Month: September 2021

“Meaningful consent is frequently not obtained,” they wrote in the September 9 communique, noting that “cookie walls” requiring people to agree to tracking to access content are misleading and complex. The privacy regulators said that when tracking notices feature design elements often referred to as “dark patterns” which can “trick users into providing consent,” they only reinforce the lack of control people have over their data. 

Some believe cookie tracking and data collection notices that highlight choices to accept cookies with more prominent or brightly colored buttons while obscuring options to reject tracking are using dark patterns.

The G7 representatives said they want something done about misleading consent systems. “Action is needed to ensure that web users are able to meaningfully control the processing of their personal data as they browse the internet, in tandem with promoting high standards of data protection by websites and acting to tackle harmful practices,” stated the meeting report. “Web browsers, software applications and device settings all have a role to play in enabling people to set and update their lasting privacy preferences and ensure that these are respected by websites.”

Warnings and suspensions by industry itself

In a rare move, the ad industry itself is dishing out its own tough love. The Interactive Advertising Bureau in Europe in the last six months has sent letters to approximately 10 companies that provide consent management services to website publishers, warning that they were not compliant with the industry’s voluntary Transparency and Consent Framework, according to Filip Sedefov, legal director for privacy at IAB Europe. That framework — which sets standards for managing the flow of data tracking consent throughout the digital ad supply chain and was designed for compliance with the GDPR — requires consent management platforms to present notices to people in a specific manner detailed by IAB Europe.

“If there is use of dark patterns, for example, we can sanction that,” Sedefov told Digiday.

The trade body has also suspended “one or two” consent management platform companies temporarily in the last six months for failing to abide by IAB Europe’s user interface guidelines, he said. The organization’s agreements with companies registered to use its consent framework prohibit IAB Europe from revealing the names of companies that received warning letters or have been suspended. Those suspensions, “are only active for as long as the issues are not fixed,” which may be only a matter of weeks, said Sedefov.

IAB Europe has conducted manual and automated monitoring of websites and their consent management systems, detecting infractions including failure to notify people in a way that appropriately informs them about data collection or purposes for data use by third parties or ad tech vendor partners. IAB Europe told members in 2020 it would be enforcing guidelines for implementing the consent framework standards, noting that “Non-compliant [consent management platform] implementations undermine the reputation of the [Transparency and Consent Framework] and expose participating organizations to serious legal risks.”

Still, IAB Europe’s own suggested approach for user interfaces for tracking notice and choice are not as strict as what some privacy advocates and regulators might prefer. While the trade group’s design guidance suggests that people should be able to click an “accept all” button in the initial notice shown, it recommends that companies need only present options to reject tracking on a subsequent page denoted by a button labeled vaguely, “manage settings.”

Privacy watchdogs have argued many common approaches are not good enough. “Clicking through cookie consent buttons is not meaningful consent,” said Jennifer King, privacy and data policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. For instance, she argued during an April workshop held by the Federal Trade Commission to address opaque user design tactics, that when an “accept” button is highlighted in advance, “you can argue that’s a dark pattern.” The FTC is the data protection authority representing the U.S. in the G7.

Stacey Gray, senior counsel at the Future of Privacy Forum, agreed that consent notice banners and pop-ups have “clearly been inadequate as a single solution for consumer privacy.” She added, “Cookie walls, notice fatigue, deceptive banner design (“dark patterns”), and the practical inability of expecting users to make informed choices, are all real problems that deserve better legal approaches.”

King said, “I would suggest we need to think at a higher level about the decisions we could make that have a more systemic effect on how our data is collected and used, instead of thousands of micro transactions that grind away at our patience.”

“Very often people say, ‘I don’t like ads or engage with them,’ as a social trope,” said Anne Hunter, Disqo’s vp of product marketing. “To see that this particular environment created ad formats that people are engaging with and enjoying is bigger than just the success of the platform — it speaks to the opportunity the ad industry has to shake things up in how advertising is delivered in a new way.”

Hunter explained that TikTok offers multiple types of ad opportunities, from in-feed ads to overlays, as well as takeover ads and influencer placements. That variety, and their integration into the content in a way that’s less interruptive than traditional ads, seems to contribute to their appeal to users. 

“In a lot of ways, these formats go back to original product placement in soap operas. It’s more aligned to a form of video digital product than it is to a digital display ad,” said Hunter. “Display ads don’t have the same emotional resonance as we’re seeing with TikTok formats in an environment where having fun and being playful is part of the raison d’être to be on the platform.”

The agency world is taking notice. “Consumers are also now creators — this was happening before the pandemic, but with companies like TikTok and Facebook paying influencers and individual creators directly, the creator economy has continued to grow,” said Scott Schiller, global chief commercial officer at Engine Group. “Platforms, advertisers, and brands have to maintain a two-way dialogue with consumers, because they have more power than ever, and their habits will continue to evolve.”

