Month: September 2021

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Earlier this year, there was a sense that business would go back to “normal.” With the delta variant, that hasn’t been the case. How are you thinking about marketing now? 

“Flexibility” is definitely still a keyword in our plans. Because of the dynamic nature of marketing today, the ability and necessity to really turn on a dime sometimes [means you need that flexibility]. Right? We’re watching at all times for what’s happening with the COVID-19 and the variants and how guests are feeling in a restaurant. We really have been focused on consumer needs of value, comfort, convenience and reassurance. 

What do you mean by “reassurance”? 

Reassurance really emerged from the pandemic. What we mean by that is making sure that guests know that it’s safe to eat at Denny’s, all [the] cleanliness matters that we’re going through. And that was never part of our team’s plans before, but it has definitely been part of our marketing plan over the last 18 months. That’s one example. Another is value. Value’s not as important to today’s guest as it has been, but that will continue to ebb and flow over time. Really it is about flexibility. It’s keeping your head on [a] swivel and making sure you stay in tune to what your guests need and, in our case, what our franchisees need to run their business and run it well. I think that [need for] flexibility will continue outside of the pandemic. 

Building in flexibility into deals and having back-up plans does seem like something that sticks long after the pandemic. 

That’s one of the most exciting things about being in marketing right now — we have plans and we have backup plans. We have backup to backup plans based on what’s happening in the marketplace, what’s happening to the guests and the mindset of the guests and where the virus is at. It’s challenging, but also very exciting for marketers to really capitalize on the tools at their disposal today. 

How do you balance meeting consumers where they’re at — i.e. “reassurance” messaging — with brand needs? 

No matter what brand you are, people need to know that you understand their safety is a top priority. So many brands are spending time on that in various ways through the pandemic. My philosophy is this is not going to go away once we’re out of COVID. I think consumer behavior and expectations have changed. They’re always going to want to know that safety and sanitation procedures are being taken. This is something brands will have to work in their toolkit, so to speak, with messaging and push and pull depending on consumer dynamics at the time. So it just adds another element. 

Earlier this summer, the name, image and likeness ruling by the NCAA allowed brands to start to work with college athletes. Tell us how you’re thinking about that shift. 

When it first was announced, I think all brands, and I would say all colleges, all players, were trying to figure out what that means and what is the best way to enact the ability to use a name, image, likeness with brands. What we wanted to do is make sure if we did it, we did it in a genuine way with something that made sense for our brand and also made sense for the players that we work with. So it’s not as simple as just paying a player money but more of, can you do something that works for your brand and works for that particular individual and make it a win-win situation? And that’s why, and, and like I said before, how do we do it in a way that is a little bit different than what you see from others by creating this team [of athletes for Denny’s] and bringing people together, which is part of our branding.

While larger campaigns historically have considered search marketing to be integral to their overall digital campaigns, particularly for fundraising efforts, Ryan — a Republican who has an uphill battle ahead in his run for a seat representing Northern N.J.’s blue 27th district, home to places including West Orange, Florham Park and Short Hills, in a blue state — said the potential performance and cost of search marketing just isn’t worth it in the small, local race he’s running which will come to a head in the general election on November 2, 2021. That’s because performance and cost of search ads is directly tied to how effective those ads are. “It’s just, I’ve never seen a local or regional campaign be able to keep the ads live and run them,” he said.

Ryan has a point, said a digital political consultant who declined to be named because he did not have permission from his company to speak on the record. “The only place I was using search in the last cycle was helping people find their polling place,” said the consultant. When it comes to a “low information” electoral race — such as the municipal election Ryan is running in, in which few voters know who’s running or even that there’s a local election coming up — running search ads “is probably the least cost-efficient if your running that kind of race.”

Instead, for Ryan’s campaign and the others he’s helping run on behalf of other local municipal GOP candidates, Facebook is where he has focused his paid ad testing and video marketing efforts. “The more you work on this stuff, the more you realize that your time is better spent on places where people are getting involved, and people are spending their time on Facebook,” he told Digiday. 

But Facebook might not have much impact on getting votes, said the political consultant. While using Facebook ads could be beneficial for a first-time electoral candidate like Ryan for generating name recognition, said the consultant, it likely won’t have much impact when it comes to persuading voters. “If his goal is ‘people need to recognize my name and face and one bullet point about me,’ maybe,” said the consultant. “He’s trying to maximize what he’s doing with those dollars, but it’s hard to see that that alone would make a measurable impact on your vote totals.”

