Month: September 2021

It doesn’t help that Zoom burnout is real. Struggling to pick up on nonverbal communication, constantly having to look at oneself and conversing in immobile digital environments are all contributing factors to a national rise in “Zoom fatigue” over the past year, according to a February study by Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. “We can’t just open up new lines of communication organically in Zoom,” said Daniel Liebeskind, CEO of metaverse platform Topia. “It’s just not possible.”

Most metaverse platforms, such as Roblox and Minecraft, are designed primarily for fun, not work. But many of the builders of these virtual spaces have organically realized their potential for meeting or coworking. At Topia, Liebeskind and his colleagues started with Google Meet before transitioning to meetings in their own virtual spaces; in Rec Room, a cross-platform social application and metaverse space, employees can use the “maker pen” tool to prototype three-dimensional virtual objects. Employees at Stageverse, an event-based social metaverse platform, started playtesting their product earlier this year only to find themselves naturally socializing and congregating in it.

All of these companies found that meeting in an immersive virtual world allowed them to more gracefully interact with each other and more easily recognize social cues. For example, speakers at a Topia “town hall” event might line up to indicate the order in which they hope to speak, something that can be difficult to signal in a traditional video call. “With a Zoom call, there is this kind of formality that we see in workplace culture, even if it’s only three or four people,” said Stageverse CEO Tim Ricker. “We really missed that opportunity to just have a hallway conversation — you know, the water cooler conversation.”

Virtual coworking spaces can be a project in their own right. In August, Facebook launched Horizon Workrooms, a remote collaboration tool that places VR-headset-wearing co-workers in the same virtual room. “You can literally put your hand up, and the other person sees in their peripheral vision that your hand is up, and they look at you,” said Dan Greenberg, president of programmatic advertising firm Sharethrough. “And they’re like, ‘yeah, what’s up, I’m sitting here — do you need something?’”

In July, Mark Zuckerberg infamously stated that Facebook would pivot to being a metaverse company in an interview with The Verge. But the use of virtual spaces for work purposes is not limited to metaverse start-ups. Workers at Supersocial, a Roblox-based virtual experience developer, already spend most of their working hours in the metaverse, so it was a logical move when the company built a virtual office this year. Journalists at Upcomer, an esports news website, built a virtual staff lounge in Minecraft following the company’s remote launch in April. “It was probably the closest to that office vibe that I could get,” said Upcomer staff writer Nick Ray.

Even companies that lack a critical mass of gamer staff are starting to utilize virtual space. The virtual reality platform VRDirect works with clients such as Porsche and Nestle to create virtual reality work events, including onboarding meetings and conferences. “We provide the software, they create the content themselves,” said VRDirect managing director Rolf Illenberger.

The growth of the metaverse as a workspace has led to a shift in what it means to be a worker. This is already underway in metaverse-native companies such as Supersocial, and it is likely to continue as virtual and physical spaces converge. If workplaces are more accessible, then so too are jobs that were once relatively inaccessible for reasons of geography, culture or even age.

Yonaton Raz-Fridman, the CEO of Supersocial, believes this transformation is already underway. He’s already had to turn away numerous job applications from teenaged developers who were ready and willing to enter the virtual workforce. “We need to reevaluate what it means to make all of these technologies available to young people who can actually build businesses in their bedrooms when they’re 15,” Raz-Fridman said. “The type of experiences or work environments that a 16-or-17-year-old would create in a platform like Roblox [is] very different than what a 35-plus-year-old is going to create.” 

Whether as a serendipitous accident or a dedicated product, virtual coworking in the metaverse is becoming more widespread as the concept of the metaverse enters the mainstream. Roblox is unlikely to replace Zoom any time soon — but the video game and its rivals in the metaverse are a viable alternative for any company looking to help its employees stave off Zoom burnout, collaborate in new ways and increase their pool of potential colleagues.

Currently, marketers use email open rates as a metric of success in email marketing campaigns. Marketers say iOS 15’s new features curb those open rates, hindering some from even appearing in personal inboxes, meaning in-email link clicks will become increasingly important.

iOS 15 is Apple’s latest push to make a world without individual tracking a reality. It builds on top of already restrictive measures including those aimed at fingerprinting and iOS 14 updates that made mobile targeting capabilities more difficult. This most recent iteration complicates the process marketers use to track people through emails. 

