Month: September 2021

So much so in fact that the publisher is committing to not just how it manages data but also how it enriches it — through its own Aperture audience data platform, which was announced yesterday. Not only can it manage different data types, from behavioral to e-commerce data across more than 300 million monthly global users, it will also eventually manage different identifiers too including authenticated and probabilistic IDs. One of those identifiers will be owned by Future.

“We’re working on a Future ID on all users,” said Nick Flood, global commercial operations director at Future. “If Future can come up with its own ID solution that allows one-to-one targeting in a privacy-compliant way then we’ll go down that path.”

Like so many of his contemporaries, Flood wonders why Future should have to share so much of its own data via various identifiers when they can rely on their own. “I don’t want the business to be beholden to an ID [from one of the ad tech vendors] if we don’t have to,” said Flood.

The delay to third-party cookies being axed from Google’s Chrome browser gives it more time to ensure it doesn’t have to relinquish that control — at least to the extent that it becomes reliant on those data solutions it doesn’t own.

Yes, it sounds like the sort of thing you’d expect Google et al to do. And while Future is indeed creating a walled garden via Aperture and its own ID, it’s one that has multiple entry points for advertisers, rather than being completely closed off to everything but its own solutions. It’s why Future has tried to make its audience data platform as flexible as possible during these privacy-conscious times when it comes to how interoperable it is with other solutions advertisers are using. It’s trying to get smarter about its own assets and data in the absence of an abundance of third-party data and subsequently how that unlocks value for advertisers (and more margin for the business).

Still, not every publisher has the clout to do this. In fact, Future is probably better placed than most to come through the industry’s move away from third-party cookies relatively unscathed. Take the e-commerce data flowing into Aperture — most publishers don’t have access to it on that scale. And even if they do they probably won’t have Future’s Hawk e-commerce technology that feeds Aperture with behavioral signals.

“Imagine an electronics advertiser, creating a real-time segment for people who are not looking for reviews, which is the standard publisher go to but also someone who’s actually clicked on an affiliate link within the last 20 minutes,” said Flood. “We’re able to work out the segment, target them on our owned-and-operated sites as well as activate across the wider web — like on Facebook or Twitter.”

In many ways, Aperture sits somewhere between a traditional data management platform and a customer data platform. It ingests the customer data (such as CRM) in the way that a CDP would but then that data, which isn’t usually anonymized because it’s based on permission-based marketing, could then be linked with web analytics data before being made available to advertisers via Future’s own DMP. It’s an important distinction to make given the current confusion around data management. Whereas CDPs take customer data and use it to help personalize emails, landing pages and more, they don’t let advertisers broker the data deals with publishers needed to mitigate the loss of third-party cookies. Aperture, on the other hand, will fuel those types of deals otherwise known as second-party data deals.

The signs are looking encouraging. So far, Aperture has increased the addressable inventory sold to advertisers by Future by 150% using the platform, which is based on technology from the audience platform Permutive.

“We’ve moved properly into that enterprise territory in terms of the number of clients we’re able to serve in different markets with different propositions based on their needs,” said Flood.

Translation: Future is pushing for more direct deals with larger advertisers. 

“The theme here is we try and pursue is trying to move clients up the waterfall or move their spending away from open auctions,” said Flood. 

Aperture goes the thinking, will give fewer of those advertisers reason to buy Future’s impressions from open auctions because they can get access to custom segments expanded via lookalike modeling and layered with behavioral and socio-demographic data. Direct deals like this haven’t offered advertisers enough value to pull their dollars from open auctions in the past — not when the costs of doing so haven’t outweighed the risks.  

“It’s no secret that Google and FB in the middle suck most of the margin for themselves; ultimately Future should be moving buyers to 1:1 relationships, bought platform-direct and not using the current rails to do so,” said Tom Jennen, chief revenue officer at analytics company Brand Metrics. “I think Future can win a greater share of spend from buyers who are already looking at unlocking more 1P data and dealing directly with publishers, but not everyone seeks to do that.”