Even Ryan said he has experienced challenges with Facebook ads for his campaign. Once candidate campaigns cross what he called the “moving target” of Facebook’s post-Cambridge Analytica political advertiser verification process, setting up ads to reach people in a narrow slice of the state is no easy task, even for the digital marketing expert, who founded his strategic marketing consultancy Motivity Marketing in 2007.

“If somebody’s hosting me to give a talk in Livingston, N.J., and we’re doing it at Nero’s Grille, we just want to put that ‘flyer’ to people in Livingston,” he said, referring to a paid Facebook messaging. His answer? Ryan has been testing how targeting ads around a few-mile radius of a coffee shop in Madison, N.J., which is part of the 27th district, performs.

Ryan, 48, declined to say how much he plans to spend on advertising for his campaign. For now, he said he’s running tiny Facebook ad trials using test budgets to see what sort of targeting is accurate and what performs well. In addition to geo-targeting, he’s delivering ads to people in business owner groups such as local chambers of commerce. He’s also started a Facebook video series called “Dad’s Taxi,” which features the candidate driving his kids around while commenting on issues such as mask mandates.

But the bulk of Ryan’s time and attention isn’t going to digital at all, really. Even during a pandemic, for the libertarian-leaning Republican, talking to potential constituents in person where they live, work and play is the name of the game.

“One of the things that you have to do is not 100% rely on digital. You have to actually talk to people,” said Ryan. Turns out, he claims to hear different things from people when they communicate in person at, say, a farmer’s market or restaurant meet-and-greet than what they say inside the social media universe.

“I think people are still detached from what they say online and what they say in real life,” he said, noting that the top-five things people say they are concerned about online “will be a completely different five things when you talk to them in person. There’s no context.”

Google’s ever-growing influence over media dollars is unquestionably a headline-grabbing issue. The same can’t be said for Apple — even though it influences how billions of dollars are spent with changes to its own ad business as well as rapid-fire decisions on tech updates that continue to reshape the ad industry.

Ultimately, that influence is overshadowed by the company’s carefully crafted position as a privacy champion. So even when Apple’s marketing says it must upend data collection methods that are inextricably linked to advertising because they breach people’s privacy — it chimes with fans. That’s regardless of the fact that in doing so, Apple has made its own ads offering relatively more competitive.

Simply put: Apple’s privacy policy is as robust as it is divisive. While there are accusations aplenty against its benevolent stance, nothing has stuck so far with policymakers. Maybe this starts to change over time, but if Apple continues to make quality products and fortifies its walled garden in the name of privacy then there’s every chance that it will continue to get the benefit of the doubt.

Think about it. Apple has always maintained an iron grip over the user experience on its devices. Its privacy safeguards are no exception. App Tracking Transparency (ATT) is just the latest example. For the first four months of the safeguard, Apple’s own apps haven’t had to ask for permission before they target someone with ads — just everyone else. That somewhat changes with the latest iOS 15 update. When Apple asks for permission to use someone’s data it says it’s for “personalization” whereas developers and marketers must use the word “tracking.” The latter doesn’t have the same positive connotations as the former.

In other words, Apple’s ATT privacy safeguard on its devices affects other apps a lot more than it does its own. And the more this happens the more those apps will have to ditch ads in favor of the App Store for growth. Retaining this influence is key for Apple.

It all but ensures content and the distribution of it is irrevocably tied to Apple’s hardware at a time when it was going the other way. Not even the prospect of Apple having to eventually permit alternative app stores on its platform (if recent concessions over app store payments are anything to go by) changes this. Few marketers will think they can profitably monetize their app on the alternative app stores via advertising if they can’t do so on Apple’s store.

“I suppose that having multiple app stores will have some impact on Apple’s plan to build out its ad stack,” said Alan Chapell, president of privacy law firm Chapell and Associates, “But even if the app gets downloaded via a different mechanism, it’s not like Apple won’t be able to see the apps present on their devices.”

So far so walled garden. In fact, Apple’s influence over the ad industry has been growing for a while — as early as 2017. Back then Apple purged third-party cookies — the workhorse of online advertising — from its browser using its Intelligent Tracking Prevention protocol. Swathes of the ad industry became unintended casualties of its war on tracking — and Apple never made any apology for that. It’s a similar story four years later with ATT, and it looks like Private Relay could be a sting in the tail. The reason being that Private Relay renders a person’s IP address useless for fingerprinting because it redirects web traffic through two separate servers. 

