actors demanded more energy than the publisher was willing to devote to clean up.

Some publishers may consider ending comments for another reason, said Scott Bender, partner and global head of client strategy at Prohaska Consulting. “It’s a revenue risk,” he said, noting that tough-to-patrol comments sections are a deterrent for more brand-safety-minded advertisers. “If there’s a questionable, inappropriate comment and you’re having a banner ad next to that, it’s an issue,” he said.

Wohl said brand safety risk wasn’t a concern for Salon, which has always been home to strongly opinionated political coverage (the News and Politics homepage on Friday last week featured ads for HBO Max show “The Other Two” and Tanqueray pre-made gin drinks in a can).

There was another reason the publisher ditched comments, though. Salon wanted Williams, who will keep her job, to lend her talents to reporting and producing more content for Salon rather than battling bad information. “We want to create more space for her to pursue that writing passion with Salon,” said Wohl. 

He also stressed that the commenting platform Salon has now turned off, operated by OpenWeb, “works really well.” He added, “The relationship with them was a positive one.”

Arcadia’s requirement of VR equipment and large open spaces creates a barrier of entry for potential users, and the company is currently approaching its so-called “super sports” primarily as an entertainment product. “We want to reach as many people as possible. This is completely new, and if we set up in a local gym, like 100 people are going to know about Arcadia,” said Arcadia co-founder Jeremy Sholzberg. “But if we create an entertainment product, with YouTube and Twitch and social media, there’s the opportunity to create awareness and entertain millions of people.”

However, Arcadia’s plan is not just to entertain the masses with a VR playground accessible to a privileged few — it’s to create an entirely new form of sports that will someday be as widespread as football or basketball. “The endgame is that this is a dominant category of sports,” Sholzberg said. “You can go with friends to the local gym, or a local school or community center and play a pick-up game.”

And the success of Virtual Athletics League’s VR Summer Games indicates that there is a growing market for mixed-reality sports. Founded five years ago as a virtual-reality arcade, VAL pivoted to a fully digital business model during the pandemic, positioning itself as both an organizer of VR game tournaments and an agency that can administer other companies’ VR game competitions. Its Summer Games, which run until September 12, boast over 10,000 participants and incorporate popular titles such as Walkabout Mini-Golf and Blaston, a first-person shooter in which players duel each other with an array of neon-colored weapons. 

VAL’s pivot allowed it to stay profitable during the pandemic, an accomplishment that its CEO Ryan Burningham partially credits to the popularity of VR gaming among both casual gamers and more dedicated athletes. “VR esports are more dynamic, and in some ways more interesting, right?” Burningham said. “Like, people are sweaty — we’re running Blaston right now, and taller players have an advantage. All Beat Saber [a rhythm game in which players use a virtual sword to slash at symbols representing beats of a song] top players look like cross-country athletes. It’s like the merging of real-life athletics with digital esports.”

Some of these mixed-reality games take their cues directly from prominent esports. In December, Berlin gaming space LVL will collaborate with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) to launch Das Race Goal, a game that uses remote-controlled cars to let users play what is essentially a real-life version of Rocket League. Das Race Goal will eventually be packed up and shipped around the world to support UNFPA fundraising events. “When we create a game that is open for any person to be able to play it, but the experience can be physical or virtual, I believe that is inclusion,” said UNFPA communication advisor Alvaro Serrano. 

Eventually, said LVL CEO Thomas Fellger, the platform will incorporate virtual-reality obstacles and power-ups, much like Arcadia. “It’s kind of a Super Mario Kart experience,” Fellger said.

In addition to creating new types of competition, mixed-reality sports create a wealth of opportunities for marketing activations that could never work in traditional sports. Arcadia has already invested in this kind of collaboration, building a virtual “Space Jam” arena in July, and it has its eyes on other natural partnerships, such as the upcoming “Tron” sequel. “There’s the IP activation potential of a Fortnite, but with this new type of sports,” Sholzberg said. “You can have avatars that are skinned with characters from a movie, the obstacles that you’re dodging can have elements from the movie and you can create sports that are based on something from the movie itself.” 

In addition to pop culture tie-ins, mixed-reality sports offer opportunities for enhanced brand partnerships at sporting events.