Aperture’s rollout is the latest step in Future’s attempts to use its own first-party data to sell against high-intent audiences — and ultimately create its own walled garden.

Over the last 18 months, the special interest publisher has been building its own proprietary tech stack to collect, streamline and grow the first-party data that it gets from its more than 350 million monthly visitors to its portfolio of 130 special interest sites and enthusiast publications.

So far it seems to be paying off. Revenues for its 2020 fiscal year jumped 65% to just under £340 million (approximately $459 million). Unsurprisingly, the publisher is keen to keep the momentum going. 

But there is a marked difference between the kind of retreats being booked now, and those before the pandemic began. For starters, “they’re more extravagant,” said Sean Hoff, CEO of Moniker, a company-culture agency, partly because businesses have reinvested savings made from COVID-induced trends like the reduction of office real-estate costs. But they’re also more reflective of evolving working models. Without the centralized structure, many businesses had before the pandemic, and the flexibility to now hire beyond wherever the main offices are located, staff are being flown in from all over the world rather than one or two major cities.

“We’ve been asked by our clients to look at destinations which are central to the entire organization,” said Hoff. “So what used to be a predominant theme of trying to stay in North America and Mexico, the Caribbean — now they’re asking us about Western Europe, Central Europe, Asia, South America because once you get on a plane, the difference between a $600 flight and an $800 flight isn’t that much in terms of the cost to an organization.”

Moniker has also noticed a shift in content requested for each retreat, which range from $500 to $1,000 per person. Whereas in the past there would have been a big focus on work-related sessions for employees to attend, the focus is now almost entirely on team-building, socializing and having fun, with activities ranging from escape rooms, elaborately planned crime-solving mysteries, immersive theater experiences, and themed parties, water sports, helicopter rides, and trips to nearby destinations like mountain ranges.

And with uncertainty remaining around the delta variant and the widespread delaying of office reopening in the U.S. in particular, requests are for more secluded locations, not the typical city center haunts so popular pre-Covid, added Hoff. 

Trouble is, with all kinds of events including weddings and a strong of other conferences and corporate retreat bookers ramping back up, competition for hotel space in the fall is fierce. “There is a real scarcity of [availability] for properties [hotels] of the size range needed,” added Hoff.

Tech company Plex is an avid corporate retreat booker and is keen to reinstate their popularity. The company, which is fully remote, relies on them to build trust between colleagues, according to its co-founder Scott Olechowski. Retreats help “develop the shared history that binds us together,” he said. “It became even more obvious how critical they are to our success, during this pandemic, we were unable to have a retreat — it was sorely missed and we are desperate to get back together in person,” he added.

For those businesses that have decided not to return to their former offices, but remain 100% remote, off-sites have become a vital source of sustaining company culture and productivity. Branding experience and creative agency Butchershop recouped almost a million dollars to its bottom line after giving up its San Francisco office last year, according to Trevor Hubbard, Global CEO at Butchershop. The business has reinvested that into a bunch of areas, from acquisition to Europe expansion, salary increases, new tools for remote setups, and of course — corporate retreats.

This June, Butchershop organized a company retreat for its staff — all of whom were vaccinated — over a 72-hour period. People were invited to share personal stories and had leadership coach Jeremiah Miller run exercises on how to be more open to giving and receiving feedback in remote working environments. Afternoons and evenings were filled with social time at the pool, dinners, fireworks, fire dancers as well as a team-bonding classic — karaoke. The agency plans to hold two retreats a year.

“Hosting these summits for our entire employee base is now part of our culture,” said Hubbard. “The expense is an investment into one of the most important things we must have to be successful or to beat failure — connection to each other. Funding travel, monthly team trips to Guadalajara, San Francisco, Vienna, and planning two summits for our global crew and one for leadership are not lavish or unnecessary, they are vital. They give us something to look forward to and to take away for the months in between.”

Butchershop will also launch its “Labland” concept — a network of spaces for occasion-based collaboration for employees — in San Francisco early next year.

Employers have long invested in regular luxurious company retreats or off-sites, either as a part of a reward process for high performers or for team bonding purposes. But after a vacuum of such meetups over the last 18 months, businesses want to see results. Hubbard claimed the company saw a noticeable jump in Slack conversations among global teams following its retreat.