Granted, none of these measures have wrought too much havoc across the ad industry to date. But skeptics aren’t worried about how they all work today but in the coming years. Small updates now could have big implications down the line. 

For example, Apple’s new “Hide my email” feature lets a person generate fake email addresses that direct mail to their personal address, so they can sign up to newsletters without sharing their email to any company, except Apple. Should it prove popular, it could kneecap any attempt by marketers to track those email users. In practice, a business could earn access to someone’s email address, only for it to be rendered useless. Apple has found a way to disintermediate that value chain.

“Email is a permission-based channel between a trusted brand and a trusting stakeholder,” said Melissa Sargeant, CMO of email marketing agency Litmus. “Potentially losing that trust has kept marketers up at night ever since Apple’s [ATT] announcement.”

Slowly but surely Apple’s influence over the ad industry is calcifying. And it is little wonder. With its flagship devices moving further into product life cycles, Apple has made it clear to investors that its “services” line of business is a key growth driver of business for the foreseeable future. “Services” is the call-all term Apple uses for licensing deals, such as Google’s agreement to provide default search functionality, subscriptions to Apple’s own apps, revenue share from other apps in the app store, and advertising. Not all those revenues, however, are straightforward to grow. 

Both Apple’s search licensing agreement with Google and its app store revenue share practices are under heavy regulatory and antitrust pressure, which leaves its own app subscriptions and advertising to pick up the slack — you could say advertising is the low-hanging fruit on the Apple tree. It’s also lucrative. Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi estimates that Apple will make around $3 billion in ad revenue in the September 2021 fiscal year, up from $300 million in 2017.

“It’s not an increased focus with Apple but a constant focus,” said Jay Friedman, president at Goodway Group. “Apple is clearly privileging its own products and marketers must deal with this disadvantage. Unfortunately, this means marketers must treat iOS as a walled garden, within which other walled gardens also exist.”

Still, advertisers rarely lead on these types of issues. The ramifications of Apple’s multiple privacy safeguards are deep and varied; not all of them are straightforward, not by a long shot. More often than not, though, they tend to affect marketers in four main ways: 

1. Which channels they plan to spend their dollars
2. How they do so through things like retargeting and frequency capping
3. The way they measure those buys
4. The ad tech vendors they work with to bring it all together

Bottom line: Apple’s moves could change more than just where advertisers buy their ads. They could affect whether marketers even have money to spend on ads. How well marketers cope with this hinges on their ability to recognize that it’s OK for two things to be true at the same time: Apple is prioritizing its company’s stance on privacy and Apple is going all-in on its own ad business. Both can be true at the same time. The latter doesn’t make the former any less valid.

“Apple seems to be creating these experiences whereby brands — that have done everything in their power to build a relationship with someone — may be constrained on how it is used for advertising and connected experiences,” said Krystal Olivieri, GroupM’s Global chief innovation officer. 

That said, preparations for these moments and all the other privacy ramifications are only now starting to whir into gear at some of the larger advertisers. And it’s little wonder. Google’s plan (or lack thereof) for life after third-party cookies in its Chrome browser has been a source of much consternation for many of them. So much so that Apple has been in a blind spot for many marketers, who just haven’t had its privacy safeguards top of mind. But with the prospect of those cookies being around for a while yet, the focus among advertisers is shifting — albeit slowly. Media agencies are already starting to talk to clients about the impact Apple’s moves could have on advertising.

Take GroupM. It has launched a weekly readiness council to help clients understand the breadth and depth of Apple’s growing influence over how they make money online. Led by Olivieri, the focus of these events isn’t just on how clients buy ads. They go into the types of choices that will need to be considered across the business once Apple’s privacy safeguards are firmly entrenched in the market. As Olivieri explained: “What Apple is doing touches more than just media. For some brands, these moves are going to disrupt their customer acquisition strategies which has a big impact on their business model.”

Execs at Omnicom Media Group are also preparing for clients. In March, the media agency formalized its advice on these issues when it launched a virtual event series, called “Future Signals.” Since then the conversation has evolved and the agency put on two additional events — one in April and another in June — from discussing how Apple’s ATT privacy safeguard will impact in-app advertising to exploring the wider implications of its stance on privacy.