Ahead of its official launch slated for this fall, email marketers have already started talking about the impact iOS 15 may have on their work. 

The key details:

• iOS 15, which was announced earlier this year, is expected to launch this fall, introducing new features including Hide My Email and iCloud + Private Relay.
• iOS 15 builds upon iOS 14, which pushed many marketers that rely on social media to build an audience to diversify their ad spend sooner rather than later. 
• Marketers speculate Apple is moving away from allowing third-party tracking to build its own walled garden and ad business. 

What does iOS 15 mean for email marketing?

Since its announcement earlier this summer, iOS 15 has been a talking point for marketers, many of which are still reeling from the changes iOS 14 delivered on mobile tracking capabilities.

iOS 15 introduces more user protection from third-party trackers, including mail privacy protection that stops email senders from collecting data via invisible pixels, according to an Apple newsroom blog post. The update also hides user IP addresses, limiting third-party entities’ ability to track users across the internet. Finally, the Hide My Email feature allows Apple product users to utilize random email addresses that forward to their inbox to their personal inbox, thus keeping personal email addresses private. 

When all is said and done, marketers say the update hinders advertisers’ ability to measure success across email marketing campaigns. 

Blow by blow, Apple has made it clear that it’s looking to end “surveillance marketing,” “where marketers can snoop on indirect interactions that consumers have with brands,” and phasing out third and second-party data, said to Wayne Coburn, group product manager at cross-platform marketing platform Iterable. 

“Since they will become an unreliable marketing metric, marketers will need to focus on more meaningful email engagement, like generating clicks,” said Omnisend’s Zakowicz. 

How are marketers responding to the changes?

“With the iOS 14.5 update, brands lost some targeting capabilities with Facebook ads, lowering their returns,” Zakowicz said. “The problem for brands was they relied on someone else for customer data.” 

That being said, platforms like Omnisend, have started talking to clients about pivoting email marketing to accommodate Apple’s latest changes. Recommendations include cleaning up current email lists to remove unresponsive contacts and start performance testing to better “navigate in a world void of opens.”

Others are recommending clients focus on stepping up their own first-party data and prioritize opt-in messaging where users can choose if they’d like to receive email communication from advertisers, and personalize messages so users are more likely to interact. 

iOS 15 isn’t necessarily the end of the world, marketers say. The update is just the latest in a series of the end of third-party data tracking, pushing advertisers to rely more heavily on first-party data.

“Marketers are going to lose some functionality with this update,” said Dan LeBlanc, CEO of Daasity, an analytics and data platform. “But at the end of the day it’ll be just another update in the long line of events that were supposed to be the ‘death of email’.” 

With Apple’s crackdown and Google’s ‘Cookie-pocalypse,’ what should email marketers and advertisers as a whole expect?

With this latest update, email deliverability will remain at the forefront of email marketing, according to Coburn, as it’s most likely not the end of the privacy battle. It will, however, mean email marketers will need to find new ways to measure email marketing campaign effectiveness. 

“The fact of the matter is that email opens are not a measure of success,” said Iterable’s Coburn, calling it a vanity metric and pushing for higher quality metrics like link clicks, website clicks and sale conversions. “While there are valid reasons to monitor opens, marketers should be focusing on meaningful metrics that drive value (and indicate revenue) for their brands.”

When those marketers do those audits, they will be faced with one of ad tech’s enduring questions: is a data management platform (DMP) worth the hassle? Possibly.

The traditional idea of a DMP is a busted flush. They have struggled to keep pace with intensifying regulation and how the likes of Google and Apple reacted to that scrutiny. And it’s not hard to see why. These DMPs were built on third-party data that was often collected and shared without a person’s permission that was often opaque and —ultimately — visualized poorly. The decline of Salesforce, Adobe and Oracle’s prototypical data management solutions bear this out. Once a must-have, marketers eventually soured on DMPs.

But times change. And this new batch of DMPs, at least from the likes of companies such as Adform and Permutive, are using identifiers beyond third-party cookies.

Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or authenticated data sets are now common currency among these newer solutions. Deterministic ID management is standardized, and establishing first-party cookies and mobile identifiers via SDK is normal practice. Google’s decision to delay its cookie cull has only highlighted this issue — not that every marketer is paying attention. Those that are, however, are still trying to get ahead of the incoming disruption — whenever it comes.

In part, marketers are forcing change among DMPs. Their expectations of data and how it is managed have changed in response to privacy concerns. The smart ones are going a step further. They’re reevaluating technologies, wary some may no longer be privacy compliant. And in doing so, they’re reframing their relationships with publishers. 

“We see this in the briefs we’re getting from marketers,” said Joe Root, CEO of audience platform Permutive. “They no longer want to know what third-party data we can give them access to. They’re asking about the publisher integrations we have — and how they can be used to build second-party data relationships.”

Indeed, deals like this mitigate the loss of third-party cookies because they’re built on first-party data. And DMPs could be central to how this data is shared directly between publishers and advertisers. “The reason we evolved from a DMP to an audience platform is that we realized that we had to build deeper relationships with publishers to gain access to those datasets along with all the consent and management that comes with it as well as the tools and infrastructure needed to facilitate it all in the first place,” said Root.

But marketers are still skeptical. Namely, because they believe customer data platforms (CDPs) have made DMPs redundant. After all, both technologies have touted the same mission in recent years: combine richer data with substantial scale across the web — and then other digital channels — to give advertisers the reach they are accustomed to.

These platforms are similar — but only up to a point. CDPs facilitate the collection of data from various sources, but they don’t let advertisers build the type of data deals with publishers needed to offset the loss of third-party cookies — at least not to the same level as DMPs. So while these technologies are evolving, they still have to continually demonstrate value in powering those services.

“When people say the ‘DMP is dead’ that’s not that coming through discussions we’re having with clients who plan to continue to work with those technologies as they try to reconcile tracking and privacy,” said Miles Pritchard, managing partner of data management solutions at OMD EMEA. “What marketers are ultimately looking for with these technologies hasn’t changed.”

What has changed, however, is marketers’ expectations for DMPs which has made them more realistic about what those technologies can accomplish for them. It’s there in the briefs. Marketers aren’t just interested in data management, but its enrichment.

Marketers aren’t the only ones that have changed; the tools themselves have evolved too — first-generation DMPs were oversold and over-promised. Several years ago, they were pitched as the tool needed to unlock the alchemy that turns data into gold. And yet many marketers struggled to do just that — and used them for straightforward advertising reasons like retargeting and acquisition.

“The fact that there’s lots of talk about audits of ad tech stacks is reflective of how marketers are recognizing that even if they have bought an out of the box, plug and play solution like a DMP then they still need experts or a really great account manager to help with the implementation,” said Lauren Fisher, vp of business intelligence at Advertiser Perceptions.

It explains why conversations between data management business 1plusX and marketers continue despite Google’s cookie reprieve. They’re “ongoing,” said the ad tech vendor’s CEO Jürgen Galler.

Marketers now want 1plusX’s DMP to be powered by a cocktail of ID-based data (cookies, and hashed emails for example) and ID-less (targeting age without a user identifier). “That’s the mission of the modern DMP — because marketers don’t want to be limited to only targeting existing customers,” said Galler.

Some marketers are already seeing the benefits. Since April, marketers buying impressions from German ad sales house Ad Alliance, which is using 1plusX’s DMP technology, have been able to reach up to 70% share of mobile German users in the target 20-39 age range, compared to 32% for standard run of network campaigns, Galler said. 

“A DMP for a marketer today lets them identify the right audiences but not through a data marketplace as they have done previously,” said Galler. “Instead, those audiences are found through direct connections with publishers facilitated by technologies like ours.”

It’s a thought not lost on the execs at Adform. Interest in the ad tech vendor’s DMP solution has been rising ever since it was rebuilt to be able to run based on first-party IDs in 2020. The use case is the same as it’s always been: connect different touchpoints across different devices and platforms. Now, however, it’s handling data from a wider variety of sources with or without known identity.