“The quality of communication also improved [after Butchershop’s June retreat,] with people being more solution-oriented in the work because they had bonded over the three days in Puerto Vallarta,” he added. “The energy of sharing a Margarita at midnight on a beach carried over into our day-to-day chats, both in personal and professional communication.”

ID check

Identity tech providers were already struggling to get publishers on board to use their alternate identifiers in advance of Google’s self-imposed deadline to disable third-party cookies in its popular Chrome web browser. Google’s decision to extend the deadline from January 2022 until late 2023 could make it harder.

“If Google hadn’t made that announcement, we would already certainly be testing, probably, multiple identity partners because of the lead times that are needed to know that something is really good,” said Clark Benson, CEO of pop culture list publisher Ranker.

But now the publisher still hasn’t signed on to use any yet. “We’ve had conversations with many companies involved in different identity solutions, most likely with the plan to implement more than one, but we haven’t pulled the trigger yet on any one,” said Benson, adding that the cookie extension gave him more time to “make a better-informed decision.”

If it weren’t for the extra time, “we might be in a little bit more of a rush with our authenticated identity,” said Mike Griego, director of ad technology for Penske Media Corporation, which publishes titles including Rolling Stone and Variety. Although PMC is already “deep in the throes of integrating ATS [LiveRamp’s identity tech for publishers],” he said, Google’s cookie extension took the pressure off when it comes to evaluating or implementing other alternate identifiers.

The key hits:

• Google’s third-party cookie extension has reduced the urgency for publishers to adopt alternate identifiers.
• It’s also opened a window of opportunity for them to avoid identity tech altogether.
• Other factors contributing to publisher hesitance include a lack of advertiser demand and questions about whether early adoption is worth it for publishers. 

An alternative to alternative IDs

Google’s extension doesn’t only take off the pressure; it gives publishers an incentive to find ways to ignore identity tech entirely, according to one executive at a large publisher who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It will help reassure publishers that their hands aren’t tied and they won’t be forced to adopt an alternate identifier,” said the exec who argued that publishers have more time to test ways to derive ad revenue without “feeling disintermediated from the chain.” 

Publishers appear to be in little rush to adopt cross-site audience tracking and targeting tech that merely perpetuates the problem that third-party publishers posed to publishers: stripping their value by separating them from their audiences, according to Rob Beeler, who had his ears to the ground at a recent in-person event for publishers held by AdMonsters, an organization which he chairs.

“The ID solutions are trying to replicate what works today and that’s not to a publisher’s benefit, and so why help so early on in the process to replicate that?” said Beeler, who manages ads for publishers as CEO of consultancy Beeler.tech. That presents identity tech providers with “an uphill battle,” said Beeler. But he acknowledged, “I don’t know that they’re toast.” 

Absent advertiser demand

Publisher adoption is only one side of ID tech providers’ uphill battle, though. Advertiser demand has to be there, too, and, since third-party cookies still work, advertisers aren’t forcing the issue, said Sara Badler, svp advertising and partnerships at Dotdash, which owns publications like Verywell and The Spruce. “I don’t think there are any demands” for identity tech from advertisers, she said.

Rather than targeting specific people in Dotdash properties, advertisers tend to buy from the publisher based on the intent people demonstrate through search (think “Taco Tuesday recipe ideas”), according to Badler. That predilection toward contextual and time-of-day targeting in place of audience targeting likely offsets any urgency to embrace tracking alternatives for the publisher. However, she said Dotdash is “definitely in conversations with LiveRamp” as well as other identity tech providers.

Advertiser demand is key for PMC’s Griego, too. His decisions to use identity tech have been based on whether advertisers buying through demand-side platforms want identity links. While PMC has implemented some identifiers across all of its sites — including LiveRamp’s ATS and Merkle’s identifier — he expects to be selective. “There comes a point when you want to wrangle in some control over how many identities you’re integrating with,” Griego said.

What’s the ROI for identity tech?

