Month: September 2021

To do so, it has overhauled the way it collects, sorts and monetizes its audience data across all its titles, including The Times, The Sun, Talk Sport and Times Radio, via its own first-party data platform Nucleus. The publisher is pitching the data platform as a way advertisers can work directly with its own data, whether its from login, registrations or first-party cookies, in a privacy-centric way. They can then model data sets from their existing target segments or modify them based on News U.K.’s proprietary preference, opinion and emotion signals. It launched earlier this summer and already all of the publisher’s biggest sponsorships include data from the platform as a way for advertisers to see the recommended audiences. 

“When we talk to advertisers we’re being challenged on what we know about our audiences and can we create segments and offer data which offer a unique insight,” said Ben Walmsley, commercial director for publishing at News U.K. “That doesn’t come from data that is freely and readily available to anyone who can buy it via third-party data sets and cookies.”

Not only is Nucleus trying to fortify News U.K.’s own ads business, but it’s also sharpening how content is personalized across its sites. The data even allows the publisher to personalize e-commerce and content to those audiences. “At the foot of certain articles now you’ll see content recommendations or recirculation units, which are powered now by Nucleus,” said Walmsley. Previously, those recommendations would’ve been powered by an ad tech vendor. “We still work with some of those vendors, but the means or delivery is based on what we know about our audiences,” said Walmsley.

As much as Nucleus sounds like a typical data management platform, its features are limited to the publisher’s data only unlike a DMP. Indeed, this data will only directly impact direct media, programmatic guaranteed and private marketplace-style deals. The overall aim is to increase spending on News U.K. properties, regardless of buy type.  

“We see a world where publisher data replaces third-party data to a large extent, particularly at the premium end where we would typically operate with other larger publisher brands looking to drive mid to upper-funnel impacts for marketers,” said Walmsley.

As much this shift in spending is being compounded by the protracted death of third-party cookies, it’s also spurred by deep-rooted issues around measurement. Historically, the measures of performance were transposed onto premium publishers. That’s changing now. Increasingly, publishers are measured by how they’re able to drive mid-funnel and brand uplift objectives. “It’s incumbent on publishers to be able to prove their effectiveness to that effect and as we get better at doing that we’ll see more migration [of spending] back to premium publishers as advertisers and agencies recognize that spending more money and focusing on performance metrics isn’t helping them properly understand the impact of campaigns,” said Walmsley. 

That a publisher like News U.K. is looking to thrive in the absence of third-party cookies comes as no surprise. Third-party cookies limited how much control they had over the way they made money from audience data because so much of it was being used by other companies.

Take Future PLC. The special interest publisher has launched its own data management technology on the basis that publisher data is the next scalable alternative to those cookies. In many ways, the delayed death of the third-party cookie has given publishers like News U.K. and Future more runway to figure out how they get more advertisers to buy more of their data. Doing so, however, is easier said than done. 

“We’ve seen a noticeable decrease in urgency since the announcement [on Google extending the deadline for its cookie ban],” said Walmsley. Still, it’s to be expected given how uneasy so many of those advertisers were with the original deadline. The way Walmsley sees it, the additional time is a net positive. “The way we see it, our investment in Nucleus isn’t about trying to replicate the status quo in online advertising. Instead, we’re trying to link together all our different properties so that we can start to have a true understanding of our audience across all our platforms.”

Nobody was ready for cookies to disappear next year per Google’s original deadline so the extension is arguably a good thing for the industry including publishers. But it means that publishers must lean in on properly collecting audience data, under the umbrella of consent and setting up the right framework to enable collaboration based on this audience data. More fragmentation doesn’t mean that advertisers must fly blind —  it only means that new infrastructure is required to connect data in safe, privacy-preserving ways.

What we see now is a rebirth of the ad network model, which makes sense for any publisher that leans in on first-party data,” said Vlad Stesin, co-founder and chief privacy officer at data connectivity platform Optable. For a long time, publishers have relied on third parties to make sense of their inventory, whether it’s third-party data companies or ad tech vendors. Now, forward-looking companies are creating a new generation of walled gardens, where consent and transparency are taken seriously — and where first-party data collection must happen in a privacy-safe way that still yields real results for advertisers.

Some would say that this is all throwback to the early days of online advertising, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing in a context where advertisers are eager to get quality at scale.

“We’ve become an on-demand culture — every desire you have can be fulfilled with the click of a button,” said Seth Ross, GM of consumer services at Ceridian and GM of its on-demand payment service, called Dayforce Wallet. Ross points to the rise of the gig economy and services like Uber as driving the trend.