“Rebuilding the platform on first-party IDs hasn’t just focused on providers like ID5 or log-in providers like Unified ID 2.0, but also publisher IDs too,” said Philip Acton, Country Manager in the UK and BeNeFrance at Adform. And as of earlier this summer, the platform started to accept first-party IDs from advertisers.

Doing so lets them create modeled audiences based on those first-party IDs as the foundation for segments that can be targeted across other publishers willing to share their own first-party IDs via the DMP. Indeed, for those publishers, it’s a chance to eke out more direct routes to marketers and in doing so charge a premium on their inventory on the back of the data.

“On the whole, marketers have responded to this well,” said Acton. Yes, there’s been a slight slowdown in plans to use these DMPs among marketers now that third-party cookies are going to be around for a while longer, he added, but many accept that the extended lull doesn’t change the industry direction moving away from those cookies. “The larger, more experienced brands that we work with have said they want to continue on the path they’re on with our DMP,” said Acton.

But the new generation faces many of the same long-term obstacles because the underlying tension of advertising remains.

“In an industry that is addicted to and predicated upon massive scale, and thus inextricably linked to third-party data, this ‘next generation’ is still tied up in data management that will be subject to the whims of the walled gardens and the inexorable trend toward more government regulation,” said Cory Munchbach, chief operating officer at CDP BlueConic. “These solutions can be a stopgap measure, but they won’t future-proof your marketing nor will they mitigate the risks that come with dubiously consented data.”

Numbers to know:

• Streaming video viewers now span more than 70 million U.S. homes, according to the IAB.
• Facebook said 2 billion people watch in-stream eligible videos each month on the social media platform.
• Half of Disney’s ad sales business will be addressable — allowing ads to be targeted at the household level — in three years and make up the majority of its business in four, according to Daneille Brown, svp of data enablement and category strategy at Disney Advertising Sales.

Diversity in media — not just a side topic

Three of the nine sessions of the three-and-a-half-hour event on Tuesday focused on minority-owned media and how brands can improve DE&I initiatives at their companies internally and creative messaging externally to reach young and diverse audiences. The minority- and female-owned Canela Media pitched its roster of programming, which the company says reaches over 22 million of U.S. Hispanics, including a new linear and VOD channel called Canela Music.

Sheryl Goldstein, evp of member engagement and development at IAB, warned marketers that they shouldn’t “expect the same outcomes in ROI” as they may be accustomed to if they don’t prioritize diverse audiences and minority-led media companies. “It will take time to learn how to connect with this audience,” she said. 

For its part, Dentsu has committed to increasing its media spend with minority-owned companies, with a new division dedicated to these efforts, helmed by Mark Prince, svp of economic empowerment at Dentsu Media Americas.

However, the issue of vetting and determining which companies are minority-owned appears to be a challenge for the industry. That seems to be especially true when it comes to small and independent businesses that may not have traditionally been deemed “media,” such as working with individual influencers or podcasters. Goldstein coined this the “fragmentation frenzy,” and said the IAB is putting together a list of minority-owned businesses under the organization’s Tech Lab Transparency Center so that the industry can “come to an agreement on definitions and how to vet” these businesses.

Streaming the news

TV news networks like the BBC and Fox News have seized on streaming as a means of establishing direct relationships with audiences and side-stepping linear’s limitations.

“Now that we are building direct relationships with users… we can respond to their tastes and behaviors and what they’re selecting and consuming and optimize the product experience as well,” said William Greswell, evp of digital strategy at BBC Studios. 

There’s only so much time a news broadcaster can devote to stories on linear TV, but with Fox News’ expansion to free, ad-supported streaming TV services — including Fox-owned FAST service Tubi — Fox News has created channels around specific genres, such as the Fox Weather Channel and more entertainment-focused Fox Nation, said Jeff Collins, evp of advertising sales at Fox News Media. “New digital outlets for news consumption have allowed us in turn… to create ad-safe and brand-safe genres we haven’t had before,” he said.