At this year’s U.S. Open, the tennis courts are surrounded by sponsors’ names, and logos such as Mercedes are affixed to nets; in augmented- or virtual-reality sports, logos could splash in all directions as the ball bounces on the ground, and sponsors’ names could expand to fill the entire court during changeovers. According to Burningham, VAL was approached by a large sponsor shortly before this year’s VR Summer Games, but the conversation happened too late to incorporate the brand into the event. “We had something like 5 million views on the last one, so we’re currently looking for non-endemic sponsors,” Burningham said.

As physical and virtual entertainment converges in a world transformed by COVID-19, hybrid events are becoming the norm. It’s only natural that the spectacles that draw people to these events — the competitions and the performances — are gradually becoming hybrids as well.

“I really believe, long-term, that this is going to be the dominant category in sports,” Sholzberg. “It is the sports of the metaverse; it is the sport for Gen Z.”

Despite a vocal anti-vax contingent, employers would seem to have public opinion on their side. A recent Gallup poll indicated that 65% of the public has strong opinions about mandates, with a majority favoring them. Since May, the number of people who say their employers are requiring vaccines has jumped from 5% to 9%, which Gallup called “statistically meaningful.”

The decision to institute mandates has put many agencies, tech companies and other employers between a rock and a hard place, however, as they’ve had to weigh the positions of those employees who are anti-vax against those of the majority who want, even demand that their co-workers be protected, and that the workplace is a safer space for everyone. 

Sharon Harris, CMO of global digital marketing firm Jellyfish, whose clients include Google, Amazon and eBay, believes more employers instituting mandates was inevitable.

“While we as a society have to consider all, for our offices to function we also have to value the health of many over the concerns of a few,” she said. Noting that vaccines are a long-established mainstay of society — with everybody from schoolchildren to soldiers to our pet pooches required to be inoculated against disease — Harris said, “If we genuinely want to get back to work and resume aspects of life before COVID, we must take an altruistic viewpoint.”

Given the uncertainties around the virus and the disparate policies among companies, schools and other places people gather, however, Harris advised leaders to be “agile, transparent and empathetic.” She called the return to the office “an opportunity to reclaim work culture and emphasize purpose, inclusivity, belonging and true collaboration.”

The Milwaukee-based agency Hanson Dodge, which works with brands like K-Swiss and Mrs. Meyer’s, not only requires all employees, contractors and visitors to be fully vaccinated in its office — everyone is required to present proof.

Doing so was something employees insisted on. Kelly Klawonn, vp of talent and operations, said company leaders surveyed the staff in March, to better understand their feelings about possibly returning to the office in some capacity. The result: a “vast majority” of employees wanted everyone to be vaccinated. “We used that to help guide our policy to ensure the broadest level of protection and comfort to our employees,” she said. “We also wanted to avoid scenarios where we had to police or enforce policies on a daily basis” in regard to mask wearing and social distancing, she said. 

For executives like Jen Grant, CEO of the Campbell, California-based app-development platform Appify — which announced in June that vaccinations would be required as the company moved toward a hybrid work arrangement — helping ensure employees were vaccinated was a matter of teamwork. 

Some employees were “a little hesitant and nervous” about getting the shot at first, or became frustrated because of the initial difficulty in securing an appointment for the vaccine, said Grant, whose company’s clients include Tim Horton’s and TataMD. But eventually, with the encouragement of their coworkers, all team members came aboard — except for two holdouts. “We focused on how much we wanted to see each other in person and be together, and how much we didn’t want to have to wear masks in the office,” she said. “The slow kindness and nonjudgmental encouragement worked to get those last two folks to get vaccinated, which allowed us all to come together again [for] our office reopening.” (what happened with the two hold outs?)

Mike Morini, CEO of Livonia, Michigan-based WorkForce Software, called the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the Pfizer vaccine a “game changer,” noting that because of it, employers that had been hesitant about requiring vaccines now feel empowered to move forward. The company, whose clients include Nike, Honda and Whole Foods, produces software that can support verification of an employee’s vaccination status and can be configured to prompt employees about health questionnaires to help HR teams ensure that the workforce is safe and complying with mandates.

Like getting employees on board with vaccine mandates, persuading them to use technology that enables such mandates will undoubtedly be a challenge for some employers.

