Less BS, More Facts, Some Opinions
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Romain Job, Chief Strategy Officer, Smart AdServer. With our programmatic marketplace becoming increasingly unwieldy, the challenge of identity resolution in a privacy-first, consent-based marketplace has made curation essential. What is curation? Simply put, it’s… Continue reading »
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Check Your Priors Advertisers look for in-markert or interested customers. But sometimes people need a push, not a nudge. Two psychology studies identify tactics that could work for particular goals or advertisers, writes Marketing Week. For one study, Stanford researchers gave homeowners a lesson on driver safety and asked to put up large ‘Drive Safely’… Continue reading »
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‘Tis the season for the holiday party. However, as breakthrough cases surge and Omicron looms, agencies are approaching this year’s holiday office party a bit differently.
Last year, lockdown, mask mandates and social distancing called an end to much of the industry’s notorious boozy and lavish holiday parties. Some agency professionals pivoted to smaller virtual gatherings over Zoom, sending care packages to employees’ homes or some extra time off. As Omicron fuels new cases, a number of this year’s parties are more of the same.
However, with vaccinations and booster shots more widely available in the U.S., some agencies are returning to in-person gatherings. For example, California-based media agency Exverus Media celebrated the holiday season in a big way, including a team outing to Lucky Strike bowling alley, which requires masks indoors and proof of vaccination. An additional team outing was held at Universal Studios Hollywood, where Exverus staff could socially distance outdoors.
“Our goal this year is to try and build community for remote and new employees on our team without being in the same room for two straight days,” Bill Durrant, Exverus Media founder and managing director, said in an email. “It’s a balancing act and we are monitoring it on what seems like an hourly basis.”
In New York, creative company Truth Collective will gather vaccinated and boosted staff for a party in January, according to Bob Bailey, co-founder and CEO. That being said, Truth Collective is ready to reassess its January in-person party should cases surge worse than they already have, Bailey said.
“Now if Omicron decides to tear up our region, then maybe we will reconsider,” Bailey said via email. “But for now, we are following the advice of the great Ren McCormack [from the movie Footloose]: ‘There is a time to laugh, a time to weep, a time to mourn and a time to dance. This is our time to dance.’”
Even with vaccinations and boosters more readily available, many industry professionals are hesitant to fully return to in-person events. Global media agencies, Wavemaker, Mediacom and Mindshare, provided budgets allowing teams to plan smaller-scale holiday gatherings, whether in-person or online. R/GA did something similar. Meanwhile, VMLY&R opted to send out employee care packages in addition to a virtual holiday party.
Media company Razorfish and performance marketing agency Tinuiti will both forgo in-person plans, opting for virtual celebrations instead.
“While we look forward to celebrating our successes in person someday, this virtual experience respects our people and their comfort levels as we navigate another Covid winter,” David LaBar, Razorfish communications director, said via email.
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Electronic Arts had a banner year in 2021. The game developer’s earnings nearly doubled between Q2 2021 and Q2 2022, reflecting the increasing prominence of video games as a tentpole of popular culture. Over the last 12 months, EA has capitalized on this good fortune through a flurry of M&A activity, including its $2.1 billion acquisition of mobile developer Glu Mobile and its $1.2 billion purchase of racing game company Codemasters.
Digiday spoke to EA Sports svp of global brand management Andrea Hopelain to learn about the strategy behind the company’s biggest successes of 2021 — and how EA hopes to invest in this momentum in the new year.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
How has activity in EA Sports titles increased over the past year?
This has been a massive year of momentum for us at EA Sports. The lines between sports, gaming and entertainment are blurring at an increasing rate, and it has resulted in one of the biggest years that we have ever had. FIFA is at an all-time high — we just launched our best and biggest game ever with FIFA 22, and we’ve had more than 100 million fans inside of the franchise in the last six months. In Madden, we’re seeing engagement continue to soar week-over-week, and even with Formula 1, or F1 2021, that’s one of the top-rated games of the year, and we’ve seen double-digit growth on that business.
When I talk about momentum — we’ve reached more than 230 million fans this year at EA Sports, and I don’t see any reason for us to doubt that we don’t have the ability to continue to accelerate. I have my sights set on us hitting 500 million fans in the next couple of years.
The convergence of traditional sports fandom and gaming has been driven by individual creators in the streaming space. What is EA doing to support individual creators working with its games?
Working in a creative industry, it is our job to support the creator economy, right? And nothing is more powerful than our fans, who are as creative as we are. We love the creative community. For the last decade, we’ve had our Game Changer program, where we’ve worked really closely to bring creators behind the curtain and into the fold of our development process.