Podcasts as part of the streaming pitch

While ostensibly an event centered on streaming and digital video, A+E Networks incorporated podcasts into its presentation and Fox News and National Public Media brought up some of their own streaming audio programming in a panel with news company executives, such as NPR’s five daily news podcasts.

Podcasts provide a way for TV networks like Fox News to expand the audience they sell to advertisers and ensure they reach as many people as possible. “Previously, we couldn’t reach people when they were commuting. Now we can,” said Jeff Collins, evp of advertising sales at Fox News Media, especially with the prevalence of smart speakers in people’s homes. “These are additional extensions for advertisers,” he said.

A busy summer break

The key hits: 

• May was a month of deal-making, between the opening of TV’s upfront marketplace and announcements of WarnerMedia-Discovery and Amazon-MGM.
• In June, ad-supported streaming took the spotlight, with new major services emerging and a heightened role in the fast-paced upfront marketplace.
• July provided a heat check, as Netflix saw growth slow and the delta variant crept into the picture.
• A usually uneventful month, August was fraught with conflict.

Dear Future of TV reader, how was your summer? I can’t believe it’s already fall. It feels like the NewFronts were only last week. A lot has happened since then — ex. the Discovery-WarnerMedia merger, the latest upfront deals, the delta variant, the Disney-Netflix rivalry, things starting with letters other than “D” — so I thought I’d catch us up on what happened this summer.

May

The calendar may slate summer as starting in late June, but the TV and streaming landscape really heated up in May. 

The month kicked off with the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Digital Content NewFronts, and immediately after the annual upfront marketplace opened for business. Broadcast network owners Disney and NBCUniversal were particularly quick to get the deal-making cycle started, using their limited linear inventory as leverage to press advertisers for double-digit price increases. The tight TV ad market propped up streaming’s importance as an alternative inventory source, which explains why digital-only sellers like Roku exploited the opportunity to participate in the marketplace early rather than wait until the traditional TV deals were done, as had historically been the case.

Upfront deals were easily overshadowed by the end of the month, though. On the eve of TV networks’ primary upfront presentations, AT&T announced that it had agreed to spin off WarnerMedia to merge with Discovery. The deal not only revitalized the mega-merger mania of the pre-pandemic era when Disney acquired 21st Century Fox, Discovery acquired Scripps Networks Interactive and AT&T acquired WarnerMedia, but it also sparked speculation of another M&A wave, with ViacomCBS and NBCUniversal considered to be the biggest potential buyers as well as targets. Spoiler: that has yet to pan out.

But before May was over, another M&A announcement rocked the future of TV’s picture. Amazon said it had agreed to buy MGM. If that deal closes — a big if considering the breadth of Amazon’s business and U.S. regulators’ interest in antitrust issues — it will take one of the biggest independent movie and TV show providers off the market, potentially putting greater pressure on streaming services’ abilities to churn out original programming to combat subscriber churn — a topic that we’ll return in the second half of summer.

June

For as eventful as May was, the TV, streaming and digital video industry could have called it a season and broken off until September. And when it came to the upfront negotiations, that appeared to be the aim.

The upfront marketplace usually doesn’t wrap up until July and can even extend into August. But major TV network owners, including Disney, Fox and NBCUniversal, closed up shop by the middle of June. Advertisers and their agencies may have appreciated the abbreviated buying cycle enabling them to take some actual time off during summer, but they were not so keen about inflated linear ad rates they received. Then again, they also understood this year’s upfront marketplace may end up being an inflection point for the inevitable shift to streaming becoming the focal point. Traditional TV may still have higher viewership, but its inventory limitations led TV networks to turn away linear dollars for advertisers to redirect them to streaming. 

And while streaming is still accruing audience, it took some sizable steps in June. After Roku rolled out 30 original shows for its free, ad-supported streaming TV service The Roku Channel in late May, the ad-supported streaming market received a further injection of inventory in June with the debuts of ad-supported tiers for WarnerMedia’s HBO Max and ViacomCBS’s Paramount+. Those marked the latest additions to a top-tier streaming ad landscape that for a long time was dominated by Disney’s Hulu but now also features NBCUniversal’s Peacock and Discovery’s Discovery+, in addition to the flurry of FAST services that are aiming to attract streaming viewers away from ad-free services like Netflix.

