Month: September 2021

This week, GARM and the ANA announced they are working with Pernod Ricard to scale that initiative working with brands and social platforms as well as small and medium-sized businesses. To get a sense of how that will work and what to expect, Digiday caught up with ANA CEO Bob Liodice.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What have the results of #EngageResponsibly been so far to prove out expanding it?

Fighting online hate speech is a movement, not a moment. Our foundational first steps in creating this movement were to convene industry leaders, align on a vision and plan, and design the first phase of the education rollout. Those first steps are what we’re announcing today.

With the foundation in place, we are now in the mobilization and building phase. This includes outreach to the NGOs and organizations that represent both SMBs and the voices of consumers, issuing the pledge and engaging big brands, and taking #EngageResponsibly live via the education campaign. At the same time, GARM is collaborating with NGOs to corroborate the measures for hate speech and its prevalence, which we will use to ensure #EngageResponsibly places the needs of consumers and SMBs at the center of all we do. 

Why expand it now?

Online hate speech is not a hypothetical problem. Every day, thousands of hate-fueled conversations happen on social media. According to ADL, 35% of Americans have experienced online hate due to racial, religious, or sexual identity. And a recent report from GLAAD shows that an astonishing 64% of all LGBTQ social media users have experienced harassment and hate speech. 

As advertisers, we cannot ask people to engage with us on social platforms and then absolve ourselves of accountability for the hate they may experience there. But we also know that we alone cannot solve this problem. That’s why we’ve built #EngageResponsibly to empower all key stakeholders — big brands, platforms, SMBs, consumers and the organizations who represent their voices — to play their part in drastically reducing online hate by 2025. 

What does that expansion actually look like? Are you going to be giving marketers a toolkit of sorts? Some best practices to curb hate speech?

Expanding #EngageResponsibly to an industry-wide initiative will allow us to leverage the power and reach of major marketers and platforms to empower SMBs and consumers to join us in our efforts to combat online hate speech. #EngageResponsibly will give marketers, SMBs and consumers the tools to take action and create demonstrable change. 

For marketers of all sizes, participating in #EngageResponsibly gives them a critical opportunity to take actions that increase the safety and inclusivity of the social environments in which they engage with their consumers.  Led by the ANA’s Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing (AIMM), marketers and brands of all sizes will soon be able to sign a pledge that publicly declares their commitment to drastically reducing online hate speech by 2025. Marketers will receive a toolkit on how to deliver on commitments they are pledging to in combating online hate speech, including how to amplify the tools and messaging of #EngageResponsibly through branded campaigns to maximize consumer and SMB engagement. SMBs will also receive tailored tools and resources to help them meet the responsible marketing guidelines established by GARM and followed by many big brands in ways that are easy to implement and cost-effective. 

To inspire consumer action, #EngageResponsibly will educate individuals on how to drive responsible online discourse; how to identify hate when they see it; and when and how to report online hate incidents using platform tools. Big brands have a huge role to play in amplifying this effort.

The goal of #EngageResponsibly seems to be getting a dataset on hate speech online that allows marketers to make informed decisions on where to spend their ad dollars. Yet at the same time, #EngageResponsibly will be working with the same platforms where that hate speech happens/where marketers would pull ad dollars from due to hate speech so I’m curious: Has the goal changed or if marketers are able to push back more to the platforms on how they are dealing with hate? 

We recognize that social platforms have been part of the problem when it comes to the spread of online hate speech. The issue, however, is far-reaching and complex– no single institution or industry can tackle it alone.  If we are going to drastically reduce online hate speech by 2025, we need an all-in approach that brings together each of the critical actors to take positive, collective action, together.  That’s why the goal of #EngageResponsibly is to harness the power and reach of social media platforms and big brands, along with NGOs and institutions,  to engage and empower small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and consumers through education and action.

The Wall Street Journal has unveiled new information about Facebook in its investigation. I’m wondering how the marketers are thinking about that and if this new initiative could help combat those issues on Facebook and Instagram? 