Still, some agency executives are hesitant to fully invest in the app just yet as it continues to build up its workforce around ad tech, beyond what was announced yesterday.

Some stats, from Disqo’s research, which polled nearly 17,000 TikTok users in North America between Sept. 20-21 : 

• Nearly one out of three respondents (29%) say TikTok is a place to find cool projects and projects
• 52% of respondents said ads on TikTok are “fun and engaging”
• 32% said that, after watching a brand video, they researched a product or project they saw in the video, while 13% reported they downloaded an app related to the video, and 12% said they purchased a product in the video.

As far as purchasing power, Disqo found that affluent users are equally heavy users as younger, less affluent users. Specifically, 53% of respondents with a household income of $150,000 or more use the platform practically every day. Hunter said she was initially skeptical of the stat when it first came in, but when she double-checked with the passive behavioral data of Disqo’s broader user base (of 207,000 users), she found TikTok users put an average of 8.5% more dollars into their shopping carts.

“We closed the say-do gap,” said Hunter. 

Hand in hand, even older users (who are often more affluent) who do use TikTok use it nearly as much as younger users. Hunter said Disqo found that over 50% of respondents 35-54 are using it daily. “They become power users just like younger cohorts,” she said. “If TikTok can generate content that speaks to older audiences without alienating their younger base, they have an enormous opportunity to become a standard platform for daily use across the spectrum.” 

Hunter noted that Disqo’s research was done independently of any involvement or investment from TikTok. 

The health compliancy platform Cleared4 offers custom solutions around COVID vaccinations and testing, with the aim of simplifying verification, monitoring and adaptability to changing COVID and infectious disease protocols. The platform provides consistent monitoring, which it considers to be “the most crucial piece for safe reopening.” The company issues more than 10 million “safe access passes” each month.

Cleared4’s business model has evolved along with the pandemic, providing not only businesses but academic institutions, sports and entertainment venues, and live events with COVID management solutions. It enables a user’s COVID status to be connected to any form of third-party access control in real time, allowing partners to select any combination of symptom checking, test results and vaccination data to trigger access to a location using any form of unique identifier, including custom QR codes, building access key cards or wearables.

The company, with clients including Netflix, Yankee Stadium and the City University of New York, said its business is growing 500% a month, with active users up 381,000 over just 28 days this summer. Only four hours after Netflix launched Cleared4’s tool among 6,000 employees, more than half had achieved fully vaccinated “BluePass” status — or when a person provides full proof of vaccination. The company said it can get a client onboarded in just 24 hours.

“Our tool allows for every business to personalize the experience, to pick the rules that say, ‘this is what safety and access mean for me — if you meet these rules, you can come in,’” explained Ashley John Heather, co-founder and president/COO of the company, who has been developing software and marketing solutions for more than 25 years.

Heather said Cleared4 is soon launching internationally, with clients in seven countries.

When asked about the role companies like his have come to have in the workplace — and how employees are responding to it — Heather likened testing and having to prove one’s COVID status to passengers having to take off their shoes at the airport security check post-9/11. “It’s frustrating, but accepted,” he said.

Meanwhile, LivePerson’s proprietary Bella Health app uses conversational AI to guide employees through rapid, self-administered and FDA-authorized COVID tests, with the ability to message with live support when needed. More than 25,000 people are now using the app every time they go into the workplace, according to LivePerson.

The company said the app — which is being used in more than 750 locations in the U.S., by employers including Citigroup — has helped catch hundreds of COVID cases before they found their way into the workplace, including cases among those who’d been vaccinated.

“It’s become a free-for-all since the Biden mandate — we get calls every day and right now there’s massive demand in the testing market,” said LivePerson’s founder and CEO Rob LoCascio, referring to the administration’s edict from early September that companies with more than 100 employees vaccinate or test weekly for COVID.

Processes that can be onboarded quickly across large enterprise clients are key. Yet many companies are still stymied by setting up the process. “Companies have got to move quicker,” he said.

One player with a unique selling proposition is Kameo, which bills itself as the leading provider of COVID testing and management services in the production side of the entertainment industry.

As productions vary in size and can have differing requirements from set to set, Kameo offers testing solutions that can be tailored to each production’s needs, in terms of cadence of testing, the types of tests needed and more. Kameo manages a fleet of mobile labs, providing effective and efficient on-site testing. Kameo also works with a network of vetted lab partners and medical professionals, allowing for sample collection at home or on-site.