July

July ended up feeling like a mix of aftermath and omen. Just as the industry seemed to have turned a corner in reeling from the pandemic and returning to the new normal, the delta variant — among other factors — began to pump the brakes. 

After in-person production picked up to pre-pandemic levels during the second quarter, Hollywood’s return to work had to take a breather due to the delta variant. Netflix began requiring cast members on its U.S. productions to be vaccinated. Sony Pictures Entertainment pushed back its office-return timeline. And movies and TV shows, like HBO’s “House of the Dragon,” had to suspend production after people on set tested positive.

Japan’s growing COVID-19 case count compromised the Summer Olympics and likely contributed to the Games receiving its lowest primetime viewership since 1988. To NBCUniversal’s credit, the TV conglomerate was able to fulfill its viewership obligations to Olympics advertisers, in part, by providing advertisers with more streaming inventory. Considering the tightness of the traditional TV ad market and the years-long trend of traditional TV viewership sliding, examples like that are likely to become even more common as this year’s upfront deals take effect in the fall.

On the other end of the spectrum, however, Netflix’s earnings report indicated how people returning to normal may have an adverse impact on viewership. The dominant subscription-based streamer saw its subscriber growth slow in the second quarter of 2021 and even lost subscribers in the U.S. and Canada. A dearth of original programming and the saturation of the subscription-based streaming market are also likely to blame. The latter seemed to be a particularly significant potential factor when looking at July through August’s rearview mirror.

August

August was spent in the trenches. As everyone contended with the delta variant, combat intensified in the subscription-based streaming war, the short-form digital video battle and the TV measurement melee.

Netflix’s reported subscriber slowdown raised the question of whether other streamers experienced similar struggles in the second quarter, signaling the long-awaited subscription fatigue had set in. It had not. Discovery, Disney, WarnerMedia and ViacomCBS each reported that their respective streaming subscriber bases grew during Q2. That’s to be expected considering these are relatively new entrants to a market Netflix has owned for more than a decade. But Disney reaching 173.7 million subscribers to Netflix’s 209 million subscribers suggests the subscription-based streaming war is beginning to be fought on a more level playing field.

Like Netflix, TikTok has also been seeing more companies come for its crown. Specifically Instagram and YouTube. A year after TikTok announced its Creator Fund to pay people for posting videos to its platform, in August YouTube likewise officially opened its wallet to pay people for posting videos to its TikTok clone YouTube Shorts. Instagram’s parent company Facebook announced a similar move in July.

However, the most heated stand-off was hosted in a much more archaic arena. After TV trade group the VAB alleged in April that Nielsen had undercounted TV viewership during the pandemic and the Media Rating Council confirmed Nielsen’s measurement mistake, the brewing conflict came to a head in August. First, Discovery CEO David Zaslav used a portion of the company’s earnings call to call out Nielsen and call for the TV industry to move away from its primary measurement provider. Then, Nielsen said it would put its MRC accreditation on hiatus while the company worked to fix its system. Next, NBCUniversal called for the creation of a new measurement infrastructure that may include but not be limited to Nielsen and sent out proposal requests to an array of measurement providers.

So that was summer. But the season cannot be capsuled in time. Case in point: on Sept. 1, the MRC announced it had stripped Nielsen of its accreditation. Instead the fallout from the past four months will be felt into the fall and through to the future.

What we’ve heard

“Discovery was super bullish in the upfront and so difficult to negotiate with because their viewer is so different [compared to other TV networks’ audience]. People will binge-watch ‘Fixer-Upper.’”

— Agency executive

Stay tuned: Smart TV wars

The smart TV front of the connected TV platform war is intensifying. In the past week, Amazon has announced its first line of branded smart TVs, and smart TV maker LG announced that its advertising division will roll out its own CTV platform.

Amazon’s and LG’s moves indicate a blurring of the lines occurring between smart TV and CTV companies. Amazon and Roku may have built much of their CTV footprints by people plugging the companies’ streaming dongles into their otherwise unconnected TVs, but increasingly people are trading in their old, dumb TVs for smart TVs, which can mitigate the need for a separate streaming device.