On-demand pay could be just the ticket for industries struggling to find and keep workers. Take the restaurant business, which has been especially hard-hit by the pandemic. According to the National Restaurant Association, the industry is 1 million jobs below where it was pre-pandemic, putting business owners trying to rebound in a terrible spot.

“Companies are really interested in offerings and benefits they can offer employees that don’t cost them a lot and makes them a more compelling and attractive place to work,” as Ross put it.

More than 600 companies have signed on to his Dayforce Wallet service, and more than 200 are already active, Ross reported. Retail, manufacturing and healthcare are among the largest industries the company serves. It takes just 2-3 hours to onboard a client, he said. About 80% of employees using the service are hourly workers versus salaried. The service “tends to be very appealing for the kind of people who may not have the buffer of savings to handle unexpected expenses — to be fair, that’s most of America,” Ross said.

The system benefits employers as well, as it takes the place of legacy payroll cycles. “It used to be painful, calculating everyone’s hours and taxes and deductions and shoving it into a mainframe,” Ross said. “It was a time-intensive and labor-intensive process that hadn’t changed in 40 years.” Ceridian introduced a function called continuous calculation, which means that at any time an employer can access a worker’s record for real-time details about their pay, benefits and deductions.

Staffing marketplace and workforce management platform Jitjatjo, in a survey of nearly 3,500 workers whose results were released in September, found that 42% said access to instant pay following the completion of a shift, in addition to increased benefits overall, appealed to workers reentering the workforce post-pandemic.

“Businesses must take these needs into consideration to create a sustainable, successful workplace that is attracting and maintaining the right kind of talent,” said Jitjatjo cofounder and CEO Tim Chatfield.

Instant Financial, another player in the earned wage access (EWA) field, found in its own research that employers are able to reduce employee turnover by as much as 27% by offering them access to same-day wages. Steve Barha, the company’s founder and COO, believes that in the next two to three years, most employers in the U.S. will provide an EWA solution allowing them to pay workers every day.

Meanwhile, a recent survey of more than 3,000 hourly workers by the workforce payments platform Branch found that nearly three quarters of respondents not only experienced weekly income frustration but also had less than $500 in savings for emergencies. It’s little surprise, then, that 84% sad being able to access their pay in real time would be beneficial.

“On-demand pay bridges the gaps in traditional pay cycles, when many people struggle to meet financial needs between paychecks,” said Branch CEO Atif Siddiqi, who noted that some 80% of workers in the U.S. live paycheck to paycheck.

The pandemic has heightened the demand on the part of employers and employees, Siddiiqi said. “The pandemic disrupted cashflow and savings for many workers due to a reduction in hours or job loss,” he said, adding that employers have added it to differentiate their offerings, add value and reduce costs.

Scott Hasting, cofounder of the sports betting platform BetWorthy in Torrance, California, said his company has implemented on-demand pay for years, long before the pandemic emerged. “We have always believed that if our employees are well taken care of, especially financially, they will love our company and always do everything for it to be successful,” he said.

Ceridian’s Ross sees on-demand pay as part of the consumerization of work, where the expectations of employees are converging with our expectations as consumers.

As Ross put it, “People expect to have great experiences in the workplace as well.”

At the core of the partnership is Misfits’ status as the most prominent Floridian esports organization. Both its Call of Duty League team, the Mutineers, and its Overwatch League squad, the Mayhem, are based in the Sunshine State. Scripps already commands the attention of many Floridians aged 25 and up, according to Lawlor, but it lacks a loyal fanbase of both Gen-Zers and gamers — Misfits’ core audiences. “They have, I believe, five stations in Florida,” said Misfits CEO Ben Spoont. “It’s probably their largest overall territory, in terms of the number of people within the market.”

Lawlor is hopeful that Misfits’ gamer-oriented content will help Scripps reach Gen-Z viewers, a demographic in which Scripps’ advertisers are increasingly interested. “We’ve probably got tens of thousands of advertising relationships [in Florida], and many of those clients are looking to appeal to Gen Z,” Lawlor said. “So our ability to create content for them, to put it on those other platforms in partnership with Misfits, with their players, with their brand — all of it just seemed to really make sense.”

Indeed, the partnership will enable Scripps to feature Misfits talent and content on both its linear and over-the-top television platforms, though exactly how that will play out is still up in the air, according to both Spoont and Lawlor. “We’re going to treat Scripps’ Florida distribution as sort of an experimental content lab,” Spoont said. “So we’re going to look at producing more content that can first be distributed within Florida as a testing ground, and then expand it more nationally. And that’s going to look at digital literacy, more types of educational content — let’s not forget that Scripps’ audience is a little bit older.”