Then there’s the bottom line. At this stage, said Beeler, publishers aren’t convinced they’ll make more money if they implement identifiers. Relaying what he’s heard publishers say, he told Digiday, “Until I hear that publishers are making more money off the identified, authenticated audiences, it doesn’t seem like I have to do anything on that front at all until we’re closer to the date [of Google’s deadline].”

Meanwhile, at least one publishing exec said his site is ahead of the game. “Kudos to us for getting our homework done on time,” said Justin Wohl, chief revenue officer at Salon, which has implemented identity tech from LiveRamp, ID5, Neustar and Amazon. Now, he and his team have more time to calibrate data flows to enable the most identity matches possible. That requires some tweaks Salon wants to make to fine-tune how data coming from its site connects with identity systems.

“We need to get better timing in our dance routine here,” he said. — Kate Kaye

What we’ve heard

“It’s just time to change the channels we use to talk — and listen — to each other.”

— Salon staff writer Mary Elizabeth Williams announcing the political news outlet’s decision to shut off comments

Publishers’ subscription ambitions are still warming up

People whose heads are already spinning at the number of paywalls and subscription products out there should strap in and get comfortable. 

Growing subscriber revenue is expected to be a major focus for publishers in the second half of the year, even for a significant percentage of publishers that don’t make any money from subscriptions right now, according to new Digiday+ research. 

In July, Digiday surveyed 117 publisher professionals about a number of different topics, including how their brands make money and how their brands would be prioritizing those revenue streams in the next six months. 

Among publishers that do generate at least some subscriber revenue, 35% said that growing subscriber revenue would be a “very large focus.” Digiday asked respondents to indicate, using a five-point scale, how big of a focus different revenue streams would be over the next six months, with “very large focus” being the biggest. Those revenue streams ranged from established revenue streams, such as direct-sold and programmatic advertising, to more emergent revenue streams, such as affiliate commerce. 

That 35% for subscriptions was the second highest number among the choices respondents were given; only direct-sold advertising had a higher percentage of respondents — 42% — indicate that its growth would be a “very large focus.”

Yet publishers that haven’t gotten into consumer revenue yet want in. A quarter of the publishers that do not generate revenue from subscriptions said subscriber revenue would be a focus in the next six months. 

While subscriptions are a much-discussed topic in media at the moment, a significant percentage of publishers do not generate much money from them yet. More than a third generate no subscription revenue at all, while another quarter get “a very small amount” of revenue from them, the survey found. For context, slightly more than a third — 35% — of publishers with subscription businesses said it constitutes a “large” portion of their revenues. 

A significant number of publishers will be looking to change that this fall. 

About half of the respondents that indicated they make money from affiliate commerce, for example, said that only “a very small portion” of their revenue came from it. — Max Willens

Numbers to know

$7: How much money Vox Media’s The Verge will charge for monthly subscriptions to Hot Pod, its first subscription product.

40,000: Number of subscribers that Defector has attracted since its launch in September 2020.

$100 million: How much revenue Dotdash expects its commerce business to contribute this year.

50,000: Average number of Apple News+ subscribers that each of the top 25 U.S. magazines had on the iPhone maker’s news-reading app through the first six months of 2021.

$4.99: Monthly subscription price for Gannett’s USA Today Sports+ after its promotional rates expire.

TikTok revitalizes voiceover videos

TikTok has kickstarted plenty of trends that have rippled across the broader digital video landscape. It has also resurrected the use of voiceover in videos outside of YouTube, opening up opportunities for publishers to piece together new videos from old clips and to produce videos that aren’t as tethered to the visuals. 

“Thrillist used to do [voiceover videos] a lot on YouTube, and we just couldn’t make it work on social video. The captions were too small; it was too fast; the people didn’t like it. TikTok coming in and revolutionizing the idea of voice-to-text has, in a way, brought us back to being able to use voiceover,” said Erin Weaver, senior director of audience development at Group Nine Media.