The goal of #EngageResponsibly is to drastically reduce online hate speech by 2025. The issues of content availability and algorithmic transparency are also pressing concerns for many industry stakeholders — not just the advertisers who are involved with #EngageResponsibly. Through GARM, the industry continues to scale conversations and activities with civil society groups and via other public-private initiatives to address the range of issues that must be tackled to ensure social media spaces are safe and inclusive for all users.

By the numbers

The surge in online shopping, ushered in by the COVID-19 pandemic, doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon. With the holiday season just around the corner, marketers expect retail sales to continue climbing. However, vaccine rollout and mask mandates have helped to reopen some in-person shopping. That, along with increased concerns around data privacy, marketers are looking at what that means for the future of online shopping. New research from performance marketing platform Smartly.io reveals many will continue current online shopping behaviors even in light of changes. Find a breakdown of the data points below:

• 87% of respondents said they plan to continue shopping online, despite eased restrictions and physical retailers re-opening. 
• 44% said they discovered a new product or brand based on a digital ad they saw on social media in the past 30 days alone.
• 74% said they are more receptive to digital ads from brands when it is clear how their data is being used. — Kimeko McCoy

Quote of the week

“When it comes to email marketing, this move puts a proverbial nail in the coffin for email open rates.”

— Greg Zakowicz, director of content at Omnisend, an email marketing and SMS platform, on the impact of iOS15 on email marketing.

What we’ve covered

• The rising case numbers due to the delta variant has experiential marketers once again retooling or delaying marketing pop-ups or experiential efforts.
• Marketers are eyeing gaming but a lack of industry standards is delaying non-endemic brands from entering the space.
• Here’s how one start-up is trying to bring back office culture despite being remote.

Section 230 gives legal cover to online companies, including tech platforms and publishers, guarding them from being liable for the content that others post to their sites. As far as the confident 25-year-old is concerned, when people say they want to change Section 230 in order to strip the social media platforms of legal shields they no longer deserve, it’s not 230 they actually may have a problem with. Instead, said Miers, maybe their problem is with the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which protects people’s freedom of speech. 

But critics argue the digital media universe is practically unrecognizable from what it looked like in 1996 when Section 230 was established, nearly a decade before Facebook and Google-owned YouTube were created. They say Section 230 gives tech giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter undue immunity from legal liability for the disinformation, hate speech and other so-called awful-but-lawful content poisoning social media.

“Especially when we’re talking about misinformation and disinformation with COVID for example, rampant misinformation has the ability to literally kill people and to tear apart relationships and families, so I do have empathy with that side of it,” said Miers in an August interview with Digiday. However, to Miers, the reason we can communicate freely on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube “is largely in part due to the First Amendment, but also backed by Section 230” because, at least in the U.S., social media platforms “have always had the right to host that content under the First Amendment.” 

‘I came to school with, like, duct tape on my mouth’

In high school during the early 2010s, Miers had a taste of techno rights activism. And like now, the cause that riled her was an esoteric piece of legislation. “I came to school with, like, duct tape on my mouth and ‘SOPA’ on it, and, like, ‘censorship.’ It was crazy,” said Miers, recalling her teenage self in protest mode against the threats to online free speech posed by a couple of legislative bills. The SOPA and PIPA proposals sounded like names for freckled Swedish children’s book characters, but in 2012 the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act drew the ire of an unlikely collective of groups that today sometimes fall on opposing sides of digital media issues: Google, Mozilla, Reddit, the EFF and Fight for the Future. 

“I remember being this very vocal 16-year-old in my high school. I think I was the only one that was ranting about SOPA/PIPA,” said Miers. SOPA “was gonna do stuff like restricting search engines from linking to things, linking to content, allowing internet access providers to block websites, so a lot of really bad stuff.” When the solo anti-censorship renegade came to school — literally prevented of her own volition from talking — in spirit, she was joining demonstrations against the bills happening online and in-person. But she also was protecting her way of bonding with people.

“As a kid I really struggled to sort of build a community around me and have friends and have a social life,” said Miers. Her parents’ work as scientists required the family to move frequently. So, perhaps more so than for other people her age, the internet was her solace, her conduit to personal interaction. No matter what was going on at school where she struggled to foster friendships, she could rush home, get online and submerge into the comfort zone of online chatrooms, Neopets, RoomScape and Club Penguin.