“The recent changes have made marketers focus more on identity resolution this year, which is why we recently called for publishers to adopt Unified ID 2.0,  because it can be used in the absence of both third-party cookies and Apple’s mobile identifier,” said Ben Hovaness, SVP of marketplace intelligence at Omnicom Media Group. “We think coverage [of the issue] has to delve deeply into the different ways Apple’s changes are going to impact our clients’ advertising end-to-end, from planning, to activation, to measurement.”

Going deeper into these issues, however, is easier said than done. And marketers have had to come to terms with not fully knowing just how Apple’s policy updates will affect their practices until the company makes them. Consider Apple’s Private Relay. While the current version only obfuscates traffic coming from the web and a tiny amount of app traffic (specifically encrypted HTTP app traffic), it’s created a potential pathway for Apple to eventually expand it to app traffic. Marketers are having to read between the lines.

“Most non-cookie-based recognition methods start with IP address[es], as do cross-device identity maps, so obfuscating it renders those solutions ineffective,” said Loch Rose, chief analytics officer at Epsilon.

Even though Apple has touted providing privacy protection, its solutions don’t offer the same barriers between itself and the consumer. 

“Apple owns both the iOS operating system and the Safari browser and thus tracks everything that the user is doing online whether or not their IP address is obfuscated,” said Rose.

“If anything, we want to do fewer stories and tell them better,” Roussel said in a video interview from London, who returned to the U.K. for the job after serving as The Wall Street Journal’s chief innovation officer.

All in all, the newsroom currently produces about 150 stories per day and attracts about 14 million views per month, Roussel said. “I don’t know what the right number [of stories per day] is, but I do know that for a brand like ours, it’s about being deeply thoughtful about every piece of content we publish,” he added.

The Times and The Sunday Times’ — like other publishers — are in a race to compete for audiences’ attentions and are changing the types of coverage they offer to entice readers’ changing viewing habits. Vice Media Group is another media company taking a move out of social media channels’ playbook to prioritize publishing fewer words in favor of vertical video. The leadership there now touts publishing more “Stories” than traditional article types.

In an email to staff Tuesday, John Witherow, editor of The Times, outlined the changes — including building out a digital hub of staffers dedicated to visual journalism (more graphics, and video) as well as and audience building (fine-tuning SEO, growing on social media).

The changes will expand the organization by at least a dozen roles. While the move separates the print and digital teams into two distinct desks, it won’t result in layoffs. “This is not a cost-saving exercise, quite the opposite. We’re increasing our spend on our journalism,” Roussel said.

The new strategy is designed to give the newsroom “​​the sophistication to anticipate how a story can be represented across the internet,” Roussel said. Editors will think about which format is most appropriate for the story itself — which means taking a step back and weighing how they want to tell the story just as much as what the story actually is.

In reality, that could look like Met coverage that prioritizes real-time updates of what everyone is wearing on the social channels readers are occupying.

“The more that we can integrate our news into places where people are spending their human attention, the better, the chances that we have are that we’re going to capture people’s attention. And we just have to recognize that. Gone are the days where you can simply create a set of content, put up a paywall, wait for people to arrive,” Roussel said. “You’ve got to work really hard to catch people’s attention.”

Execs hope the changes will help accelerate a broader audience shift. Already, the organization has seen a change: self-identifying females now make up 52% of new digital subscribers and 40% say they’re under the age of 30. Those figures are each 10 percentage points higher compared to pre-pandemic levels.

While Roussel is working with leadership to determine an exact goal for digital subs, he declined to give the figure. Instead, Witherow laid out to staffers the exact current picture: 367,000 digital-only subscribers, “double the amount of print only.”

“In order to achieve our full potential, attracting a wider base of subscribers, we must raise our digital game by several more levels,” Witherow wrote.

While the News UK’s changes have growing the subscription business top of mind and aren’t necessarily an outright bid for ad dollars — authentic content speaks to readers — and advertisers, said Patrick McKenna, CEO of DMi Partners.

“Engaging content that is authentic to the publication is what captures attention in today’s digital ecosystem…,” he said. “Publications increasingly are establishing partnership-based relationships with advertisers, who are able to provide value-added, authentic content that is engaging to the publication’s audience.”

In bold letters, the collective took out a full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times that stated: “Access is dignity. Access is power. Access is freedom” and touted a site where readers can directly donate to activist organizations and find more information about reproductive freedom.