As TVRev noted in a report released earlier this month on the smart TV ecosystem, smart TVs account for half of TVs in the U.S., and smart TV makers are looking to grab a larger share of the streaming ad market, as they push out their own ad-supported streaming services and sell ads across third-party streamers available on their smart TVs.

To be clear, Amazon, Roku and even Google have struck deals with TV makers to have their respective CTV platforms power the manufacturers’ smart TVs. But TV manufacturers like Samsung, Vizio and LG operate their own CTV platforms, and companies like Walmart and Comcast are reportedly working together to create their own smart TV powered by Comcast’s CTV platform. These moves may amount to cutting off and even cutting into the CTV platform owners’ share of the market.

That may already be happening. In the second quarter of 2021, connected TV devices saw their watch time increase by 5%  year over year, while smart TV watch time jumped by 46%, according to Conviva. Although Amazon’s and Roku’s CTV platforms combined to account for 49% of watch time in the period, their share dipped from 52% in Q2 2020.

As stated in TVRev’s report, “by rolling out their own simple, user-friendly interfaces, the smart TV [manufacturers] are beginning to make strides in getting users to either cut back on using streaming devices or not resort to one at all.”

Numbers to know

30%: The percentage share of creators for streaming shows aired during the 2020-21 season who were women, compared to 22% for broadcast TV shows.

$6.5 million: The highest price that NBCUniversal has secured for a 30-second ad in next year’s Super Bowl.

1.6 million: The number of people who streamed last week’s NFL Kickoff Game, compared to 24.8 million people who watched it on traditional TV.

$18.4. million: How much money cable TV networks lost in affiliate fees because of carriage disputes that resulted in blackouts.

1.35 million: How many traditional pay-TV subscribers cut the cord in the second quarter of 2021, compared to 1.57 million in Q2 2020.

What we’ve covered

Why Immortals Gaming Club is turning the esports merch game on its head with its zero-profit strategy:

• The Los Angeles-based esports team is hoping the price reduction attracts younger and less hardcore gamers.
• The loss-leader strategy is uncommon in esports where a lot of companies are still seeking profitability and commerce is a crucial revenue stream.

Read more about Immortals Gaming Club here.

Why Canadian TV company Blue Ant Media has taken a niche, FAST-first approach to building up its U.S. business:

• Rather than break into the crowded U.S. pay-TV market, Blue Ant has oriented its U.S. expansion around free, ad-supported streaming TV.
• After soft launching in the U.S. on Roku’s The Roku Channel in mid-August, Blue Ant’s HauntTV has attracted roughly 600,000 unique viewers.

Read more about Blue Ant Media’s FAST approach here.

Why esports companies are leveraging Snapchat to reach mobile gamers:

• Snapchat’s boom during the pandemic has turned the heads of esports media companies.
• Snapchat has debuted almost 60 new gaming and esports shows on Discovery this year.

Read more about esports’ companies Snapchat adoption here.

How Walmart is using interior design to tap into TikTok’s Get Z audience:

• The retailer launched a home channel on TikTok to target Gen Z shoppers in search of their first homes, apartments and college dorms.
• Walmart plans to use influencers and produced videos about DIY decor.

Read more about Walmart’s TikTok strategy here.

What we’re reading

Apple plans to step up its streaming fight:
Two years after making its foray into the subscription-based streaming war, Apple seems to finally be ready to take the fight to Netflix, Disney and Amazon, according to The Information. The iPhone maker is expected to spend $500 million to promote its Apple TV+ streaming service and is looking to up its programming output, with one new show or movie slated to premiere per week in 2022.

Amazon closes in on NFL Sunday Ticket deal:
Amazon is looking to pick up the rights to the NFL’s Sunday Ticket package, according to CNBC. The package, which allows subscribers to watch out-of-market games, would add to Amazon’s growing roster of sports programming, which includes the NFL’s Thursday Night Football games, the WNBA and various European soccer rights.