“I was enthralled with the idea that I could now communicate with my long-distance friends that I hadn’t heard from in a really long time over this service,” she said, recalling her first interactions in AOL chatrooms. “I also used the internet to learn a lot about who I am as a person. I found my identity. I had a lot of personal growth on the internet.”

So, the digital free speech issues that fueled the SOPA and PIPA wars — they hit home. “I saw that as a huge threat to this outlet of creative expression that I grew up with,” she said. “That world introduced me into this rabbit hole of online free speech.”

SOPA and PIPA were eventually scrapped with the help of the author of Section 230, longtime Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, who like Miers, takes a purist’s stance on preserving its 26 words. “In a world without 230, I cannot imagine that Facebook or Twitter would allow posts about police violence that could possibly be defamatory. These horrible injustices would never get the public attention they deserve. And accountability would be even less likely,” Wyden wrote in a CNN opinion piece in 2020 opposing then-President Donald Trump’s push to revoke the law. 

Fighting from the inside

Though her formative years were imbued with a sense of civic action that might have led her toward a job at one of those nonprofits that opposed SOPA and PIPA, Miers said she decided to be in corporate tech — at least for now — to learn how things work on the inside. Yet, she admits that others might question her legitimacy because she works for a company whose profit-driven motives affect its content moderation policies and approach to Section 230. Being perceived as a “shill” for the platforms, as she put it, can hinder acceptance of her perspective. 

“It is an obstacle, but I also see it as an opportunity to try to, you know, quote-unquote not drink the Kool-Aid and to hear the other side and then try to empathize and then bring those stories back to Google and think about how can we, one, do better, and two, how can we explain these challenges a lot better, as well, to the community.”

The team Miers joined this spring at Google — the Access to Information group — advises Google’s internal content policies and processes, specifically as they relate to issues such as mis- and disinformation, election integrity, copyright, free speech and censorship. It also helps communicate those policies to global government policymakers. And that “access to information” phrase is already part of the Google lexicon. It pops up in company parlance, both as a means of describing its mission as well as a mantra repeated when it explains how it applies its policies guiding how it handles things like government requests to remove content or combatting child sex abuse materials.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai addressed Section 230 head on when he told lawmakers in March that changes to the law “would have unintended consequences — harming both free expression and the ability of platforms to take responsible action to protect users in the face of constantly evolving challenges.”

Whether Miers and the other legal, political science, policy and history experts serving as analysts in the division were put on the Access to Information team because of their personal beliefs about Section 230, content moderation or censorship is not clear; Google declined to provide information about the team or comment for this story. But of her colleagues in the group, Miers said, “All of us share a common thread in being passionate about the internet, access to information, free expression, et cetera.”

That common thread — availability of information and free expression — is stitched throughout Google’s more recent public policy messaging around content moderation, particularly in relation to YouTube, which is often blamed for facilitating the spread of misinformation. “People around the world come to YouTube to find information, to learn and to build community,” wrote YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki in an opinion piece published by The Wall Street Journal in August, arguing that “prescriptive rules” for what “legal speech should be allowed on platforms” would amount to overregulation, would “have serious consequences” and would “have a chilling effect on speech.”

A blog post from YouTube’s chief product officer Neal Mohan published a few weeks later mirrored that sentiment. “We’re seeing disturbing new momentum around governments ordering the takedown of content for political purposes,” said Mohan, declaring, “An overly aggressive approach towards removals would also have a chilling effect on free speech.” 

Democratic and Republican lawmakers have proposed changes to Section 230 that they believe would bring much-needed accountability for social media companies that have relied on it as a get-out-of-jail-free card, even as their platforms generate billions of advertising dollars that help amplify toxic content that negatively affects people’s mental health, promotes phony COVID cures and damages our increasingly fragile democratic institutions.  

But there’s no wiggle room in Miers’s interpretation of Section 230. “I strongly believe that there is no change to Section 230 that would solve the problems we have with content moderation today,” she said. “I don’t think there’s any way that we could change or slice Section 230 in a way that would just fix these underlining human problems that we’re seeing mirrored on the internet today.”