Kameo’s vaccine passport allows productions to track the vaccination status of their cast and crew, while enabling them to adjust testing schedules according to who has and has not been vaccinated. Since its launch last year, Kameo has supported more than 150 productions and administered more than 80,000 COVID tests. 

Managing the safety of hundreds of people on a film shoot is complex business — and challenging. Kameo promises to simplify that. “Hundreds of people come together for a short period of time to put together a TV show or a film — there are different requirements, and the needs of production are fast-moving, 24/7,” said Kameo CEO Matthew Hibbard. “You have to be able to create a fluid solution for their needs.” He said the company works with 8 of the top 10 studios and operates out of a range of cities.

He also said Kameo plans to extend its reach beyond COVID. “In production, there is very little adoption of technology to make their lives easier,” he said, explaining that the short-term nature of production offers little incentive for shaking up processes, no matter how archaic. “You have a multimillion-dollar budget that’s being shared in Google Sheets,” he pointed out.

Kameo aims to change that, with offerings that manage everything from staffing to scheduling and payroll. As for COVID, how have those on set been responding? Admitting there was a learning curve early on, users have come to quickly get the process, Hibbard said. “I think people generally appreciate the fact that they can continue to work in an environment that is quite safe compared to other industries.”

“It’s about scale and the halo effect television offers,” said Alvaro De La Rocha, chief marketing officer at Bespoke Post, adding that the channel helps legitimize the brand. “As we try to expose our brand to a larger audience and get that reach, you can really see the sound and sight of tv being able to do that.”

The move doesn’t come as a surprise to media buyers, who say between Google’s cookie-less future and Apple’s data privacy crackdown, advertisers are taking a second look at traditional channels as “the old school always comes back around,” according to Santia Nance, vp associate media director at The Martin Agency advertising.

“With audiences getting so niche, and digital targeting gradually taking a backseat from being borderline creepy, we’re starting to reconsider the days of more contextual and general placement — hence, more TV,” Nance said via email.

BeSpoke Post’s campaign features two 30-second spots running across national television channels that feature lifestyle content. The DTC brand has over-the-top television slated for the campaign in coming weeks with plans to include linear television advertising in its media mix from here on out, according to De La Rocha, who did not say exactly how much the investment was worth.

Currently, BeSpoke Posts says it spends more than $2 million per month on media, earmarking at least half of that spend for Facebook and Instagram and leaving 10% of that budget to test offline media channels. Broadcast advertising was always in the plan, according to De La Rocha. But in light of the pandemic accelerating online shopping and thus saturating the digital advertising space, the DTC brand accelerated its timeline to diversify its media mix in hopes to become less reliant on digital advertising.

“We’re hoping for TV to quickly get to the scale of a Facebook, a Snapchat or a Pinterest,” De La Rocha said. “I could see it going from a channel in which we have zero percent [dedicated] spend today to one that could quickly be taking up 25-40% of our spend in the near future.”

At Martin, Nance believes television is and will always be the key awareness driver. As technology progresses, advertisers will need to plan around connected TV platforms, product and brand integrations, and more addressable formats, she said. “There’s no denying the facts, though — the more media touchpoints you have, the more effective your advertising will be so diversification is always necessary,” she said via email.

However, data privacy changes are only part of the reason advertisers are moving ad dollars to traditional media channels like television, according to Carrie Drinkwater, chief investment officer at media buying and planning agency Mediahub. With the chance to reach millions of viewers at one time, TV offers a major opportunity to boost brand awareness, she said.

“Those that have had success and reaped the financial benefits of the digital space need to start building a greater brand awareness to help fuel their [marketing] funnel,” she said. “If you watch TV, you will see Facebook ads and you’ll see Google ads, Nike ads and Chipotle ads. These are cultural brands and they’re on there because it’s working.”

As data privacy changes continue (e.g. Apple’s recently launched iOS 15), De La Rocha sees it as a bump in the road, changing the ability for hyper targeting and hyper efficient growth digital advertisers saw in years before and encouraging diverse media mixes.

“It’s a return to the basics,” he said. “On a whole, digital channels tend to be more efficient, but all these things can work together.”

Overheard at the Digiday Publishing Summit

The key hits:

• Publishers are dealing with a lot of alternate IDs and a lack of clarity around which advertisers will adopt.
• Acquiring people’s consent continues to be a challenge, just as privacy regulators appear poised to step up enforcement.
• Getting traction with new projects, including subscription programs and podcasts, is hard — even internally.

For all that publishers have overcome over the past 18 months, their businesses continue to face plenty of challenges. They are working to prepare for the cookieless era while also managing their editorial product portfolio and advertiser relationships.