This older audience could present a challenge for the Scripps–Misfits partnership. “I think a lot of esports fans are younger, and they tend not to have cable subscriptions; they’re the typical kind of cord-cutter,” said Matt Boyd, vp of esports and games at Nielsen. “So I guess there’s a question: if it was more available, would more people be consuming esports content on [linear] TV? I would be curious to see how that plays out in practice with something like this new deal.”

Scripps is not limited to linear content; its offerings also include over-the-top services such as Newsy and the Florida 24 news network. But to Lawlor, the cord-cutting of the average esports fan doesn’t mean there isn’t a tremendous potential audience to be reached through linear televised esports and gaming content. “There’s an opportunity for us to help educate a whole new audience — not just gamers, but their parents,” Lawlor said. “We asked all the guys on the Misfits board, ‘how did you get so interested?’ And they said, ‘My son was playing it all the time, and I just want to spend more time with my son.’” With its Misfits partnership, Scripps isn’t necessarily trying to reach the esports fans who have moved out and cut the cord; many esports fans still live with their parents and have ample access to cable television.

As gaming and esports continue to enter the mainstream, Scripps’ decision to invest in Misfits Gaming Group is only the latest example of a linear or over-the-top television company getting into gaming. It’s also further evidence that large esports organizations such as Misfits are pushing to become full-fledged media and entertainment companies in their own right.

Whether or not Scripps’ experiment bringing Misfits to its cable audience in Florida is a success, the broadcaster’s executives understand that the audience for esports is growing steadily in both size and demographic reach, and they are willing to take this gamble to establish themselves in the space.

Anyone charting the trajectory of the industry has assumed this subset of publishers would continue to grow unabated, as relentless spending on online media pushed more dollars into those businesses. But those assumed truths stand to be uprooted by the industry’s protracted attempts to reconcile privacy and personalization.

The web is heading toward a collapse of the middle. As third-party cookies crumble, marketers are working more closely with publishers to replace this lost data. The largest, most respectable media holding companies are, of course, well-positioned — as are the savvier smaller publishers who dominate a niche. The ones in the middle, however, are in a more precarious position.

More often than not they’re too small to build — and subsequently sell — credible first-party audiences at scale. But they are also too large to have outsourced these tasks to a sales house. Third-party cookies were the bandage on the issue: they democratized the brand value of the site — and more importantly of audiences. It helped advertisers realize they could reach those audiences at a fraction of the cost compared to a premium site. Naturally, media dollars flowed to those publishers. 

That spending could slow in the absence of third-party cookies. And if this happens, the same publishers risk being pushed out of the middle class and into vulnerability.

Sound familiar? The pandemic has been a cruel financial blow for many people on middle-class incomes in markets like the U.S., India and China. Of course, some publishers will buck the trend, but many others won’t be able to afford to. Not when advertisers are becoming increasingly dependent on publisher-managed audiences based on first-party cookie data to plug the gap. Selling those audiences sans third-party cookies isn’t cheap. There are sales execs to remunerate and technology to fund.

“The upper class of publishers is doing a great job at providing some form of identity, whether it’s an email, credit card or something else entirely, that can act as a proxy for the historical, anonymous cookie,” said Bob Regular, CEO of ad tech firm Infolinks. “Everyone else in the middle can’t do that — they neither have the content depth or the repetitiveness of producing it at a level that justifies gathering those identities en masse.”

Don’t be surprised if some of these publishers turn to companies like Infolinks and sales houses as a result. In fact, it’s already happening. The largest sales houses are already moving up-market. “It is common today to see a mid-size publisher that is outmatched in yield sophistication and sales presence by a small publisher that partners with a sales house,” said Chris Kane, founder of programmatic consultancy Jounce Media.

Take Café Media as an example. Similar to Hearst, Café Media monetizes large websites like heavy.com and spendwithpennies.com as a sales house. But it also does something similar for the long-tail of sites by aggregating sales operations across over 2,500 websites.

“We’re definitely hearing and seeing medium-sized publishers think harder about these sales houses,” said Matt Prohaska, CEO of Prohaska Consulting who says around half of his practice is medium-sized publishers. “Slowly but surely these publishers realize they can either continue to fight tooth and nail for a continuously smaller slice of media dollars and let Darwinism run its course or they could look at co-op style deals,” said Prohaska. “Joining a company like Café Media or Mediavine is an attempt by these publishers to make the latter point happen.”