Miers sees Section 230 as a means of making a First Amendment fight in court more manageable, especially for a startup company that may not have the resources to take on the burden of a lawsuit over comments, videos or other content people post to its site. In her interpretation, the First Amendment right to host user-generated content has a connection to Section 230. But it’s 230 that provides for a court’s decision on a company’s motion to dismiss a content-related lawsuit to be reached more quickly — and, thereby, more cheaply with respect to legal fees. That way, she said, “smaller services can kind of have more confidence when they’re entering the marketplace and deciding whether they want to allow for user-generated content to be on their services or not.”

Now that she’s experienced the challenges of crafting policy to manage a deluge of problematic content from the inside, Miers said, “I’ve actually developed a greater appreciation for Section 230, specifically for market entrants. What I’ve learned is that, you know, these major internet companies can’t just nerd harder.” She added, “If content moderation poses such an immense challenge to us at Google, I can’t help but wonder what it looks like at startups and smaller services that don’t have the people and the resources that we have.”

The irony, of course, is that her dedication to preserving this law — which many see as an unwarranted safeguard for too-powerful platforms — stems from a belief that it protects the little guy; meanwhile, these days the little guys are deterred by the bigness of platforms like Google from entering the market in the first place, much less competing in it. Still, some of big tech’s toughest critics — the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU — have warned against changing Section 230 as a means of reining in its power or ensuring better platform accountability.

The pre-230 content stone age ‘sucked for users’

Before graduating and joining Google in 2020, Miers had stints as a legal collaborator at tech policy nonprofit Tech Freedom and as a legal intern at Twitter. And she didn’t start her work at Google in public policy or government affairs. Instead, her work was adjacent, helping guide how product teams handle “legal removals” of content like YouTube videos.

At the time Miers was a third-year Internet law and policy student at Santa Clara University School of Law, a Silicon Valley-area Jesuit Catholic school, already with a Section 230-themed TedX talk under her belt. 

Clad in a light pink knit jacket styled to resemble a biker’s black leather, Miers painted a picture of a bleak epoch before Section 230, when web services were sued, often for defamation, for the content that users posted. The lack of legal protections created a “moderator’s dilemma” that would handcuff websites, thrusting upon struggling digital media innovators a Hobson’s choice between not even removing the most vile content or going overboard by curating an overly-sanitized internet. Her conclusion: the “pre-230 internet,” was an “archaic” era that “sucked for users.” 

In the end, Miers petitioned her audience to fight back against legislative attempts to alter Section 230 — as feistily as they would battle a repeal to the First Amendment. “These days it’s not easy to stand up here fighting for social media companies,” she admitted in her talk. “Understandably we’re angry at Facebook and Twitter and Google, but when we’re angry at hate groups and political controversy and the deplorable past and present speech of our nation’s leaders, do we push for changes to the First Amendment?” she asked. “Of course not.”

Miers is an energetic, yet methodical person “who wants to get things done, wants to make things happen,” said Alyssa Aguilar, a second-year internet law student at Santa Clara who is among the earliest members of a student group Miers co-founded while at the school. The Internet Law Student Organization has held talks on legal issues associated with fintech, e-commerce, telehealth and — duh — Section 230. The group has brought in big name speakers including Vint Cerf, a so-called father of the internet.

But chewing over legal concepts during coffee chats and virtual meetings is nothing like being inside the belly of the beast where the challenges social media behemoths like Google face have become clearer to Miers.

“What I’ve learned from my short time here on this new team is that it’s not as easy as, you know, telling an algorithm, ‘Hey, make sure you only show information that’s not misinformation about COVID,’ for example.” 

She pointed to the Sisyphean task of keeping pace with rapidly emerging cultural and current events-driven shifts in ideas — and the very meaning of language. “When you have so many inputs into this problem, and you have stuff like government officials speaking incorrectly about health or other topics, it’s really difficult to make decisions about what really is a [high-quality] information source. And that’s especially true when we’re talking about breaking news or sensitive event situations where we are literally learning the context at the same time reporters and people on the ground are seeing it.” 