At the Digiday Publishing Summit (DPS), held in Miami from Sept. 27 to 29, publishing executives gathered — while masked — to compare notes on the issues they’re experiencing and the topics they are trying to tackle. They broke out into groups for behind-closed-doors discussions — conducted under Chatham House rules so that Digiday could share what was said while maintaining the executives’ anonymity — on data and privacy, editorial products and revenue. Here is a sampling of what was said. — Kayleigh Barber, Jim Cooper and Tim Peterson

ID overload

“The ID solutions are just going to be a problem down the line. It’s just like a pivot but not actually addressing the issue.”

“When it comes to the number of IDs, let’s minimize the risk for data leakage and at the same time what we can do to consolidate our revenue sources? Having many, many [IDs], that’s a problem I run into. Every division I work with [says], ‘Hey, I’ve got this great new partner. What they’re going to do is give you one ID.’ I’ve just had seven of those same conversations.”

“We’re waiting to hear from the buyers on what [IDs] they’re going to transact off of. It’s a waiting game at this point because it’s useless if no one is going to transact off of it.”

“We’d like to move sooner than later [to decide on which identifiers to support], but we all know it’s going to get delayed two years. We’re keeping moving forward because we have our engineering, [developer] and legal teams’ attention. But I’m sure that it’s going to come to a screeching halt, and we’re going to be right where we left off.”

“Before the delay [by Google], when it was really top of mind, then the dev team was able to [build support for different identifiers]. It became a bit of a rinse-and-repeat process where things got easier, the more we integrated. I’ve got like six or seven [identifiers] integrated now. But the maintenance of them is becoming challenging. As you continue to maintain the rest of your code base, maybe timing changes slightly somewhere, and now the consent signal is missed on its way over to ID 5. That happened. So maintenance is a different consideration beyond even the initial implementation.”

Email insufficiencies

“[The email address as identity foundation] is insufficient as we look to [streaming] and CTV. So you have my email address because I pay for Netflix or Showtime. But what about my family profiles? You build completely different behavioral, psychographic data off that, and you’re tying it to, most likely, the wrong email address. So [the email address is] a great start… in 1999.”

“I have six different emails, and I pick which email [address] to use based on what spam I’m willing to experience.”

The consent conundrum

“Part of the challenge is protecting people while also getting their data, progressively over-asking the questions when you’re asking them to sign up.”

“There’s so many prompts that users get all the time now that you could just be another one of the prompts and get what you can get and see if your scattershot approach collects enough consent for you. Or [you could] really carefully offer the value exchange and explain why you need to do this. But how many terms and conditions or explanations or reasons or pleas are everyone going to read?”

“The fact that everybody and their brother now has a consent banner has actually made it more difficult [to educate people on data collection and usage] because it’s so binary now.”

“This [third-party cookie extension] gives us a longer ramp-up time to turn those scattershot banners everybody’s blind to and just clicks without even thinking into a meaningful onboarding process.”

“Most users don’t even understand how their data is being collected or every time they share their location and agree to do that is giving the provider access to their data. That education would probably need to happen in a school-type setting, in a formal education setting. But obviously most users are not in formal education anymore, so that’s a real challenge.”

“This extra time [provided by Google’s third-party cookie extension] isn’t just extra time to do technical testing and find solutions. It’s extra time to allow us to provide user education. It’s about the meaningful consent.”

“Our biggest issue right now that blocks the ability to have proper data, proper privacy policies that really make sense for the industry and also for humans is proper digital literacy.”

Privacy regulation, redux

“We need federal preemption [over states’ privacy laws] desperately. You can’t have every state having their own laws. It’s going to be a nightmare for publishers.”

“I don’t think the lawmakers that are making the laws totally understand what they’re doing either.”

“[Publishers’ legal teams] can’t even keep up [with the shifting privacy landscape]. They have to bring in specialists to consult other lawyers who specialize in [privacy] to help them because it’s changing so much. It’s crazy.”

“With GDPR, there was such a panic, and all publishers were rushing to come up with a solve, and we came up with a solve, not that it was the solve. But we realized that, over time, the repercussions of not following GDPR, the penalties haven’t been that steep. So I think a lot of publishers have said, ‘What we’ve done is good enough. Let’s now move on to the next.’”

“As publishers, we’ve got to be cognizant that a lot of the soft enforcement was because of COVID. And they’re now coming out of that. The I.C.O. specifically said, ‘Hey, sorry, we took a little nap to deal with COVID. We’re back starting in July.’”

“As a publisher, I feel like I was lulled into a false sense of ‘I am good because nobody’s come with an enforcement action against me, and I would probably be one of the first they’d fine.’ But now we’re actually starting to see that pick up this summer. There’s definitely been a false sense of ‘we’ve done the right thing.’ I very much suspect we haven’t done the right thing. They’re just now coming to look at us, and those enforcements really are actually picking up.”

