Month: December 2021

The main drivers behind Wieser’s more bullish estimates, based on the ad revenue the above-named media generate, include the emergence of new marketers that include DTC companies but also small businesses flush with low-interest rate investments from venture capital firms. “They’ve raised in some cases billions of dollars and then deployed hundreds of millions on advertising,” he explained. 

Digital’s share of the global ad revenue total amounts to 64.4 percent, up from 60.5 percent in 2020, according to the GroupM report. Among them, Facebook, Google and Amazon secured between 80-90 percent of that digital ad revenue (not including China).  

“The 25 largest sellers of advertising in 2016 went from 46 percent share of all advertising to 66 percent in 2020,” noted Wieser, largely due to that digital triumvirate.

Specifically in the U.S., the prediction is just as bullish, with Wieser increasing ad revenue growth in 2021 to 22.7 percent, up from June’s forecast of 17.3 percent. The growth rate for 2022 is a healthy 14.6 percent. 

The single biggest driver of 2021 growth is digital, which Wieser bumped up to 39 percent, up from 29 percent in June — accounting for 60 percent of total U.S. ad revenue, up from 54 percent in 2020. 

Wieser forecasts U.S. TV revenue growth in 2021 at 4.1 percent, but a more robust 6.2 percent for 2022, fueled in part by what’s expected to be a banner year for political advertising next year thanks to congressional and gubernatorial races. 

Audio is also expected to grow at healthy rates, at 18.2 percent in 2021 and 9.3 percent in 2022. The same can be said for OOH, growing at 15.8 percent in 2021 and 21.8 percent in 2022. That said, Wieser expects both those areas to settle back to single-digit growth in subsequent years. 

It’s clear the media agency giants face major staffing issues when one scans the clients they’ve landed. Arguably, Publicis emerged the biggest winner of all the holding companies, landing all or significant chunks of Facebook, Walmart, Stellantis, Inspire Brands, L’Oréal and most recently Eli Lilly. But WPP also scored with the lion’s share of Coca-Cola’s media, and Omnicom secured Mercedes-Benz’s media business. The other giant media account in mediapalooza ’21 was Unilever, which was split among WPP, Omnicom, Havas and IPG. 

So what are they to do? Talent search firms are seeing desperation in their dealings with media agencies.

“We have a lot of holding companies calling us with the pressure of, ‘Can you guarantee us 50 to 100 new hires by the end of Q1? And if you can’t guarantee it, we’re not going to secure the business. We will have an even bigger exit of our existing talent that are going to get burned out’,” said Camille Fetter, founder/CEO of Talentpool, which works with all the major holding companies as well as independents to help with staffing needs. “It does make me nervous with these holding companies taking on such significant additional work without a significant talent pipeline in place.”

To Fetter’s thinking, the combination of burnout-if-I-stay and the lure of bigger paychecks at brands looking to set up in-house media operations has put more power in the hands of existing talent in those media agencies. “Agency talent is starting to realize, ‘I can actually go [to the] brand side more easily than I may have in the past.’ So that’s a general trend — the business landscape has changed and digital media talent is at the forefront of helping these businesses scale.”

To make matters even worse, many of these clients are looking for digital-first solutions in their marketing efforts, said Brian Dolan, CEO of WorkReduce, a remote staffing platform that specializes in outsourcing for both holding companies and independents. Agencies’ “digital [workload] has gotten bigger than ever,” said Dolan. “In addition to the churn and the accounts moving, there is more money in digital both from legacy analog budgets and investment moving into digital that wasn’t there before. So the the amount of work has increased at the same time there’s a real strain in the traditional agency model.”

For its part, Publicis is turning to its internal, AI-driven Marcel connective tissue to connect employees across agencies, disciplines, timezones and countries to recruit and retain from within, according to a Publicis Media representative. The rep added that recruitment team sizes have doubled and undergone training with an eye toward more diverse hiring. She also noted that agencies including Digitas are using social media to recruit. 

That bears out with what WorkReduce’s Dolan is seeing. “Nearly every agency holding company is pursuing some sort of central services model,” he noted.

Though the size and breadth of holding company media agencies prevents them from being more nimble, one digital performance agency CEO believes they can slow the tide of attrition by changing their comp models. Zach Morrison, CEO of Tinuiti, said the agency has consistently enjoyed lower employee churn rates than the average agency, which hovers around 30 percent. Talent sits atop Tinuiti’s operating philosophy, he said. 

“Treat everybody like owners — that means everyone gets equity and merit-based pay, not tenure-based pay,” said  Morrison. “If you take on another client and you do great for a client and they grow, you benefit from it and get recognized more. That has been in some respects part of our secret sauce from the beginning.”

Morrison’s is only one of many potential solutions for the holding company media agencies. What’s safe to say is if they stick with the same game plan, we’re likely to see the next mediapalooza manifest itself in less than the next two years — and the strain, burnout and talent exodus cycle begins anew.