Hulu’s price increase reignites subscription fatigue speculation:
Disney’s Hulu is the latest subscription-based streamer to announce a price hike, a trend that seemingly must have some end, according to Los Angeles Times. People’s pocketbooks probably do have some some upper limit on the amount of money they’re willing to spend to stream shows. But how that budget may be allocated is where things get messy. Some people may be willing to pay a lot for a few major services, while others seek to spread out their options among cheaper, specialty streamers. And each month, the math may change based on what show or movie debuts or is taken off a given service.

TV networks expect record-breaking NFL season:
TV network owners like Disney, Fox, NBCUniversal and ViacomCBS wouldn’t shell out billions of dollars to air NFL games if they didn’t expect to make that money back and then some. This year — after NFL rights prices shot up to $9 billion per year — TV network owners are expecting a proportionally bigger payday, according to Adweek. Some TV networks nabbed double-digit price increases for their NFL ad inventory in this year’s upfront market, and NBCUniversal is already securing 30% higher prices in the scatter market.

ViacomCBS rejiggers its studio to prioritize Paramount+:
A year after many media companies reorganized themselves around streaming, ViacomCBS’s Paramount Pictures is separating its movie and TV divisions, according to The Wall Street Journal. David Nevins, who oversees Showtime and Paramount+’s original programming, will take the reins of the studio’s TV division, which will prioritize producing shows for ViacomCBS’s own TV networks and Paramount+ streaming service rather than selling them to outside networks and streamers.

“Large tech companies like Facebook have gotten away for years with nothing more than a slap on the wrist for their deceptive practices,” said Schakowsky during a House Energy and Commerce Committee markup session held Tuesday to amend the Build Back Better Act. “With these resources, the FTC will invest and hold companies accountable for failing consumers.” The legislation was moved to the House Budget Committee and still needs approval by the full House of Representatives to go into effect next year.

As data collection and use fuels corporate power, people both inside the FTC and outside who hope to influence it have pushed for a more holistic approach to addressing problematic data practices — one that takes into consideration the increasingly important role of data as a revenue driver for companies. That means finding ways for the century-old FTC, which oversees both consumer protection and competition issues, to evolve to meet the realities of the way companies operate today.   

“The FTC needs to create a new bureau,” said Jessica Rich, the former head of the FTC’s Consumer Protection Bureau, in a July interview with Digiday. “This bureau would address not just privacy, but broader data protection concerns like anti-competitive data practices and the use of data for fraud, racial profiling and discrimination,” she said. Rich, now part of the privacy and advertising group at law firm Kelley, Drye and Warren, spent 26 years at the FTC and directed the agency’s Consumer Protection Bureau starting in 2013. The bureau that Rep. Schakowsky has proposed appears to be along the lines of what Rich recommends. 

In addition to hiring more staff with technical expertise, Rich said people from the FTC’s existing Competition and Economics Bureaus and its Privacy Division (part of the Consumer Protection Bureau), as well as international staff and technologists, could move into the new bureau to form its foundation. The FTC’s chief technologist Erie Meyer said in July at the agency’s PrivacyCon event that she and her team were in hiring mode already, hoping to bring on board privacy engineers, designers, financial analysts, product managers and technologists. 

“The FTC does not have the financial resources and the funds to fulfill the critical responsibilities the American people certainly need, and nowhere is the lack of resources more glaring than in its effort to protect consumer privacy and data security,” said Schakowsky.

Republicans pushed back on giving the FTC what they considered too much money without more specific direction from Congress on how it would be spent. Florida Republican Rep. Gus Bilarikis was among those who opposed the amendment. He and other Republicans pushed for the FTC funding to be guided through the establishment of a would-be federal privacy law. Without that, he said, the FTC funding “could become nothing more than a socialist slush fund.”

While a lot of attention is given to the FTC’s investigations of Facebook and Amazon in relation to antitrust and competition issues, privacy has been top-of-mind this week. The possibility of the new bureau at the agency comes on the heels of the nomination Monday of privacy hawk Alvaro Bedoya as a commissioner. Bedoya, a champion of privacy rights for people of color, immigrants, and working people, is a former chief counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law. Most recently, he helped establish the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, where he co-authored the center’s influential research on facial recognition use by U.S. law enforcement. If approved, Bedoya will fill the seat of Rohit Chopra, who has been named to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.