A decade later, we’ve just debuted our creator network, which is an evolution of that program. What it does is double down on our vision of what creativity looks like and broaden the capabilities, or even the types of creativity, that we want to celebrate. It’s not just someone who’s really great at streaming: it could be a photographer, or a writer, or someone who’s really great at drawing. So what I love about our program today is that it continues to give all sorts of diverse creators authorship and producer power with us.
During the outpouring of abuse and misconduct allegations that swept the gaming industry this summer, EA seemed to remain above the fray. Why was this?
It’s been really unfortunate to listen and to read about what’s happening in our industry. At Electronic Arts, we take this stuff really seriously. DEI is deep-rooted in the culture of who we are and how we think about the talent that we have, the talent we’d like to have and even how we support the diversity of players that we have.
So I would say, at our core, that Electronic Arts is really focused on making sure we commit to and maintain an environment that is safe for our players and our community of employees. We have tools in place that allow our employees to raise a concern, and absolutely every concern that is raised is investigated.
Also, in the last year, we have committed to positive-play initiatives, whether that be our patent pledge, where we’re democratizing accessibility technology or the tools that we put inside of our games to prevent toxic behavior and ensure that we are not supporting that kind of culture. So we do take it very seriously.
How did EA use its games to produce non-gaming content?
We don’t really see ourselves as just a gaming company; we’re at what I think is the white-hot center of the future of sport. And that really allows us to think about how we blur the line between sports and entertainment and gaming, and about the myriad of ways that we tell stories and drive fandom.
I have a couple of examples of work that I’m incredibly proud of that we’ve done over the last year, that has both deep storytelling, as well as real-time moments that we can celebrate. The first of which is actually something we announced the other day, which was the partnership with UNINTERRUPTED around elevating and celebrating the diverse voices inside the world of hockey. We were able to do a six-minute docu-series with [professional hockey player] Luke Prokop, and it was really around his moment of coming out in the sport and being a gay player inside the world of hockey.
Another really great example, that’s maybe more real-time, is our Ratings Adjuster program inside of Madden. Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve had Peyton Manning running the live stats for Ratings Adjusters, and what he’s been able to do is take stats from the real world of sport and use those to drive the official ratings inside our games. And there’s been quite a fun battle on social media between Peyton Manning and Tom Brady over the last week or so because Tom Brady is really not happy about the way he’s been rated. So it’s fun, because we’re actually creating entertainment out of the real world of sport that’s tied to play inside of our games.
How has EA adapted to the explosion of mobile gaming in 2021?
Mobile has been a big focus for us over the last couple of years — it’s a huge opportunity and growing at an extremely accelerated pace. What I think is most important, as we think about mobile, is to put ourselves in the mindset of our audience. Our obligation is to do whatever we can to reduce the friction between where our players are and how they want to play.
So we’ve made a couple of really significant acquisitions over the last year: we acquired Glu and we acquired Playdemic. Glu brings Tap Sports Baseball, Tap Sports Fishing; Playdemic brings Golf Clash. What’s wonderful, and very intentional, about those acquisitions is that they really help us to round out the playstyles and the motivations of a sports audience. Much of our portfolio to date, in sports mobile, has been simulation-based games, and Glu and Playdemic really allow us to meet the motivations of our broadening fan bases. I’m pretty excited about the potential for us ahead, as we continue to bring those team members into our organization and leverage the strengths that they bring in broader categories.
The post ‘We’re at the white-hot center of the future of sport’: A Q&A with EA Sports svp Andrea Hopelain appeared first on Digiday.
The Future of TV Briefing this week looks back at some of the biggest developments in the TV, streaming and digital video industry in 2021.
There will be no Future of TV Briefing sent out next week, so stay tuned for a look at the top topics set to shape 2022 in the Jan. 5 edition. Happy holidays!
The key hits:
The future of TV is one year closer. 2021 saw some shifts in the TV, streaming and digital video markets start to settle, while other aspects of the landscape only became more unsettled. As the year comes to a close, here are the trends and developments that dominated the past 12 months and set up for what comes next.
The streaming wars flattened
The streaming surge of 2020 settled down in 2021. While “growing” remained an apt description of the overall streaming market this year, the rise in the number of streaming services on the market spread out that growth a bit. Meanwhile, many of the biggest players saw their growth slow, and streaming viewership even stagnated in some respects.