“We’re not an activist organization, we’re just a business,” said Alexandra Fine, co-founder and CEO of women’s sexual wellness brand Dame Products. “But when things like this happen, and then something happens again that feels even more restrictive, I feel like ‘what could we be doing?’”

The collective, headed up by Dame Products and virtual abortion care company Hey Jane, was joined by other women-led and founded including skincare brand Fur, parenthood and pregnancy membership company Seven Starling, and nine others to respond to the new laws. Recently passed, Texas’ new legislation bans abortions at six weeks and encourages private citizens to enforce the law, according to the Texas Tribune.

“It’s outrageous for us as a company for us to be pushing forward sexual pleasure… and then access to abortion to be taken away from some of our sisters in the U.S.,” Fine said. “It feels like a fight against our brand and what we stand for.” 

Per a spokesperson, the companies in the coalition, including Hey Jane, Dame, Folx Health, Real, Loom, Fur, Oula Health, Coa, Seven Starling, Flare, and Spora Health paid for the advertisement in The New York Times. However, the coalition declined to say how much they spent on the print advertisement. By taking out the spot in the Sunday Times, the team says it hopes more brands and advertisers will follow suit, donate to the reproductive rights organizations listed on the resource website and take a stand in favor of reproductive rights. The companies did not respond to a request for details on how much money was donated, but said donations from the ad placement are continuing to come in as of press time.

“Businesses shouldn’t be scared of ‘the a-word’ anymore — access to abortion and reproductive care is vital to the health and wellbeing of our communities,” Kiki Freedman, co-founder and CEO of Hey Jane, said via email. “Abortion is healthcare, and we urge other companies to stand up with us.”

They’re not the only brands making a statement about the new legislation. CNN reports web hosting service GoDaddy took down a site that allowed post tips about possible abortions in Texas. Meanwhile, rideshare companies Uber and Lyft pledged to cover legal fees for drivers who drive women to their appointments and are sued as a result of the legislation. Dating apps Bumble and Match announced a relief fund for those affected. And Don’t Ban Equality, a 2-year old campaign coalition similar to the one led by Dame and Hey Jane, has plans for ad placements in Texas newspaper, the Houston Chronicle.

“If companies state publicly through this statement that restrictions like SB8 are bad for business… we hope it can dampen other states’ fervor to advance related restrictions,” said Jen Stark, senior director of corporate strategy at Tara Health Foundation and former Don’t Ban Equality campaign manager.

This isn’t Dame’s first rodeo with social justice. Back in 2019, the brand partnered with other women’s wellness brands for a similar message in response to a rising number of abortion bans across the nation. According to CNN, most attempts were blocked by judges. In addition to that, the sexual wellness brand sued New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) after it denied a Dame subway ad campaign for what the brand calls “vague and sexist reasons.” Per Fine, the new SB8 legislation puts the collective’s efforts back at square one, but the brands plan to continue as part of their brand purpose.

“Every brand has a purpose, or should, beyond just making money. What are you trying to do in the world?” she said. “When brands do something, it impacts the world. When brands say something, it impacts the world.”

The idea of brand purpose got a second look in 2020, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic and renewed calls for social justice. Recently, a number of brands, like Expedia Brands and Axe, recommitted to campaigns encouraging people to get vaccinated. According to the latest consumer report from marketing analytics and product research company Jungle Scout, nearly 60% of shoppers say a brand’s social activism influences their notion of that brand. To prove its point, Tara Health Foundation commissioned a study this year showing that 77% of respondents said that reproductive healthcare, including access to contraception and abortion) is an important issue.

“Over the last decade to 15 years, it has become increasingly important that brands really show up with a set of values and beliefs [and] that their customers know what the brand stands for,” said Deb Gabor, founder and CEO of Sol Marketing, a brand strategy consultancy.

Per Gabor, it’s a change of pace for advertisers, who are notorious for being risk-averse. But as shoppers look to align themselves with brands carrying a belief set similar to their own, advertisers will need to meet them where they are.

For example, Gabor pointed to Nike’s 2018 ad with Colin Kaepernick as the Black Lives Matter movement was picking up steam. It was a move pundits speculated would alienate conservative shoppers, but Gabor calls it “an absolute mic drop” moment for the fitness brand.

“Nike knew exactly what they were doing,” she said. “Yes, they alienated some people, but they were totally OK with who they were alienating because they were moving closer to their ideal archetypal customer.”

The rise in brands supporting social causes is no different. In fact, it’s a move to lean into their own values and thus, attract a loyal customer base with similar values.