Brand safety: real or red herring?

“You need to have a conversation with (agencies) and educate them. But you also have to go up the food chain and get them to understand what they’re doing.”

“It worked to an extent at the agencies, to go up the food chain to get agency leadership to understand that they needed to take a real look at their block list and get them to try and negotiate a little bit.”

“We all assume that [brand safety is] a problem, but is it really a problem?”

Getting new products off the ground

“We have a lot of ideas but getting them funded internally is complicated. We’re doing a lot of built-if-sold. If we go out and find the sponsors or the brands that want to be tied to that product, maybe it gets easier.”

“Give [leadership] the framework of bullets to cannonballs. We have private equity shareholders that care about ROI maybe more than a VC shareholder or an individual shareholder, so we have to be very careful. So we will fire some bullets, like test mobile app development. We’ll do some improvements on our existing ones, and if we start to get some traffic, we can go back and get more money and then turn that bullet into firing a cannonball. It’s been mostly bullets, not cannonballs, unfortunately.” 

“If you go with small bullets, maybe you’re killing the project from the beginning. If you don’t do it right, the probability of it working isn’t as high, and that’s where you have that catch-22 that is complicated.” 

The subscription paradox, bigger isn’t always better

“We have a subscription product that we launched a year ago, and it hasn’t grown the way I thought it was going to grow. The percentage of the visitors to our site that end up paying us $10 a month is not as high as I wanted it to be, and I wonder if it’s because we didn’t invest as much up front in the product.” 

“Doing a blanket subscription is missing out on a lot. I think you have to have a targeted approach. If I limit access but improve quality, are there targeted [audiences] that I can better [serve] and then can I duplicate that strategy?”

Identifying the right people to lead new projects 

“Anyone with an editorial team knows, you can’t just hire in people who are talented or passionate. You kind of have to create that, and so it’s better if you can cultivate that environment internally.” 

“What’s beneficial for us is we are trying to raise the people who have proven themselves and love to learn to do new things and having them supported from the bottom up. You don’t want to make assumptions [about what people want to do]. You want to give them the room of choice, by having them be responsible and accountable for work [and giving them a] roadmap to focus people so they have an individual track.”

“What I look for is an employee who says, ‘This is a good project, I would like to take a bet on this.’ And regardless of if it is an intern or a senior manager, if it works, they own it.”

Building a podcast in a black hole

“[Podcasts] have to be the hardest product to start because the distribution challenge is so great. Unlike video, newsletter or content itself, you can only put [a podcast] front and center so much. If people want it, they will listen to it. If they don’t want it, you can’t auto-pop up a podcast and get listens to it, like a video. Also, if they download it, [how do I know] they’re going to listen to it?” 

“With our content, we know who is reading what, but with podcasts, you just get information from the platform about how many downloads you got. If you wanted to build a new product, I have no way to target those people other than the podcast itself.”   

“[Why are we] launching a podcast when there are so many panels and virtual events and those are faster and easier to put together?” 

“I think podcasts are all about setting expectations. If we’re going to go that route, we know we’re not going to see that return at first.” 

“It is really hard to build an audience from scratch. There is demand on the advertiser side for audio content [so when] your sales team asks, ‘Can we spin up a podcast for this sponsor?’ We’re like, ‘Sure, but is anyone going to listen to it?’ And on the other side, you can’t substantiate for the advertisers running [campaigns in this medium] how many people heard their ad.”

What we’ve heard

“Everyone talks about the ‘Great Resignation.’ We haven’t seen that — our turnover is back to normal and maybe up a little bit [compared to pre-pandemic rates] — but we are seeing upward pressure on pay.”

— Publishing executive

… But who’s counting?

The tittering about Ozy Media, its many attempts to misrepresent the size of its audience and the relevance of its programming, has taken on a life of its own among the media commentariat this week, with observers puzzling over its website’s lack of advertising, its “bullshit” use of branded content to market Ozy’s talent and the wild story that its cofounder, Samir Rao, impersonated a YouTube executive in the middle of a meeting with Goldman Sachs.  

Ozy founder Carlos Watson swung back at some of the claims, chiefly by saying that many of the third-party measurement firms, Comscore among them, are undercounting Ozy’s audience. 

It’s an interesting defense for a company that used the measurement service to overstate the size of its own audience, using some tricks that were more eyebrow-raising than others.

When Ozy was a Comscore customer back in 2017, it used a tactic that was common at the time, rolling the traffic of third-party sites including Newser and Public Radio International up into its Comscore property, claiming it was authorized to sell their digital ad inventory. That roll-up, in 2017, claimed that Ozy had an audience of about 14 million, more than twice the 6 million that visited Ozy on its own; recent Comscore figures peg the site’s monthly audience at under 500,000.