Voiceover can be a particularly valuable tool for video publishers because it provides them with more flexibility in the videos they produce. “Voiceover really frees you up from, at times, a burdensome amount of preproduction planning,” said Jesse Wood, chief creative officer at Donut Media. 

For example, a video’s visuals do not need to be shot specifically for the attached audio but can instead be cobbled together from existing, otherwise random clips. “We’ve definitely been utilizing [voiceover] more and more to assemble edits from productions we’ve had to do quickly,” Wood said.

The voiceover trend has also freed video publishers from being limited to making videos in which on-screen talent can narrate the storyline or relying on lengthy captions (and counting on viewers to actually read the captions) to do the job. “It’s given us a lot more room to tell good stories,” Weaver said.

In keeping with the overarching trend of TikTok informing video approaches on other platforms, publishers are also exploring extending their voiceover videos elsewhere. “We’ve definitely dabbled a little more [in voiceover video] on Snapchat and Instagram more so than in the past. It’s becoming a little more of a trend and originated more so in getting that much more popular on TikTok,” said Joe Caporoso, evp of media at Team Whistle. — Tim Peterson

What we’ve covered

The Washington Post wants three minutes of your morning to read (or listen to) its newsletter:

• The D.C.-based publisher debuted a short daily briefing called The 7 on Sept. 7 that highlights seven of its top stories of the day.
• Each briefing will be available as an emailed version and in text and audio formats.

Read more about The Post here.

Women of Color Unite’s Cheryl L. Bedford is fighting ‘exclusion by familiarity’ in entertainment:

• Women of Color Unite operates two programs that are aimed to help women of color get in the door and move up the Hollywood ranks.
• Its #StartWith8 program originated after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and gets established people in Hollywood to commit to giving their time and energy to support eight women of color apiece.

Listen to the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast here.

Jacob Wolf takes esports expertise to podcasting as he continues to influence a new generation of writers:

• The former ESPN reporter has formed a production company to expand into TV, film and audio.
• He is producing an investigative podcast series on esports.

Read more about Jacob Wolf here.

Salon turns off comments and banks on email newsletters to generate identity connections for targeted ads:

• Salon’s commenting capability provided a means of gathering emails.
• Less than half of a percent of Salon’s unique visitors used its comments tool.

Read more about Salon here.

Barstool Sports will launch a channel on Sling TV:

• The bets-focused sport outlet’s channel will be programmed with a repository of existing programming.
• Barstool Sports will also carry a number of live college football pre-game shows.

Read more about Barstool Sports here.

What we’re reading

Black representation at fashion magazines remains a work in progress:
Nikki Ogunnaike was named digital director at Harper’s Bazaar in November, and when she started her career interning at fashion magazines nearly 15 years ago, she said she grew accustomed to being one of two Black people on staff, according to The New York Times. Since last year, there has been an acceleration of diversification in the industry, sparked by the murder of George Floyd and the social unrest that followed, but the question remains if this change will continue on or if the fashion industry will fall back into old patterns of treating racial progress as a trend.

Meanwhile, fashion editors are splitting from the media industry to join Silicon Valley:
Aya Kanai worked in fashion for over two decades, most recently serving as the editor-in-chief of Marie Claire, and developed a fluency in industry jargon, which ultimately led her to be poached by Pinterest as its new head of content and creator partnerships, wrote The Cut. Kanai is not the only top editor to make the leap to the tech and platform space, largely because that’s where the promise of promotion is — and where there is more money.

Substack’s middle tier isn’t generating the big bucks:
When Simon Owens first launched the paid edition of his media newsletter on Substack in February 2020, he was generating only one thousand dollars per month, which he said caused him to hemorrhage money between his business and life expenses. And yet, he decided to turn down a six-figure job just months before that to focus solely on building his newsletter and podcast products. “I belong to a group of Substack writers who don’t get written about much in the media … and I want you to understand the sacrifices we have to make while building our newsletter businesses,” Owens wrote in his newsletter from earlier this month. 