Still, it’s not as straightforward for these sales houses as it sounds. First and foremost, working with a mid-size publisher is different from the smaller ones. Mid-tier publishers want to continue repping their inventory to agencies, for example. Commercially, this means they want the right to book insertion orders where the sales house doesn’t take a fee — and keep their own Google Ad Manager accounts.

And even if those issues were overcome, their actions could be misconstrued as a breach of privacy. The reason being that attempting to use any new hook to correlate to identity is in and of itself potentially against the spirit of privacy.

Luckily, sales houses are one of a handful of options these publishers can pick from. Invariably, some will try to go it alone, specifically, those in niche categories that can attract direct-sold demand and gain an outsize share of contextual programmatic buys, said Kane. But that’s a hard route to follow. The go it alone strategy will require unsustainable traffic acquisition costs and disruptive ad experiences, said Kane. It’s no wonder there’s a strong case for the largest media companies to control programmatic operations for mid-size web publishers.

“The smart marketers are consolidating their spending into fewer, better sites so it’s up to publishers to justify their reason to exist on those media plans,” said Rob Webster, chief strategy officer at media consultancy Canton. “If you’re a smaller publisher then you can’t really do that on your own.”

Look no further than in Europe where a U.K.-based consortium that includes publishers ranging from the Guardian to Stylist Group, has been looking to bring local publishers into the fold. 

“Audience scale is of huge importance in realising the value of publishers’ first-party data, in order to compete with the detailed targeting demanded by advertisers and offered by social platforms,” said Damon Reeve, CEO of The Ozone Project. “Few publishers alone have the requisite scale to truly compete with these environments — and let’s face it, we can’t deny they’re now a campaign staple for most advertisers.”

That’s where The Ozone Project comes into play. It’s to help publishers of all sizes create value from their audience, not just their inventory, said Reeve. “We work with all types of publishers; from a single brand publisher — such as City AM or Time Out — to a multi-brand publisher like Reach housing local, regional and leading national titles.”

The Ozone Project is designed to help publishers secure more media dollars before they go into programmatic auctions on the open market where revues aren’t as guaranteed. The concentration of this supply has been happening for some time now.

The 27 largest media companies collectively control 189 of the 1,000 largest websites plus another 1,058 long tail websites. Collectively, those websites represent 37% of all DSP web spend, per Jounce Media.

Companies like Café Media fuel this too; they further concentrate those impressions up for grabs.  The 27 largest publishers plus the three largest sales houses control 11,972 websites that capture more than 50% of DSP web spend, according to Jounce Media. Expect this trend to pick up as cookies fade away, whether it’s through consortiums like The Ozone Project or M&A.

Whether these businesses ever get the chance to bounce back from publishing’s middle-class meltdown remains to be seen. Third-party cookies don’t even have a firm removal date from Google’s Chrome yet. If there is such a meltdown though, it could be a relatively short one.

Here’s why: If advertisers consolidate their spending into a top tier of sites then there’s going to be price inflation for those impressions, which means a drop in ad spending to value. The truth of the matter is that both the middle and long tail of sites are the workhorse of online advertising. So advertisers will need to find ways to buy those impressions in smarter ways not dependent on third-party cookies to offset the inflation. Going to the walled gardens will only yield more impressions because supply in those environments is finite. This is where the rebalance could occur.  

“The risk outlined here — of the middle falling out — is a real one if media companies and publishers do not unite to combat it by creating co-ops and other second-party data sharing opportunities among each other,” said Cory Munchbach, chief operating officer at customer data platform BlueConic. “There are benefits to this from several perspectives, including maintaining quality and reach for advertising buyers; creating better data consent lineage across publications to preserve privacy; and re-centering publishers in this ecosystems as opposed to the ad tech players and walled gardens.”

“We’re using the martech product portfolio including CDP in order to build rich profiles of our customers and prospects,” Mike Kostow, marketing cloud EVP and GM at Salesforce, told Digiday. Internally, the company calls its approach to promoting its own products Salesforce-on-Salesforce.

Although people do not have to be logged in to watch videos on Salesforce+, the company expects a lot of people watching the streaming content to be logged in using their TrailblazerIDs, which will allow the company to connect the data dots generated through their video views to other information it has about them.

Salesforce, which has cobbled together some of its data management and martech capabilities by acquiring firms including MuleSoft, Tableau Software and Datorama, launched its Salesforce+ product at this year’s Dreamforce conference held Sept. 21 through 23. Inspired by streaming services like Netflix or Disney+, the offering dishes up original series featuring interviews with execs such as IBM’s CMO Carla Piñeyro Sublett and athletes like Arizona Cardinals’ offensive tackle Kelvin Beachum, along with training videos and product demos from events the firm has held over the years.