The most _______ time of the year

The key hits:

• Publishers are finding advertisers more willing to plan for the fourth quarter prior to the period than last year, though not entirely.
• The delta variant is delaying commitments to advertising creative and content.
• While there’s some urgency to get branded content campaigns on the books now, video and audio are likely to be the backbone of publishers’ Q4 ad businesses.

In the pre-pandemic era, publishers’ fourth-quarter ad sales were well underway in August. Last year, for obvious reasons, deals were done on the fly during the period. This year is shaping up to be a hybrid of the two, as publishers’ advertising businesses have weathered the worst of the pandemic but the delta variant has continued to put advertisers on edge.

“2020 was all very late planning. 2019 was definitely more forward planning focused. This year is somewhere in the middle,” said Ryan Pauley, chief revenue officer of Vox Media.

Publishers like Meredith and Vox Media are in the midst of fourth-quarter planning conversations with advertisers and their agencies, but the advertisers are hesitant to commit to specific creative messaging because they are unsure what the cultural tenor will be through the fall and into the holidays.

“Two months ago, prior to the delta variant, all of the briefs were about holiday travel and what is it like hosting events this year and assuming we were more back to normal in the creative. Now the holdup is let’s not pretend we’ll be too back to normal, so there’s a little bit of stalling in what the actual creative and content will be. It’s caused some delays,” said an executive at another publisher who asked to remain anonymous.

Meredith svp of digital sales Marla Newman said she has seen a bifurcation for the fourth quarter between advertisers that are doing deals ahead of time and those adopting a real-time approach and planning to pick up inventory throughout the period. To deal with that duality, Meredith is relying on its more expansive, long-term deals with advertisers — such as its deal with Walmart that includes connecting Meredith publications’ recipes with Walmart’s grocery business — to provide the publisher “our good foundation,” she said. Then the publisher, like others, will be spending the next few months building atop that foundation as ad dollars from more tentative advertisers hit the market.

“Do we have the visibility to fully say, ‘The quarter’s done; we’re going to be up.’ We don’t see that yet,” said Newman. 

“We’re waiting for Q4 to happen as it’s happening,” said the unnamed publishing executive.

Some advertisers may be sitting on the sidelines for now, but given the historical importance of the holidays for industries like retail, automotive and travel to hit their revenue goals, there are advertisers active in the market and sucking up some of the available supply. 

For example, some of Vox Media’s podcast shows are already sold out through the end of September into 2022, said Pauley. He acknowledged that the rising advertiser demand for podcast inventory and the role that inventory can play in the fourth quarter was “definitely part of the consideration” in the media company’s spree of podcast-related deals this year, which include the acquisition of Cafe Studios and the additions of podcasts like “Longform” and YouTube star Marques Brownlee’s “Waveform” to Vox Media’s podcast network.

Additionally, while publishers have had to adjust to the shortened sales cycle and abbreviated turnaround time for branded content campaigns, the work can only be compacted so much, especially when publishers’ production teams are stretched across multiple campaigns. “If we don’t begin to execute on a branded content campaign this week, then it’s probably not going to happen until late in Q4,” Pauley said.

To get out ahead of a potential backlog of branded content campaigns, Meredith is working with advertisers to develop campaigns that can roll out over time rather than debut all at once. That approach is meant to enable the publisher to tweak a campaign’s creative to be timed more closely to the moment in which it will appear, according to a Meredith spokesperson.

Finally, in what has become a familiar refrain now imbued in companies’ ad sales strategies, flexibility remains the focus. That is why publishers are spending the present fourth-quarter planning period mapping out the ad programs, products and inventory sources of interest to advertisers so that when advertisers are ready to spend, the publishers will have their campaigns close to ready to run.

To that end, publishers’ video inventory is expected to be a hot commodity because it’s easy enough for advertisers to provide the ad for publishers’ to plug into the videos running on their sites and platforms like YouTube and Facebook.

While branded content and commerce will play a role in publishers’ fourth-quarter ad sales, given the continued uncertainty in the market, the standard, turnkey inventory sources of “video and audio are going to be the areas that are going to drive the business forward,” Newman said. — Tim Peterson

What we’ve heard

“I don’t think we’re losing steam as much as there’s less urgency to migrate to them.”