The story of the streaming wars in 2021 was a tale of two halves.
In the first half of the year, Netflix and Disney’s Disney+ reported slowing and even declining subscriber growth, as Discovery’s Discovery+ and ViacomCBS’s Paramount+ (re)entered the market and WarnerMedia’s HBO Max received a boost from Warner Bros. film slate.
Then in the second half of the year — as people got vaccinated and spent more time outside of their homes — streamers across the board saw subscriber growth slip. Except for Netflix, which picked up the pace if only slightly. Meanwhile, streaming’s monthly share of overall TV watch time has held flat since June, according to Nielsen’s The Gauge report (the latest of which is covered farther down in this week’s briefing).
Two-plus years after Disney and Apple kick-started the current era of companies rolling out subscription-based streamers featuring top-tier programming and often carrying a “+” in their names, the streaming wars continued to heat up in 2021. But unlike in 2020, when the major source of that warmth was the surge in overall streaming viewership, this year it was the pressure to keep people entertained amid all the competition, on-screen and off.
The TV ad market tilted further but did not tip
For the second year in a row, the TV advertising market was at a tipping point in 2021. Traditional TV audiences’ attentions are shifting to streaming, and advertisers are following suit, and streaming is set to overtake linear. Blah blah blah.
That’s all true, and yet the TV ad landscape has yet to come out on the other side of this rubicon. It’s getting closer, though.
While traditional TV once again dominated this year’s annual upfront marketplace, streaming was the cycle’s centerpiece. TV network owners turned away linear dollars to redirect advertisers to their streaming inventory while also pressing advertisers to agree to new, higher pricing bases for that streaming inventory. Additionally, top streaming ad sellers like Amazon, Roku and YouTube stepped up their competition with those traditional TV companies for advertisers’ upfront budgets.
However, advertisers continue to see traditional TV as the more cost-efficient means of reaching a large number of people. Broadcast and cable TV’s majority share of overall TV watch time, as per Nielsen’s The Gauge, only serves to reinforce that stance for now. Moreover, for all the grousing among ad buyers about traditional TV’s limited inventory and high prices, streaming is in a similar situation but with a relatively smaller, more fragmented audience among ad-supported streamers.
That dynamic will likely change eventually. It may already be doing so, as some advertisers sat out this year’s upfronts and others opted to cancel portions of their fourth-quarter upfront commitments, which could free up money to be diverted away from traditional TV. And at that point, the market will finally tip.
Production settled into the new normal
After all the upheaval to TV, video and commercial productions in 2020, 2021 was placid by comparison. There remained changes that productions had to manage through, such mask mandates and distancing requirements. However, by the end of the year, the state of production could be described as normal, albeit a new normal.
Production had begun its return to normal in the second half of 2020, but 2021 was when it actually approached normalcy. TV show, video and commercial makers found ways to put together all the same types of projects that they had produced prior to the pandemic, including programs shot internationally or in front of a live audience. Meanwhile, the availability of vaccines helped to ensure sets and studios offered safe working environments, though not all cast and crew members have been willing to get vaccinated.
The settling down of productions into this new normal was especially advantageous since production volume appears to have only ramped up. Not only have production companies proven they can put out traditional-looking programming despite the pandemic, but TV networks and especially streaming services are proving to be insatiable when it comes to loading up on new programming. Some producers have reported fourth quarters in 2021 that were not only busier than in 2020 but than in any other year, full stop.
This normalizing of production should help companies withstand the threat of the Omicron variant. However, with the entertainment industry’s biggest union agreed to new contracts with film and TV studios that seek to improve working conditions for crew members, the time of change for productions is not over.
The creator economy cashed in
Well, 2021 came and went without Instagram or TikTok officially rolling out YouTube-style revenue-sharing programs for individual video creators (as of this writing). Nonetheless, this year indicated a boom period for the creator economy.
Instagram rolled out an affiliate revenue program for creators to make money by pushing sales of other companies’ products, and TikTok added a tool for creators to sell their own products on the platform via Shopify. And after TikTok and Snapchat rolled out programs in 2020 to pay creators for posting to their platforms, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube followed suit with their own creator funds in 2021. Media companies like Tastemade are similarly getting in on the action by rolling out new programs to help creators — and themselves — make money.
Creators also continued to stretch beyond the usual digital video platforms to become more ingrained in the broader entertainment establishment. TikTok stars like Addison Rae and Charli D’Amelio starred in movies and TV shows on Netflix and Hulu, respectively. Meanwhile, controversial YouTube star Jake Paul has become one of boxing’s biggest stars.