But any ad buyer, agency exec or investor looking at Ozy through Comscore at that time would also have found something that made Ozy look considerably bigger: a custom entity built by an Ozy employee that pegged Ozy’s audience at more than 114 million.

The custom entity rolled up the traffic for dozens of sites that had no affiliation with Ozy at all. They ranged from viral sites, such as Viral Liberty, to educational institutions, such as Brown University, to white nationalist and conspiracy peddling sites including the Daily Stormer and Infowars. The custom entity was accessible in Comscore until 2019.

Neither Watson nor Rao responded to Digiday’s request for comment; Comscore declined to comment. 

The phrase “fake it til you make it” has played an unusually prominent role in the tech and media news cycle this year. But the scope of what Ozy did was so vast that some of its own business staff felt uncomfortable with it; one former employee told Digiday they did not feel comfortable using some of the numbers Ozy executives told them to use in decks. 

A similar kind of discomfort stirred, that same source said, when Ozy ordered its employees to write positive reviews of the company on Glassdoor, in an effort to make the company more attractive to top talent. — Max Willens

Numbers to know

40%: Percentage share of top management positions at Axel Springer that will be held by women by 2026.

19%: Percentage share of sports media staff positions that are held by women.

>$2.5 billion: How much money IAC is reportedly likely to pay to acquire Meredith.

8%: Percentage share of newspaper and publishing staff members who identified as Hispanic in 2019.

Q&A with The Atlantic’s Candace Montgomery, svp and gm of AtlanticLIVE

The Atlantic Festival is virtual for the second year in a row, due to the ongoing pandemic. It also marks somewhat of a comeback: The Atlantic’s live event division was the hardest hit when the company laid off 68 people (17% of its staff) in May 2020.

The usual four-day festival — which launched in 2008 — will run over the course of two weeks under the theme “Visions of What America Can Be.” It has a new format, platform and approach — for example, for the first time, attendees can curate their experience by adding sessions to their calendar around five content tracks, including: business and tech, climate, culture, health and race, identity and politics.

Digiday spoke with Candace Montgomery, svp and gm of AtlanticLIVE, on what The Atlantic learned from last year’s event, what’s changed this time around, and what’s to come for future Atlantic events. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. — Sara Guaglione

What did you learn from last year’s Atlantic Festival that were taken into account this year? What is different this time around?

We expanded it to seven days this year. Based on viewing patterns from our other virtual events this year, we saw people are getting busier, people are going out in the evenings. We are doing shorter days over a longer period of time, with more daytime programming, to accommodate the audience’s busy schedules and how people’s lives are adapting to the new normal.

We also improved the production value and quality. We recorded live, from our set in D.C. We really doubled down on the platform experience. We created videos that we play during breaks of the show to help people navigate the platform better, to find out how to chat, network and find the schedule. We can direct them throughout the experience to find the things they are looking for. Our media partnership with NBC this year is also a first for the festival. NBC anchors are joining Atlantic editors to interview different subjects.

Are there any notable changes in attendance of the Atlantic Festival? If so, why do you think that is?

In a virtual realm, you can get far more people than you can in a live experience. We are nearly at 23,000 registrations. We can’t compare that to the festival in 2020 yet because the event is still going, so it won’t be apples to apples. I think we are doing well but we also realize that the world is a little different now. So we are not just focused on registrations, but on engagement as well. We are at 43% yield right now, which is great in terms of registration to attendees. Engagement is up compared to last year. We are at 1.5 million views across all platforms on social, including YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn. 

Any notable changes in the festival’s sponsorship?

Underwriters allow us to bring the festival to the audience for free. I can’t say that model will always be the case. It’s possible that may change. Sponsorship revenue from the Atlantic Festival increased 60% from 2020 to 2021. We attribute that to thinking about our brand integrations, improvements in the platform and putting our editors forward. We have 15 underwriters this year. We expanded what the underwriters can do across the rest of our product suite, and built out those packages. So it’s not just the event, but it could be media spend, digital integration, custom content or a more integrated package. 

Does that mean the Atlantic Festival could be ticketed next year, or certain programming could be?

We’ll see. Potentially. We are an evolving and growing business, so we have to think creatively about how we are going to market. It may not always be this model. We are thinking about how to evolve and grow.

What we’ve covered

Leah Finnegan is rebuilding Gawker with her editorial vision front and center:

• The leader of the newly relaunched Gawker is looking to right past wrongs, from internal workplace culture issues to misguided editorial decisions.
• Finnegan has hired mostly women to work at Gawker “because the misogyny was such a powerful and noxious force when I was there.”

Listen to the latest Digiday Podcast episode here.