Color by numbers

Advertiser Perceptions dug into retailers’ holiday ad spending plans, and found 47 percent plan to increase their digital spending, which isn’t a huge surprise in and of itself. But where they’re spending is — notably live-streamed shopping. According to its latest Digital Advertising for Retail report, where 11 percent of respondents said they are already using live-streamed shopping, another 17 percent said they will incorporate it into their holiday media plans, and another 44 percent said they plan to explore it. 

Takeoff & landing

• Published reports have Amazon’s Audible audiobook putting out the call for a media review of its $500 million account; media agencies across several holding companies currently work on the business.
• IPG’s Mediabrands unit said it’s expanding its work with news content watchdog NewsGuard to also evaluate TV news programs and networks — beyond existing work to rate and monitor content on news websites. 
• In personnel moves, Angela Steele is returning to Publicis in an undisclosed global role from Dentsu, where she was most recently U.S. CEO of Carat; Dentsu promoted Mike Law to replace her, while Cara Lewis was promoted to chief investment officer for Dentsu Media … Havas Media Group named consultant Sarah Ivey its North American chief strategy officer, replacing Meghan Grant who was recently promoted to U.S. president … Matt Brown was promoted to managing director of WPP’s SYZYGY U.K., expanding on his m.d. duties here in the U.S.; the move is the result of SYZYGY U.K. CEO Ita Murphy’s planned departure from the business at the end of the year. 

Direct quote

“With brands like Patagonia doubling down on their decision to stop all paid advertising on Facebook (Meta), we will start to see more marketers taking a thoughtful and intentional approach to how and where they invest their marketing budgets. Recognizing that their spend supports and sustains the voices and viewpoints that directly impact billions of people around the world, we will see increased scrutiny of precisely what that spend is funding and who benefits from it, with an increased focus on investing in businesses that align with corporate values and societal issues. This will see more brands tapping into the open internet to reach the diverse audiences it enriches and being intentional in aligning with publishers that represent diverse backgrounds.”

—One of Quantcast CEO Konrad Feldman’s predictions for 2022.

Speed reading

• Digiday’s senior editor of research and features Max Willens gathered interesting original research that indicates agencies will continue to let staffers work from home for the foreseeable future. 
• Senior media editor Tim Peterson’s Future of TV Briefing addresses the growing power content creators are amassing due to the rise of the creator economy.
• Finally, if you want to know who today’s gamers really are, gaming and esports reporter Alexander Lee busts some stubborn, popularly held myths about them.

The video spot is a first for the company and per co-CEO Kerrigan Behrens, after seeing a lift in brand awareness, there are plans to pursue more video advertising in the future. “That’s been a dream since we started. It didn’t make sense to create a commercial for a long time because there was nowhere to air it,” Behrens said, referring to the passing of Farm Bill. 

It’s unclear how much the CBD brand spent on the ad as Behrens declined to offer specific figures. However, she said Sagely aims to dedicate at least one-third of its marketing budget toward upper funnel marketing tactics, including earned media, sampling programs and audio. She added that there are no plans to increase the percentage of video ad spend currently, but as revenue grows, the budget will shift accordingly. 

In the past, Sagely Naturals has focused more on retail marketing strategies than digital, given CBD advertising restrictions are still in place. For example, Facebook’s policy states that ads promoting the sale or use of recreational drugs are prohibited. There’s a similar policy at Twitter and Google-owned YouTube, as previously reported by Digiday. The brand is available in 16,000 stores nationwide, including Target, Sprouts, Rite Aid and most recently, Kroger. 

Just before the pandemic, Sagely launched an out-of-home billboard campaign in Los Angeles, which are notoriously hard to measure, per Behrens. 

“That’s been an evolution of six years of experimenting, trying to figure out what we are and are not allowed to do from an advertising standpoint,” Behrens said. “We’ve never really invested heavily in Google or Facebook because we’re not really allowed to. It’s never been a key part of our strategy.”

With that in mind, Behrens says, digital video has proven to be an effective marketing tool worth pursuing in 2022. And as more brands look to diversify their media spend away from mainstay digital marketing channels like Facebook and Google, Kelly Taylor, lead content strategist at Dagger agency, suspects many will turn to digital video to reach shoppers. 

The numbers tell a similar story. According to eMarketer, the connected television ad spend is expected to increase by 59.9% to $14.44 billion by the end of 2021.

“Video is incredibly customizable and as capabilities in the space continue to expand, from 360 to VR, and inventory of platforms continue to grow as more consumers are turning to digital content, there’s room to scale based on resources and budgets,” Taylor said via email. 

The key is ensuring that brand videos have context, Taylor says, noting that brands can miss the mark and ultimately turn shoppers off if content feels disconnected from the user experience. “The goal is to entertain and engage consumers, not detract from their experience,” she said. 

At Sagely, Behrens says the team is parsing through data that will measure how the ad performed in terms of retail sales as the brand plans for more video it in its marketing mix. 

“Every indication that we’ve gotten is that this commercial was really effective,” she said. “There are absolutely plans to utilize the commercial through 2022.”