— The Independent U.S.’s Blair Tapper on advertisers’ interest in cookieless ad products

Media companies’ staff diversity improves incrementally

While media companies like Condé Nast and The New York Times publish self-reported breakdowns of the racial and ethnic makeup of their employees at the beginning of the year, publishers like Gannett, The Washington Post and Vox Media have put together updated statistics this summer. 

So far, improvements in the diversity of staff at publishers year over year are incremental, with increases typically in the low single-digit percentage points. However, all of the publishers that shared updates with Digiday lowered their white representation as they hired more people of color.

Meredith (as of June 2021)

• 24% of employees overall were BIPOC, up from 23% in June 2020

USA Today (as of July 2021)

• 34% of newsroom employees were BIPOC, up from 30% in July 2020
• 31% of employees in leadership positions were BIPOC, up from 23% in July 2020

Gannett (as of July 2021)

• 84% of leadership positions were held by white people, a dip from 85% in January 2021
• 1% of those in leadership positions chose not to disclose their race or ethnicity, versus 2% in January

Vox Media (as of June 2021)

• 62% of employees overall were white, down from 65% in December 2020
• 62% of employees in leadership positions were white, down from 63% in December 2020
• 67% of editorial employees were white, down from 69% in December 2020

The Washington Post (as of June 2021)

• 56% of employees overall were white, down from 57% in June 2020
• 67% of employees in leadership positions were white, down from 68% in June 2020
• 68% of employees in news and editorial positions overall were white, down from 70% in June 2020
• 76% of employees in news and editorial leadership positions were white, down from 78% in June 2020

While Vox Media shared some updated diversity numbers with Digiday, the media company publishes its official diversity report twice a year and will do so in the coming weeks, according to a Vox Media spokesperson.

BuzzFeed will also report their staff diversity breakdown later this fall. The Los Angeles Times published its last report in July 2020 and has not since published an update. Bleacher Report declined to share their data, and Condé Nast, G/O Media and The New York Times did not provide updates before press time. — Sara Guaglione

Numbers to know

4: Number of profiles written by Black women that The New Yorker has published in its print magazine between 1990 and 2020.

$47.8 million: How much ad revenue BuzzFeed generated in the second quarter of 2021.

90%: Percentage of Fox Corp. full-time employees who are vaccinated.

<$50 million: How much money Fox paid to acquire TMZ from WarnerMedia.

$50: Monthly price for Front Office Sports’ subscription product, which will cost $300 for annual subscriptions.

A brief history of publishers’ sports betting businesses

In May 2018, The Supreme Court struck down a 1992 federal law that made sports betting illegal in most states except for Nevada and to a degree Delaware, Montana and Oregon. Since then, 32 states and the District of Columbia have legalized sports betting and about a dozen states have allowed online sports betting to take place within the state borders for both residents and nonresidents. 

This year, the sports betting industry is expected to generate $4 billion in the U.S., according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. Sportsbook BetMGM, however, predicted in its April 2021 investor day presentation that the online sports betting market is worth upwards of $14 billion to $32 billion annually. 

This much potential revenue is beckoning online sportsbooks and betting organizations to allocate more money to their marketing budgets, which has boded well for sports media companies and even non-sports endemic brands alike. 

Here is a timeline of some major deals between sportsbooks and media companies. — Kayleigh Barber

• February 2019: Turner Sports partners with casino operator Caesars Entertainment to develop sports-betting content and open a Bleacher Report studio inside one of its Las Vegas casinos.
• September 2019: Vox Media creates a sports betting website for DraftKings that is monetized on an advertising revenue-share model between the publisher and sports book. 
• September 2019: Fox launches its sports betting platform Fox Bet in partnership with gaming provider The Stars Group that targets casual betters. Fox acquired a 4.99% stake in the company for $236 million in order to do this. 
• September 2019: TheScore also launches its sports betting platform, TheScore Bet, using sports betting company Bet.works to handle the creation of the tech stack. 
• January 2020: Penn National Gaming buys a 36% stake in Barstool Sports for $163 million, giving the casino operator exclusive rights to use the Barstool brand in its sports-betting products, according to The Wall Street Journal.
• Early 2020: DraftKings approached WarnerMedia to buy Bleacher Report, according to The Information. The deal doesn’t go through.
• October 2020: Turner Sports signs a content partnership with sports betting companies DraftKings and FanDuel that will license Bleacher Report and TNT content to the sports books, as well as use betting information from DraftKings and FanDuel for its own content. In addition to the licensing agreement, Turner Sports collects referral fees from wagers made through the affiliate links in the content that goes to the sports books’ pages. According to The Information, these partnerships are expected to generate between $300 million to $400 million for Turner Sports over the next five years.
• February 2021: Bleacher Report and DraftKings come together to create a branded show live-streamed on the B/R mobile app, YouTube channel and Twitter feed called the “B/R Drop Zone: DraftKings Big Game Prop Reveal” ahead of the Super Bowl. 
• August 2021: ESPN explores a potential multi-year licensing deal with a major sportsbook company that’s worth $3 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.
• September 2021: Seeing the lucrative revenue model for sports betting companies,  Sports Illustrated bypasses the partnership route and launches its own sportsbook, SI Sportsbook, in Colorado. 
• September 2021: DraftKings partners with media entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk to launch a weekly NFL show called “Die Hard Dialogue” where Vaynerchuk and his guests discuss the best betting odds heading into each weeks’ games.