A Q&A with Fortune’s new editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell:

• The former editor-in-chief of Insider’s business vertical will be the first women to oversee Forbes’ newsroom in its 92-year history.
• An initial priority for Shontell is to dig into data to understand why people subscribe to the publication and what they read.

Read more about Shontell here.

How Axios is tackling local news: newsletters from small teams, in more markets:

• Axios Local plans to operate newsletters in 25 markets in 2022.
• The publisher’s local division is on pace to generate $4 to $5 million in revenue this year.

Read more about Axios Local here.

News U.K. puts its data the nucleus of post-cookie push for media budgets:

• The U.K. news publisher has overhauled the way it collects, sorts and monetizes its audience data across all its titles.
• After launching its first-party data platform earlier this summer, all of News U.K.’s biggest sponsorships include data from the platform.

Read more about News U.K. here.

Here’s why the loss of the third-party cookie is heading toward a collapse in the middle:

• Major media companies and niche publishers are well-positioned, but those in the middle are in a precarious spot.
• Mid-tier publishers are too small to build and sell credible, large first-party audiences but too big to outsource those tasks.

Read more about the third-party cookie’s collapse here.

What we’re reading

Ozy’s shadiness shines a light on media’s dark side:
Ozy Media’s COO Samir Rao impersonated a YouTube executive in an attempt to convince Goldman Sachs to invest $40 million in the media company, according to The New York Times. There’s no sense summarizing the story because if you’re reading this newsletter, then you’ve probably read it already or plan to soon. The article was a big topic among publishers at Digiday Publishing Summit. As one attendee said, “Have you read about Ozy? It’s everything that’s wrong in media.”

The teen magazine given way to TikTok and other platforms:
Not 10 years ago, teenager and young adult magazines and digital websites, like Teen Vogue, Rookie and Seventeen, had a grip on that age demographic, The New Yorker writes. But just a few years later, funding for these titles have decreased and have led to the brands completely shuttering or decreasing the print output significantly. That’s in part because the role of these magazines — giving teens access to advice, role models and information written for them — can now be easily delivered via TikTok and Instagram, though not without their problems.

The New York Times assembles a “trust” team:
The New York Times has put together a group of employees across its organization, including journalists, to address people’s mistrust in the media. According to Vanity Fair, the team’s work is a priority for publisher A.G. Sulzberger. But it remains to be seen how the Times plans to show the work it puts into its reporting and whether the effort will work.

Student journalists are also suffering burnout:
Claire Hao, editor-in-chief of University of Michigan student newspaper The Michigan Daily, has opened up about the stress and anxiety she has experienced from the job, which is why she decided to step away from the newsroom for a week. Some people are burnt out on stories about newsroom burnout, but Hao provides an example of both how systemic the issue is and (hopefully) how the next generation of journalists will help to find ways to address the issue without exiting the industry.

MSNBC’s hard news push draws internal criticism:
MSNBC president Rashida Jones is pushing the TV news network to compete against CNN in covering hard news stories, which is leading some employees to worry what that means for its opinion-based primetime programming, according to New York Post. MSNBC may have established itself as the left’s answer to Fox News, but the emphasis on straight news seems responsible given how detached people have become from the facts and the mistrust in the media that other news outlets like the Times are trying to address.

Clubhouse launched its creators program, but without giving the promised support:
When Clubhouse built its creator program, it promised participants the ability to get one-on-one meetings with prospective sponsors. Instead, they were told to pitch themselves and their Clubhouse shows in a public discussion on the platform that didn’t yield deals because it was difficult getting sponsors to show up to the pitch sessions. Clubhouse’s future success relies on it standing out from all of the other platforms in the market and The Verge writes that these initial attempts are not working.

State Farm’s relationship with NBA2K developer 2K Sports began just a year after the company started sponsoring the NBA in 2010. “We’ve done a lot with them,” said State Farms assistant vp of marketing and brand Patty Morris, “from in-arena to stanchion signage, which mimics real life.”

To date, State Farm’s involvement in NBA2K has followed the lead of its partnership with the real-life NBA. The company has held off on exploring the potential of features specific to the title, such as The City, a mini-metaverse of sorts where players can congregate before and after games. The City is where the virtual mascot can be found idling in front of a storefront and offering players access to a free in-game skin based on State Farm uniforms.

The in-game mascot is eerily lifelike, the result of a development process that combined NBA2K’s bespoke motion capture technology with the comedic timing of actor Kevin Miles. “We’re always really conscious of that fine line between an immersive experience and an intrusive experience,” Morris said. “The last thing you want to do is show up out of context and take value away from the experience.”