Still, she said Google could improve by “developing clearer content policies,” such as “notifying people when their content is removed and giving them opportunities to appeal those decisions” and “sharing how our systems are designed for addressing harmful content and how they work and evolve over time.”

About that tattoo…

Miers graduated earlier this year from Santa Clara, but her pro-230 message thrives on campus — already fertile ground for it, within 20 miles of both Google and Facebook HQ. The Internet Law Student Organization she helped start remains active, having grown by 50 members to around 200 since Miers graduated, according to Aguilar, who is now a co-vice president of the group.

“She’s definitely inspired a lot of people,” said Aguilar of Miers. Indeed, along with sprinkling Section 230 fairy dust at Santa Clara U, Miers even gave Aguilar a gold pendant emblazoned with the phrase “SEC230.”

A necklace is one thing, but a permanent tattoo is quite another. Miers became known for her S230 ink around campus, though it wasn’t entirely her idea. Turns out it was none other than her internet law professor and now-mentor, well-known internet lawyer Eric Goldman. “In his syllabus he has a rule that if you get all 26 words of Section 230 tattooed on your body he will give you an automatic A,” said Miers. “I failed this assignment; I only got literally ‘230’ tattooed, but I was inspired by that, especially because no one took him up on it.” (Actually, her tattoo says “S230,” and the zero is about to be clicked by a cursor icon.)

Syllabus gag aside, Goldman — a recognized figure in Silicon Valley circles and among people tracking digital privacy and content moderation law — wasn’t necessarily gung-ho about the tattoo. “When she asked me, ‘Should I get the tattoo?’ I said, ‘Are you serious? No!’” he said, suggesting Miers might feel silly were Congress to revoke or change the law. Still, said Goldman, praising his mentee’s leadership qualities, her decision showed a passion and a commitment to the ideals she sees embedded the law. “The tattoo is a manifestation of who she is, and you have to have the full package to pull that off,” said Goldman.

Miers isn’t sure if she’d ever go through with getting a tattoo of the full 26 words. As for that SECT230 license plate? That’s awaiting its future perch, on the back of an on-order Tesla Model 3.

But while the concertgoers’ headbanging was real, the event they were attending was entirely virtual: PENTAKILL is a band composed of characters from the League of Legends universe, such as the lead singer, an undead spirit named Karthus, and the guitarist, the warlike necromancer Mordekaiser. “We’re exploring how we can really push the envelope in the space that we’re playing in here, where it’s kind of the collision of music, video games and storytelling,” said Riot Games Music head Toa Dunn. “Music performance is just a great way for fans to connect with their favorite audience, hear songs — it’s just a more intimate connection.”

There is a longstanding tradition of virtual bands. Inspired by the popular comics character, The Archies released six albums between 1968 and 1971; more recently, the cartoon-powered Gorillaz have held sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden and London’s O2 Arena. But while some of these bands have performed in physical space in the past using projections or massive screens, the rise of the metaverse and its corresponding technologies has made it possible for companies to bring fans into their performers’ native virtual worlds.

To Jarred Kennedy, COO of Wave, virtual concerts are a natural next step in musicians’ ongoing mission to recreate live performances using technology — a logical evolution of innovations such as music videos and visual albums. Furthermore, Kennedy said, the use of virtual and augmented reality technology makes it possible for artists to untether their shows’ visuals from the limits of safety or physics. “Going into game engines, these artists have the opportunity to really think about their whole vision and manifest it in a way that wasn’t possible previously,” Kennedy said. “So I think the art form and the technology lines up in a way that makes a lot of sense.”

The most well-known virtual concerts thus far have occurred in Fortnite. Last year, over 12 million players attended a virtual Travis Scott concert in the game-cum-metaverse-platform, with millions more attending Ariana Grande’s virtual Fortnite “Rift Tour” last month. Like Riot Games’ PENTAKILL event, these concerts took advantage of Fortnite’s physics engine to introduce fantastic elements such as a skyscraper-sized Scott. “Fortnite has become a great crossover medium given how popular it has become,” said Simon Valcarcel, head of brand and consumer marcomms at O2. “It’s a free-to-play game, and yet it’s delivering experiences at a standard and quality that someone would’ve had to pay £50 for a short while ago.”