Meanwhile, the businesses of esports organizations like FaZe Clan and Team Liquid are reaching new levels of maturity. Team Liquid is allowing more of its creators to become investors in the company, while FaZe Clan is preparing to become a publicly traded company.
Measurement blew up
In January, no way did I think that measurement would be among the most seismic shifts to take place in the TV business in 2021. And yet here we are.
The foreshocks started in April when trade organization the VAB alleged that Nielsen had undercounted traditional TV viewership during the pandemic. Then the Media Rating Council confirmed the undercount. But then Nielsen remained the currency of choice in this year’s upfront deals, and the measurement provider’s position seemed secure and further secured by its plan to begin rolling out an updated measurement system in the fourth quarter of 2022.
Nope.
The situation got much shakier in August. First, Discovery CEO David Zaslav called for the industry to move away from Nielsen. Next, Nielsen offered to put its MRC accreditation on hiatus as it addressed its measurement system’s shortcomings. Then, NBCUniversal announced it was developing a new measurement system and had solicited the participation of a host of alternative measurement providers as well as Nielsen.
And finally, on Sept. 1, the MRC announced that it had stripped Nielsen of its accreditation, and the TV ad measurement landscape as the industry knew it appeared on the verge of toppling for once and for all.
It has yet to do so. TV network owners, advertisers and agencies spent the remaining months of 2021 assessing the measurement ecosystem and setting up tests and relationships with various measurement providers — and setting up for a 2022 that is sure to be a big one.
“We’re working through what is the approach to a premium service with an ad-supported model. What I think our audience will see in 2022 is us kind of experimenting with different pricing models to see what their response is to those.”
After increasing its share of overall TV watch time for three of the previous four months, broadcast TV ceded share in November 2021, while cable TV’s percentage stagnated for the second straight month, according to Nielsen’s latest The Gauge report. Streaming was also fairly stagnant, though, with the exception of Disney+.
If the chart’s streaming breakdown looks familiar, that’s because not much has changed from October. In fact, the only streaming-related change was Disney+ adding a percentage point, likely helped by the service celebrating its two-year anniversary and adding Marvel film “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” on Disney+ Day.
Cable TV’s watch time share was also unchanged, but broadcast TV did lose a percentage point, as watch time for general drama shows fell by 12% month over month and sitcoms’ watch time dipped by 7%. Those declines appear to have offset the 7% month-over-month increase in sports watch time.
As much as Disney+ may have been partially responsible for broadcast TV’s downtick, gaming was likely another factor. The “other” category includes gaming and saw its watch time share rise by one percentage point.
1,923: Original shows that were released on traditional TV and streaming in 2021.
$5.99: Monthly price that CNN reportedly is considering charging for a subscription to its upcoming CNN+ streaming service.
6%: Percentage increase year over year in viewership for “Jeopardy!” which is reportedly on the verge of a bidding war among TV station owners.
BET’s Scott Mills shares plans for BET+ in 2022 and why the network has formed its own studio:
Listen to the latest Digiday Podcast episode here.
Why a leading esports organization is inviting its players to become investors:
Read more about Team Liquid here.
TikTok creates a measurement training program for media agencies:
Read more about TikTok here.
Nielsen lines up Disney, Magna to test new measurement platform:
As many members of the TV ad industry determine how to ease their reliance on Nielsen, the measurement provider has responded by getting Disney and Magna to sign up to test its forthcoming Nielsen One measurement platform, according to Ad Age. The support may serve as a counterbalance of sorts for Nielsen to maintain some gravitational pull as parts of the industry look to pull away from it.
Hollywood employees take a stand:
Entertainment industry labor groups have been getting more aggressive in standing up for employees when dealing with studios, networks, streaming services and talent agencies, according to The Hollywood Reporter. In addition to existing unions and guilds signing new agreements, new groups are popping up to protect creators and crew members.
Omicron hits Hollywood:
The Omicron variant has coincided with a rise in COVID cases around the world, including in the entertainment industry, according to Variety. That rise is leading to some productions being put on hiatus. However, the industry seems to be largely taking a cautious wait-and-see approach as it did with the Delta variant.
TikTok pushes eating-disorder videos to teens:
TikTok’s content recommendation algorithm is showing teens videos about weight-loss tactics and purging, according to The Wall Street Journal. The recommendations are likely contributing to teens to developing their own eating disorders and are another example of how platforms not only struggle to rein in controversial content but amplify its spread.
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