The company recommends those shows to Salesforce+ viewers using another one of its own products, Interaction Studio, which identifies people, monitors digital behavior and tailors what they see on websites they interact with in real-time. “If I see that you’re interested in my keynote, or the Marketing Cloud Roadmap keynote,” said Kostow, “I’m building a pretty good sense that you’ve got interest in marketing technology.”

All that viewership data from those video streams is combined with what Salesforce meticulously tracks about its customers, gleaned through its sales and customer service channels like emails, chats or phone calls. That data is tacked onto purchase information showing what products clients have already signed up to use.

Call it an extreme example of the first-party data Salesforce wants its own customers to take into its CDP to manage and use when they themselves market to their own customers. The company recently added the CDP to its AppExchange, the compendium of software applications that plug into Salesforce technologies, to make it easier for clients to connect that first-party data to the data from third-party companies that’s available in the exchange. “You marry that with what they’re saying to your sales team [and] it’s more about what happens when you bring all that together,” said Kostow.

Christopher Bayerle, a certified Salesforce consultant with “Ranger” status — a ranking of a Sequoia-level heights in the company’s “trailblazer” hierarchy for users of its products — said the Salesforce-on-Salesforce strategy makes a lot of sense. “Of course they want to know what you’re watching on Salesforce+ and have that guide their conversation with you because that is also the tool they’re selling to people who are watching it,” he said.

Kostow said Salesforce is also considering turning Slack, the work chat and collaboration platform it bought in January, into another marketing vehicle for its own products. “It is on our longer-term roadmap,” he said.

It’s a brand awareness play that leverages user-generated content and video to stand out as competition from newly launched brands like The Period Company and Cora Period Underwear as they threaten Thinx’s reported 70% market share, per Crystal Zerrenner, chief growth officer at Thinx. “Our goal is to continue to be the bold leader in the space,” she said.

“As people get out into the world again, and they aren’t heads down, we wanted to make sure that we reflect that consumer behavior,” Zerrenner said of the out-of-home strategy.

Vaccine rollout and people getting back outside are among the reasons Thinx is delving further into the out-of-home space. Like many DTC brands, Thinx is looking to diversify its media spend in light of Apple’s looming data privacy crackdown, in which iOS 14 muddied targeting capabilities for social media advertising.

“Digital consumption is on the rise but even still, a sense of connectivity in real life is what consumers are searching for,” said Ashley Karim-Kincey, vice president of media at Dagger, a full-service creative agency. “Market momentum will push the slow-to-move brands to get on board and start phasing out old single-channel media planning and media buying methodologies.”

Currently, the majority of Thinx ad dollars goes toward digital advertising, especially social media. Zerrenner declined to outline details of Thinx ad spend. But according to Kantar, the DTC brand spent more than $450,000 on advertising in Q1 of this year, up from an estimated $58,000 in Q1 of last year. In 2019, the underwear brand spent nearly $6 million on advertising. Those figures do not include social media ad spend as Kantar does not track those numbers.

Per Facebook analytics, the period brand has at least two paid ads currently running across the platform, leveraging social media support in this digital OOH campaign and making it Thinx’s first cross-channel campaign as the period brand looks to create a presence both in real life and online.

Thinx‘s pivot to expand its OOH strategy is a smart one, according to Allen Adamson, brand analyst and co-founder of brand consultancy Metaforce. “Outdoor is underrated in its ability to get noticed,” Adamson said, noting that Thinx interactive billboard helps the brand capture a bigger share of potential shopper attention. “With people driving more and less on mass transportation, it’s opened up as another channel again.”

As technology develops and digitizes the out-of-home category, marketers say it’ll become a more crowded space. “Brands shouldn’t do it without a corresponding mobile geo-targeted strategy with it,” Michael DeLeo, director of media at R/GA said in an email. “As the platforms evolve, I think mobile becomes even more important than OOH or DOOH as everything opens up.“

That being said, DeLeo notes that Thinx is headed in the right direction with its interactive billboard that more so capitalizes on curious travelers than netting new customers. “For a strategy to reach new customers, they’d want to expand their efforts outside of NYC and absolutely expand their digital spend,” he added.

With nearly a decade in business, Thinx is looking to scale with plans to diversify its media mix. According to Zerrenner, the Thinx team will continue to bank on digital channels, leveraging tactics such as paid search, platform publishers, digital display and programmatic.

“We’re all figuring out what our new reality is,” Zerrenner said.