“Business leaders should remember that when a company introduces new technology, employees often fall into various groups, ranging from enthusiastic first adopters to those who stubbornly resist,” Morini said. “Arming employees with knowledge of how tech can assist them in ensuring global compliance no matter how large the workforce will show them that the business is serious about seeking out innovative new ways to help workers in their roles as we navigate the ever-evolving implications of the coronavirus pandemic.”

3 Questions with Nici Bush, global vp, workplace transformation, Mars

Mars is halving business travel and letting employees choose which 50% of their work time they spend in the office. Explain how you developed your flexible working model. 

When we interviewed over 1,000 associates [staff], we talked to senior leaders from different generations, ethnicities, nationalities. And we realized we needed to reimagine how, where and when work gets done – not just where – to maximize productivity. That allowed us to think beyond just how many days are spent in the office and how many at home. So if you’re a young mom with kids and you’re juggling different priorities — the flexibility to do asynchronous work, and not be locked in back-to-back meetings — could be really useful. And if you’re a dual-career family like mine is, and you’re having to balance who picks up the kids when one of you is travelling and who attends parents night at school – the flexibility to schedule your work around these other priorities, is useful. We realized that was much broader than just a matter of going hybrid.

What are the difficulties in rolling out a strategy like this?

The big challenge is how do you provide enough of a framework for 32,000 people in 80 countries in 140 offices, enough of a framework that empowers them, when it’s not a one-size-fits-all. It’s tempting to try and provide more certainty than you can just to provide some sense of calm for a team or a unit. But we know that tends to create one that’s hard to do, we know that the most important thing is that we can be flexible, and we can ensure that within that framework, it works. No matter what the ebbs and flows. And you can imagine running a global business, it’s felt different being on separate parts of the world through this pandemic. And so the challenge is to make sure that you provide enough framework, and that you that you lean into that, what you don’t know and be open and vulnerable about it.

A lot of people will still be carrying grief and a range of other emotions when they return to the office. How will you manage that?

Prior to the pandemic we had a whole team around health and well being. So we have a structure of support, which associates can access for free help and advice around how they deal with personal health issues and those of their family if they’re dealing with mental fatigue, burnout, depression. And then as we think about coming back [to offices], and spending more time face to face, one of the other things we have always valued is vulnerable leadership. So, talking with people about struggles that everyone is having and voicing those concerns, is the first step. Because if you think you’re the only one having it, or you think that people aren’t really understanding where you are [psychologically], then I think it becomes even worse. It’s really important to give permission for everyone to be vulnerable. Sometimes a leader needs to take the first step and be vulnerable themselves. 

Read the full interview here.

By the numbers

• Gen Z (up to 24 years old) is the least satisfied generation at work, with only 56% satisfied with work-life balance and 59% with their job overall, in a report interviewing 3,400 enterprise workers.
  [Source of data: Adobe’s Future of Time report.]
• Organizations are forecast to spend $656 billion on future-of-work technologies in 2021.
  [Source of data: IDC Spending Guide.]
• 51% of 297 employees who reported their COVID-positive diagnosis to employers, felt judged by their colleagues as a result.
  [Source of data: Skynova survey.]

What else we’ve covered

•  The face-to-face engagement that defined so much of sales culture in the past has taken a big hit over the last 18 months. And while technology has become an essential tool for the sales function during the pandemic, the real secret sauce is the embrace of empathy and creativity as the soft skills for salespeople.
• Burnout is plaguing the U.S. workforce. Since March 2020, a myriad of factors have contributed to employee burnout, including trying to stay healthy during a deadly pandemic, dealing with financial hardships from the ensuing recession, and — for many —navigating working remotely. But new factors have come into the mix following the vaccine rollout this spring. 
• The five-day office workweek is dead in the media industry, according to new Digiday+ research. 

  This email briefing is edited by Jessica Davies, managing editor, Future of Work.

As a career marketer, Sivajee has served as CMO for companies such as media company The Knot Worldwide (previously XO Group), AOL Brand Group, as well as having held senior-level marketing positions at Bloomberg and HBO. Digiday caught up with Angi’s new CMO ahead of stepping into the role to talk about being a purpose-driven marketer, balancing that brand vision and culture with profit and diversity in advertising.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Why do you think brand purpose is important and how does it go beyond marketing?