Despite this caution, the in-game experience ultimately comes off as more of a commercial than a genuine on-the-street interaction, with dialogue that is slightly stilted, albeit genial. But State Farm is not overly concerned about the return-on-investment metrics; the company is approaching the virtualized mascot as an experiment that can be tested and refined to help improve similar activations in the future. “Doing something new and different with a brand-new partner is bringing a ton of value to us as a sponsor, and we think value to players of the game,” Morris said.

State Farm is doubling down on the partnership by hosting a “Jakeover” livestream event on Twitch this Saturday, October 2, featuring the real-life Jake from State Farm and a group of prominent NBA2K streamers. “We want to be faithful to this partnership, and there will be social to support it,” Miller said. 

Though heavy brand involvement risks becoming off-putting to NBA2K players, the fact that the partnership doles out free skins to participating players allows it to improve their experience instead of simply existing alongside the game. “You have to be doing something that enhances the experience for people who are gaming,” said Marta Swannie, senior creative director at the agency Superunion. “If you do something that doesn’t feel authentic, it’s going to feel like a bit of an interruption.”

As society moves into the metaverse, consumers are becoming increasingly comfortable with virtual representations of actual people, and brands will continue to follow suit through partnerships that combine the real with the virtual. For State Farm, a longtime NBA sponsor, bringing its mascot into the most prominent basketball video game was a natural extension of its sponsorship activities in the physical world. “We’re sort of mirroring reality,” Morris said. 

The average publisher likely receives hundreds of phishing emails a month, Ahmad said. Below is a look at how Dotdash, which owns advice and lifestyle brands like Investopedia, Verywell and Byrdie, made improvements to its tech infrastructure to protect its remote newsroom — and why other publishers need to be aware of any cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

For Dotdash, the transition to working from home was no big deal, according to Ahmad. The company was already transitioning to a remote workforce and had a flexible work-from-home policy. Its editorial staff was mostly remote when the pandemic hit. The office’s network, however, was just as vulnerable as working from home or from a Starbucks, Ahmad said. The company had started using more SaaS solutions to work over cloud-based apps.

But it wasn’t a perfect shift to remote work. Dotdash’s Zoom accounts were tied to conference rooms, and overnight more than 400 employees required Zoom access for meetings. As the pandemic wore on, employees needed office amenities at home, including desks and chairs. IT support had largely been conducted in person pre-pandemic — now when an employee had an issue, they couldn’t just walk up to the tech desk for help. Even onboarding new employees had been an informal, in-person process at Dotdash. 

But the biggest tech issue was cybersecurity threats, mainly from phishing attacks and employee mistakes (such as downloading malware by accident). “People are your biggest attack surface. That was true prior to the pandemic, and it’s true now,” Ahmad said. “At the end of the day, you really need to make sure that your employees are aware of the risks and threats that are being directed at them.” 

Wi-Fi networks at home were often inadequately protected from cybersecurity threats, as were the personal devices that an increasing number of employees were working from.

Dotdash’s IT team got to work: they got each employee a Zoom account. Keyboards, mics, monitors and other office equipment were shipped to employees’ homes. IT support transitioned to Slack and Zendesk, and more screen-sharing products were adopted. IT staff started stocking and storing computer equipment at home to ship out to employees when needed. The onboarding process evolved to include more documentation for new hires, who were also assigned “buddies” to help them get acquainted with the company.

But hackers remained a threat. A hacker could pretend to be someone else at the company and target a new employee. “It’s hard to identify when those things are fraudulent if you’re sitting in a room by yourself,” Ahmad said.

Hackers can search on LinkedIn to find people to target, he said. They can also use software to scan a publisher’s tech infrastructure and find out what version of WordPress they are using or what vendors they are working with, and figure out if there are any security vulnerabilities there. “It’s cheap for them to scan and find your vulnerabilities,” Ahmad said.

Dotdash runs monthly phishing exercises on both employees and contractors so they know what to watch out for. The company sends out an internal monthly security awareness newsletter with security tips.

Every employee’s laptop should have software installed to detect viruses or irregularities, Ahmad said. 

Publishers “should be running software to scan your infrastructure to make sure it’s secure and up to date,” Ahmad said. Every publisher should have a plan in place for a cybersecurity attack or breach. “Don’t put it off,” he added.

Hackers usually target publishers for two reasons: political motives, and data theft. That means political news publishers need to be extra wary. “Some [hackers] want to go after folks that have political views that are different from their own,” Ahmad said. 

Hackers also might want publishers’ user data. “In a world where data is king and everyone is trying to collect data, having [user] data makes you a target,” Ahmad said.

Call your security team, if you have one, and then get your legal team and law enforcement involved, Ahmad said.

And keep careful watch over new products being developed and launched now, he said. That is where vulnerabilities will arise and present opportunities for hackers over the next six to 18 months.