Events like the PENTAKILL and Travis Scott concerts, which are funded and created by corporate game developers, are not intended to stand alone as profitable businesses. Rather, they are popular and effective marketing expenses intended to stir up interest in the games in which they are rooted.

Still, virtual concerts can potentially be turned into moneymakers by taking advantage of many of the same revenue streams enjoyed by traditional physical events. The virtual events firm Stageverse, which launched yesterday, eschews the fantasy elements of PENTAKILL and Fortnite in favor of using 3D cameras to capture real-life events, such as a 2019 Muse concert in Madrid, and convert them into immersive virtual worlds.

Much like traditional concerts, these virtual spaces can then be used to sell tickets and merchandise — but the primary expense behind these virtual events is in building them, not putting them on, as is the case for traditional concerts. According to Stageverse CEO Tim Ricker, this will allow users to attend concerts that would have previously been inaccessible to them for reasons of price or distance.

“Tens of thousands and millions of people can descend on this space,” Ricker said. Stageverse uses its own bespoke virtual platform to host concerts, offering a growing list of avatars and features to potential users, while other virtual concerts take place in pre-existing spaces in platforms such as Fortnite and Minecraft.

The stronger connection to real people and spaces afforded by less fantastic platforms such as Stageverse is also a boon for brands looking to get involved in the virtual concert space. Concerts based on Fortnite and League of Legends don’t necessarily feature organic entry points for non-gaming brands, but Stageverse’s event recreations have the same potential for branding tie-ins as physical events.

The platform’s Muse concert showcases custom virtual clothing by Balmain and leaves the door open for an e-commerce aspect, with merchandise or branded non-fungible tokens, down the line. “A lot of people are like, ‘oh, so can we order something here and a physical item can be delivered to people?’” said Stageverse COO/CMO Claire Seidler. “Which, of course, the answer is yes.”

Music is often a spectacle, but it’s also a deeply social experience, a pairing of traits that Ricker and other experts believe make virtual concerts a perfect fit for companies looking to showcase the metaverse to skeptical users. Stageverse includes spatial audio and enables users to congregate in curated groups; other companies, like Eric Reid’s Roar Studios, are developing ways for musicians to jam together in virtual space. “Creating a platform that gives musicians a way to grow their audience and be found in a virtual world is very needed for the way musicians operate in the real world,” Reid said.

Virtual concerts are a growing practice on almost every proto-metaverse platform. The virtual events platform Open Pit holds concerts in Minecraft; over the weekend, Twenty One Pilots kicked off its latest tour in Roblox, with millions of users visiting the virtual concert space. Even ABBA is launching a virtual concert experience next year. Earlier this month, HTC Vive announced the development of Beatday, a concert-focused metaverse platform.

In 2020, when Travis Scott opened the floodgates with his Fortnite event, the jury was out on whether virtual concerts were a novelty or a lasting innovation. A year later, it’s become clear that music — particularly live music — is an integral element of the growing metaverse. Virtual concerts are here to stay. 

These 10 interviews have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Confessions of a consulting firm exec on the squeezed middle of publishers

I know holding companies that are mandating 80% private marketplaces starting next year, which means it’s going to be back to direct sales using programmatic as a vehicle just to execute. So publishers who either have good ad network relationships or have a sales team will succeed. The longer tail ones, however, won’t have either of those safety crutches and so will have to work with ad networks. SSPs aren’t built to be ad network type of operations.

Confessions of a chief media officer on agency IDs

We’ve tested many of these solutions and don’t feel like there’s much of a future there. We’ve tested these alternatives in Europe and the U.S. and the results have been underwhelming, whether it’s a very buggy service that doesn’t really do what it’s meant to or they just don’t have the requisite scale for us. We used one in France where we had around 30% of our audience and not all of that was accurate. The data strategies at these companies aren’t progressive enough. 