It’s important to know what your brand stands for, what’s its purpose, what’s its value. Something that has become really important during these times is to make sure that brand purpose and those values come through at every single customer touch point — not just through the marketing and advertising work that we do. Of course the TV commercial is great, but make sure the consumer experience is spot on, lives up to the brand values and is aligned with the brand values. I’ve spent the last couple of years being joined at the hip with product and technology teams. It’s not two separate teams. It’s one team working on different points to really make sure that whenever our technology is creating a consumer experience that really delivers on the value. That’s something I know Angi’s is committed to.

All brands at this point in time should stand for something bigger and be able to use their platform for a greater good. It’s something I was very passionate about at The Knot, in terms of making sure we were serving all different types of couples and that there was no discrimination on our platforms and our marketplace.

How do you balance profit with brand purpose?

As a CMO, my job is to make sure that we really deliver on the brand mission for both sides of the market — for home owners and the home service pros. To me, the company’s focus has been there and I want to build on it. It is really to make sure that we take care of our pros at this time, whether it’s through education on how they can manage people and legal matters during this crazy pandemic time to building and serving as a central community platform for them to connect and share their stories. [The professionals] are a really hard working group of people that want to do their best for homeowners. So it’s up to us to provide and bring our resources to bare with Angi to really help them. That comes in the form of education, thought leadership, bringing community and of course products and services that help them grow their businesses. They obviously want to connect with homeowners that are a good fit for them. The company has been really focused on building out features and functionalities and tools that really help our pros connect and market to homeowners out there. That’s the role that we can play to help them grow their businesses.

DE&I also got a second look thanks to 2020. What does it mean to be a woman of color coming into this position?

My parents were immigrants to England from Sri Lanka and they didn’t have a formal education to speak of, and so they really had to hit the ground running, launching and running a lot of small businesses, whether it was laundromats, gas stations, bingo halls. You name it, we’ve done it as a family. I just have a real purpose and passion in helping small businesses owners achieve their dreams. Angi, from day one, that has been a purpose and mission of the company to really help small businesses and home service pros grow their businesses so they can have a legacy as well.

I’m coming from [The Knot Worldwide] that was 60% women — a lot of females in strong leadership positions. That’s also the same with Angi. I really looked for companies that focused on female and other DE&I efforts. What I love about this brand is that we’re here to serve all homeowners from every walk of life, no matter their color, religion, background or what neighborhood they’re from. Same with the service pros. They come from every walk of life as well. That was really important to me in this role. Angi is committed to DE&I on both sides of the marketplace.

Launched only months before the COVID-19 pandemic began by two friends, co-founders Kenny Tomlin and Dan Khabie, who crossed paths for years at WPP-owned or -acquired agencies including Rockfish, Digitaria and Mirum, Court Avenue is expected to reach $13 million in total revenue in 2021 (including acquisitions), according to a source at the firm.

“When I read that the first paved road in America was Court Avenue, I thought that’s a great brand for a business that’s focused on innovation and transformation. While it didn’t shorten the physical distance between two points, paving roads shortened the practical distance, and it removed a lot of friction,” said Khabie, who described his role as the “natural hunter” for new business at the agency.

Filling out the executive triumvirate at Court Avenue is CEO Michael Stich, another WPP veteran who also brings strategic consultancy experience from time spent at McKinsey. 

Tomlin, who is Court Avenue’s inherent networker with the big Rolodex (if those even exist anymore), laid out three goals he and Khabie set when they first launched Court Avenue in the latter’s garage: “First and foremost, we wanted to build around digital transformation strategy. Most people would agree that COVID was less of a disruptor and more of an accelerant. The second was we wanted to do some acquisitions and investments with great entrepreneurs in early-stage businesses and help them grow. And the third was we just want to be a home for innovation. We want to launch products and invest in products.”

Scott Sturcke, Epson’s director of creative services, video and online marketing, said he works with Court Avenue on a project-by-project basis, but has grown that remit of online AOR work over time, from websites built to broader digital strategy work. Sturcke said he’s comfortable with Court Avenue’s “unagency-like” approach, having worked with Khabie when he was at Digitaria and Mirum. 