The new Gawker is toggling the line between staying true to its roots while not being mean:
Leah Finnegan, the top editor of the celebrity gossip blog, told The New York Times that she’s “not interested in ruining people’s lives” with the new iteration of Gawker. Gawker spent 13 years exposing celebrities’ private lives and releasing sex tapes, but in a note to readers in July, Finnegan said that what needs to be the center of the site is its sense of satirical humor and unique voice.

But in reality, this distinction is not so clear cut. At the end of the day, loyal readers and longer visits create more revenue opportunities. The driver of all of this is quality content and user experience.

Publishers are walking a tightrope between elements that bring in revenue and elements that attract and retain users. Keeping readers on the page longer and encouraging them to come back to the site improves revenue gains. The key is not only creating the written content that meets reader needs and expectations, but also easing the path for them to discover more. In the middle of all this is the format that delivers on both revenue and user experience — video. 

Video is a vital component of the user experience

When smoothly integrated video meets user needs, it becomes a vital UX component: A tool that improves editorial quality and keeps users on site for longer. Publishers who become renowned for relevant, quality video will find that users will come back to their site, too.

While user retention is of utmost importance for a publications’ success, so is their revenue generation strategy. Yet, finding internal harmony between the editorial and revenue teams can be a challenge. Thankfully, editorial teams know the power of video storytelling is often unmatched and revenue teams know that in-stream video ads are often the highest-yielding advertising unit. Finding a partner or product that delivers on both is the trick. But not all video content is created equal. 

Platforms that enable videos to be created by stitching together images with text and music have become popular. With fast turnaround times and increasing numbers of editing functions, these can seem appealing. But a frustrated viewer who sits through an ad only to discover the video is a rehash of the article or that the video is of poor quality is not going to return.

Improve UX with quality content — and context — and revenue will follow

At the other end of the scale is quality content from renowned sources. And this is where the bar is really being moved in 2021; household names in news, sports, entertainment and lifestyle are now syndicating their content to quality sites. Needless to say, these also provide an in-stream opportunity for publishers, encouraging the all-important repeat and multi-page visitors.

Content is only one part of the puzzle — it must also appear in the right place — the context of the content is crucial. Ideally, video content should enhance the information presented on the page around it by providing new information, an alternative take or moving image footage bringing the text descriptions to life. Automation and machine learning is now able to do this instantly.

But even that’s not enough to impress the seamless needs of today’s casual web browser. Video UX isn’t just about quality or context, it also encompasses aesthetics and functionality. A video player should appear native, naturally blending in with the site regardless of whether it’s a third-party player — and it should function smoothly and unobtrusively.

Finding a balance between quality and speed 

There’s also an elephant in the room — video players can be heavy and awkward. For publishers, slow loading players hit where it hurts, as Google’s Core Web Vitals analysis drastically punishes pages that load slowly. Install the wrong video player or add too many monetization platforms and search traffic will plummet. Core Web Vitals are designed to respond to better UX, so the traffic will follow once that score is improved.

Clearly, maintaining an equilibrium of a great UX while generating in-stream revenue is no mean feat. Here are some tips to help in choosing the right partner:

1. Video quality: If a publisher’s video library is lacking, does the prospective partner have a large library of professionally produced, brand-safe video content? How deep is the video library when it comes to categories and evergreen versus time-specific content? 
2. Relevancy: Ensure the content being delivered, whether it’s owned or third-party, is matched to the content of a page. How sophisticated is the contextual matching AI? Does it work instantly, adapting to the newest content available?
3. Revenue: Does the partner have direct demand relationships to help monetize the newly created in-stream inventory? How can publishers add value to the understanding they have of their readers by enhancing their data sets?
4. Ease of implementation: Does the partner provide an easy to implement, lightweight video player? Does the partner provide an automated solution, or does the publisher need to manually place videos?  

With the pressures of revenue hanging over them, there’s a danger that commercial teams at publishers can lose sight of user experience in the pursuit of KPIs. Yet, revenue focused teams shouldn’t underestimate their users’ intolerance for low quality and irrelevant video content.  

User experience itself can’t be quantified, but its effects are seen across every metric, from page analytics to revenue. So, whether on the editorial or commercial side of the water cooler, finding a path that works for everyone is key.