Confessions of a publisher on growing skepticism over ID tech

It’s vital that we keep in mind why the ecosystem (tech companies, data providers, measurement vendors etc.) is fighting so hard for these new global or unified IDs. The ecosystem’s goal with these solutions is to recreate the world of yesterday, which was not a particularly nice place for publishers to be in. Here publishers were reduced to being providers of users (at a price that kept dropping); where first-party data and journalism meant almost nothing; where cross-site tracking enabled third parties to build and expand ever larger data pools. 

Confessions of a media agency exec on Apple’s growing influence over advertising

As it stands, our clients are playing catch-up when it comes to Apple. There’s so much they need to get their head around in this protracted pivot to privacy that Apple’s role there has gone unnoticed somewhat. It’s all been overwhelming. That said, they’re starting to pay more attention. And we’re setting up initiatives internally to help make sense of it all, particularly when it comes to contingency planning because there may come a time when they have to ease their reliance on Apple’s ecosystem when you think about how much control it’s exerting over the App Store and tracking more broadly. It may get so bad that we have to start advising clients to drive people away from their apps, for example. For some brands, these changes from Apple are so much bigger than media — it’s a disruption to their business model.

Confessions of an ad tech exec on the future of the IAB Tech Lab

There are a lot of issues with the organization that the new CEO will need to address as a matter of urgency — not least the influence of Google. Under the previous regime there, we were witness to a lot of awkward conversations where execs from Google were trying to influence conversations in unsubtle ways to benefit their own agenda. It wasn’t a good place to be. 

Confessions of a senior marketer on why it’s hard to quit Google

Neither Google’s stance on alternative identifiers or its decision to extend the deadline for when third-party cookies go is surprising. I highly doubt that this change is done purely to support the privacy topic and is disconnected from future profit streams that Google is anticipating. I suppose they will see what the changes look like. Google has already a strong pull today and even consultants often recommend using Google over other solutions (probably as it is likely to outlast the others). The knock-on would be that multi-touch attribution, a somewhat shaky science, will go away altogether, but that is another topic.

Confessions of an ad tech exec on the future of Unified ID 2.0

While Unified ID 2.0 has gotten some support from the holding groups recently, I haven’t seen much detail come through from the IAB Tech Lab. I’ve been expecting an update and have reached out multiple times about the proposal, especially when it comes to the transparency and consent issues that have been raised, but the leadership team has been quiet. I don’t know if they don’t have the answers or because there’s been no one there yet who could answer given changes at the top of the organization. Anthony Katsur is only a few weeks into his job. It’s important because more of the conversations I‘m having at the moment are around the concept of seller-defined audiences where publishers define the audiences and then push the segment into the bidstream instead of an actual user ID. 

Confessions of a mobile app publisher on the fallout from Apple’s ATT privacy safeguard

If you look at the bottom up of any apps business they’ve always been based on iOS and Android. Historically, they’ve been able to operate very similarly in this regard. Now, though, those ecosystems are a lot cloudier when you think about how advertising on them for customer acquisition happens following the arrival of ATT and SKADNetwork. It’s more expensive for us to get users and there are lower CPMs for us to monetize. So the question now is how do we start thinking about iOS as a separate app to Android when it comes to our business model. We were worried about that at the start of all this and since then it’s become a tale of two cities. 

Confessions of a media consultant on ad tech vendors being between a rock and a hard place

Lots of companies have poured millions of dollars into building out new technology like cohorts and Unified ID 2.0. That was smart when Google’s original deadline for third-party cookies was valid. Not so much now. Following the extension, those investments aren’t irrelevant but there’s less urgency to adopt them because marketers are still reliant on third-party cookies. Companies that were progressive and set their stool out on being fast movers are in between a rock and a hard place because their products aren’t as needed as they once were. It’s their punishment for doing the right thing — at least that’s how we see things playing out based on discussions we’re having.