“We’re currently working with them on trying to understand more about the digital customer journey, as we evolve our business,” said Sturcke, who added he doesn’t consider Court Avenue a vendor, but rather part of his team. “How do we make sure we improve that digital experience for customers across the board? That can be someone buying a $12 ink cartridge on our site to someone looking to buy a $500,000 printer through a deal, that doesn’t have anything to do with e-commerce.” 

An e-commerce marketing director at a major consumer packaged goods client of Court Avenue, who declined to speak on the record, said he knows Stich well from his days at Rockfish and VMLY&R, knowing he could get “scrappy” help in three areas: Help understanding the digital commerce landscape, guidance in scorecarding the landscape (performance metrics, sales growth, etc.) and the development of an interactive AR tool that shows what the kitchen will look like in five years.   

“They move quickly and I don’t need to handhold them with daily standup meetings,” said the exec, who added that “With [their] price tag there’s quite a difference from other players. And most important to me, it isn’t a fight — I need you to make what’s in my head better but I don’t want to debate with you what’s in my head.” 

Even though Tomlin, Khabie and Stich consciously chose not take outside investment money they have acquired businesses, including most recently Modifly, a social marketing operation that specializes in GenZ-targeted platforms like TikTok and Snapchat.

Finally, as a tech incubator, Court Avenue has also developed a product called MainZero, which stores the most important emails forever across every email account a user has. The product has only been used internally, but is being readied for a public rollout in coming weeks.

“That’s what clients hire us to do,” said Khabie. “They want us to add speed, convenience, and transparency into the relationships with their clients [or] their internal systems.”

Ultimately, time will tell if upstarts like Court Avenue — as well as You & Mr. Jones, or even the recently rebranded S4 Capital (now called Media.Monks) — can peel off enough business from agency holding companies for all of them to grow. To use a naval analogy, with more and more PT boats competing with the holding company aircraft carriers, it’s only a matter of time before they start running into each other.

“There’s something happening here,” said Nick Emery, founding partner of You & Mr. Jones Media. “Everyone’s having a go at this.”

Color by numbers

Online video platform JW Player compared ad avails in digital video from July 2020 to July 2021 to see what content categories are growing or shrinking, both for the U.S. and globally. (Ad availability reflects the volume of impressions in a category that advertisers can buy using JW Player’s contextual targeting solution.)

The biggest gainer in percentage both in the U.S. and worldwide was business travel, which doubled in interest. The second-biggest growth in the U.S. was in family and relationship videos, which registered a 68% jump. The biggest loser, ironically given the previous stat, was dating, which dropped 387% in interest. Globally, the second-biggest gainer was events and attractions videos (up 62%), while the biggest drop was in North American travel (at -179%)

Takeoff & landing

• Havas Media Group expanded its relationship with diamond producer De Beers, winning global media duties for De Beers Forever brand from GroupM’s Mindshare. That brand will be collapsed into one De Beers brand, which will be handled by Havas Media Group’s London-based luxury international unit. 
• Publicis Groupe’s Team Lift won AOR duties for health club chain Planet Fitness, handling media buying/planning, as well as data/analytics, creative/brand partnerships and marketing strategy. 
• Richard Hartell, a longtime media veteran of Publicis Media, was named Essence’s global chief client officer, responsible for the GroupM-owned agency’s relationship with Google. 

Direct quote

“It’s our job and responsibility to help reduce the load of ads in such a way that they don’t feel like they are stopping me from doing the thing I want to do, but then focus on innovation-led engagement as a theme or lens through which we look at how we make those work. That means that our media buying and strategy has to work in a more symbiotic relationship with creative.”

— GroupM North American CEO Kirk McDonald, on how to reach consumers in a largely ad-free environment.

Speed reading

• To read more about Kirk McDonald and what he’s doing to transform GroupM North America, please give my feature on him a read. 
• In his latest Future of TV Briefing, Digiday’s senior media editor Tim Peterson examines the new types of ad breaks and formats TV companies are creating to refresh marketing in video. 
• And senior editor of research and features Max Willens looks at how companies like Apple, Firefox and Neeva are venturing deeper into the world of private and ad-free browsing.