What we’ve covered

Vox Media’s new editors-in-chief are redefining their roles:

• Vox’s Swati Sharma and The Cut’s Lindsay Peoples Wagner spoke about taking the reins of newsrooms during the pandemic in this week’s Digiday Podcast.
• The episode kicks off a four-week series featuring the new leaders inside newsrooms.

Listen to the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast here.

BFFs once more, advertisers and publishers rediscover their alliance amid tracking turmoil:

• Amid advertising’s privacy reckoning, direct deals are du jour again.
• The return of direct deals is good for publishers because the money is also direct.

Read more about publishers’ and advertisers’ alliance here.

Why publishers say opening up remote hiring has grown and greatly improved the applicant pool:

• Publishers like Quartz, Fortune and Axios have expanded their workforce to employees who are not based at the companies’ traditional hubs.
• The expanded hiring pool has helped to diversify publishers’ employee bases.

Read more about publishers’ remote hiring here.

When Google extended the cookie deadline, urgency behind testing publishers’ new ad products subsided:

• Publishers are feeling a lack of momentum behind the cookieless ad products and tech they’ve spent the last year or more building.
• While advertisers remain interested in publishers’ contextual and first-party data products, they may shy away from plans to spend on cookieless advertising.

Read more about publishers’ ad product testing here.

Yahoo is selling sponsors on NFTs, starting with Rebecca Minkoff:

• For its initial foray into non-fungible tokens, Yahoo is creating a gallery for NFTs for a sponsor rather than itself.
• The approach differs from other publishers that have created a micro, consumer-based revenue stream off NFTs.

Read more about Yahoo’s NFT pitch here.

What we’re reading

How Teen Vogue has pushed back against the establishment from the inside:
Teen Vogue’s evolution from being purely a fashion and beauty magazine for teen girls into becoming an outlet that can adeptly cover culture and politics has been pretty well covered. Still Columbia Journalism covers it pretty well in this long feature, including the past and present internal politics around Teen Vogue at Conde Nast.

How Puck may be more creator network than traditional publisher:
Considering the buzz around the broader creator economy and the trend of journalists going independent, it seems strategic for a new publisher like Puck to fashion itself as more akin to a network of individual creators than a media monolith, according to Bloomberg. But Puck won’t say how much of the company its writers actually own, though its founding partners do have a stake in the company and receive bonuses for driving subscriptions and ad revenue.

Why small publishers struggle to transition to digital:
Small publishers, like local news outlets, understand that eventually digital will need to become the bulk of their businesses, but moving away from print means sacrificing the corresponding, relatively intact revenue and taking on the costs of managing a digital operation, according to Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative.

Why Kevin Merida took the top editor job at Los Angeles Times:
The Los Angeles Times is not an obvious pick for a top-tier editor like Kevin Merida to join, yet the then-editor-in-chief of ESPN’s The Undefeated opted to jump to the struggling large-but-local newspaper despite being up for the role of overseeing ABC News, according to Vanity Fair.

Yahoo has a new CEO — again:
The cycle of Yahoo appointing a new CEO with ambitions to return the aging portal to its former glory continues. After Verizon sold off Yahoo to private equity firm Apollo Global Management earlier this year, the portal has tapped as its new CEO former CBS executive Jim Lanzone, who is looking to grow Yahoo’s finance and sports verticals as well as its ad tech business, according to The Wall Street Journal. A familiar playbook from his predecessors, what would be new is if Lanzone proves to be the chief executive who can actually execute on it.