Confessions of an ad tech exec on the fallacy that is CTV thriving in the absence of third-party cookies

The people who are the most frustrated with all the disruption across the ad industry are the media buyers. I recently spoke to the head of media activation at a large holding company and they were beside themselves; the frustration of having to spend millions of dollars on CTV while basically flying blind, not knowing if they’re reaching the same people or not across all the different TV platforms, or not having a way to stitch together the data with anything else they’re buying. It’s crazy. For entrepreneurs like us, it’s good because we go to where the problems are, but there’s so much frustration underneath the hype around CTV right now.

“Our old focus was on broad, longtail publishers on a variety of topics. That was not a successful business model for a company like ours,” said The Arena Group COO Andrew Kraft. Rather than hosting sites that publish content on niche topics such as lifestyle blog Cupcakes and Cashmere and health resource site Cancer Connect, the focus now is on category-specific content and hosting and acquiring sites that fit into the sports and finance verticals, or “arenas,” as the company calls them. This shift began when Sports Illustrated CEO Ross Levinsohn became the top executive of the then-Maven in August 2020.

Bolstered by Sports Illustrated — which The Arena Group has licensed from Authentic Brands Group since January 2020 — the media company claimed, citing Comscore data, that the number of unique visitors to its sports sites has grown by more than 300% year over year to total 50 million unique visitors in August 2021. According to data from Comscore, Sports Illustrated attracted 25.6 million unique visitors in August 2021, a 39% increase year over year. The company’s sports vertical also includes The Spun (which the company acquired in June), and 100 other sports publications that were added to the company’s platform since the beginning of last year, including FanNation’s local team sites hosted on the SI.com domain, The Hockey News, Fadeaway World and Morning Read, among others.

The Arena Group’s finance vertical, anchored by TheStreet, has 17 sites. TheStreet had 5 million unique visitors in August 2021, a 42% decline year over year, according to Comscore data.

Key details:

• The Arena Group generated $143 million in revenue from June 30, 2020 to June 30, 2021, a 54% increase year over year, according to the company.
• The company’s digital revenue grew by 90% year over year, with most of that growth coming from subscriptions. Kraft declined to break out digital’s share of overall revenue. 
• The Arena Group’s revenue is roughly split between subscriptions (print and digital) and ad revenue.
• Digital ad revenue grew by 26% year over year in the second quarter, the company said. The Arena Group has not reported its third quarter earnings.
• The sports vertical reaches a younger and more diverse audience compared to last year, including 15% more millennial-aged visitors and 42% more women. Women now represent a quarter of the sports vertical’s audience, according to the company.
• The Arena Group owns and hosts the domains of over 200 sites.
• Over the past year, the company has raised more than $40 million.
• The Arena Group has 300 employees and is a fully virtual organization.

Investing in subscriptions

In the past year, The Arena Group has hired eight people to the consumer marketing side of the company. The company’s CMO Jill Marchisotto oversees the company’s subscription business and plans to add more employees to the team. 

Digital subscription revenue has grown by 18% year-over-year, mostly thanks to TheStreet’s subscription business, which grew 36%. Sports Illustrated and TheStreet have a combined subscriber base of 89,000 subscribers. Sports Illustrated’s digital subscription launched in March, while TheStreet’s is two years old.

Access to FanNation’s sites are part of the Sports Illustrated digital subscription package. Marchisotto said a model like this could be applied to future publisher categories at the company.

What does the refocus mean for the other sites?

Roughly 50 sites are not part of The Arena Group’s sports and finance verticals, and include health, history and food sites, among others. The Arena Group will continue to host them.

“The most important thing about this refocus is not just deciding what we are going to do, but what we aren’t going to do,” Kraft said. “We aren’t going out signing publishers onto our platform willy nilly outside of our verticals.”

The Arena Group provides publishing and monetization tools that publishers, such as FanNation’s independently owned local team sites, are able to use. FanNation’s sites, for example, live on Sports Illustrated’s domain, make money via The Arena’s Group’s monetization stack and get to keep 50-70% of their revenue. The Arena Group takes the rest, and benefits from the traffic and ad revenue those sites drive.

What categories are next?

Despite The Arena Group refocusing on sports and finance, the company does not plan to retain that strict focus for long and will eventually look to the lifestyle category. “We wouldn’t put this group together if we were satisfied with two verticals,” Kraft said.