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 Eric Bozinny, senior director of marketplace quality at PubMatic. After this exclusive first look for subscribers, the story will be published in full on AdExchanger.com tomorrow. The IAB Tech Lab designed the sellers.json specification… Continue reading »
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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. You Got Peltzed Unilever will cut jobs and reorganize to fend off activist investor Trian Fund Management, led by Nelson Peltz, The Wall Street Journal reports. Peltz unseated a Procter & Gamble board member in a shocking shareholder vote in 2017 – winning… Continue reading »
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It has been a slow road to recovery from the so-called “Shecession.”
The phenomenon, as previously reported by Digiday, was spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, leaving women shouldering the brunt of housework and childcare thus exiting the workforce in droves. It was so drastic that in 2020, a report from McKinsey and Company and LeanIn.Org noted that one in four women were considering downshifting their careers or leaving their jobs altogether due to lack of childcare and lackluster company flexible work policies. Vice President Kamala Harris called it at the time a “national emergency.”
In response, companies like Facebook and Twitter rolled out permanent work-from-home policies to better accommodate the workforce as a whole. Others like Pinterest and Inkhouse public relations agency have ramped up paid family leave policies for women and caretakers. It’s a move to not only attract more women to the workplace but to keep them there; the groundwork for what marketing and advertising experts have dubbed the “Shecovery.” To get women back to the workforce, companies are prioritizing flexible work policies to better support overall employee health and wellness. If companies don’t make moves for workplace equality, marketing and advertising experts say they stand to lose half of their workforce.
“Every stage of the female experience in life, which has usually been very taboo in the workplace, is now being openly addressed and accommodated for in terms of workplace expectations,” said Emily Safian-Demers, editor at Wunderman Thompson Intelligence.
Earlier this year, Wunderman Thompson Intelligence, the advertising agency’s research and reporting arm, released its annual report, called The Future 100 that summarizes trend predictions across 10 different sectors. Per the report, workplaces across the globe have spent the last year stepping up initiatives to better optimize the workplace for women and ultimately stop the bleeding. By the numbers, the International Labour Organization found that 64 million jobs held by women have been lost worldwide due to longstanding gender inequalities, which can range from anything like an unequal division of household labor to lack of childcare. It’s unclear what those figures look like for the marketing and advertising industry specifically.
The advertising and marketing industry, however, has in the past lagged behind other industries when it comes to parental leave and other work-life balancing initiatives. But in today’s talent market and in light of the “Shecession,” the tide seems to be turning.
“Creating a supportive environment for women in the workforce is critical to the business because we cannot create our best work without a diversity of thought and experiences,” said Katy Thorbahn, partner and managing director at Shiny creative agency, “which includes having women’s voices throughout all levels and positions.”
In optimizing the workplace, Digiday reporting found that companies have started lauding publicly available salaries to reverse its gender pay gap, providing childcare and even company policies around pregnancy loss.
Over the last year, companies like Shiny, video advertising agency Quirk and digital agency PMG have all committed to these efforts, each rolling out their own initiatives to offer more leverage to all employees, but especially working parents.
“If you’re not helping to enable someone to stay in the workforce and show them how your company can actually better support them, you’re gonna lose them,” said Marla Kaplowitz, president and CEO of the 4A’s, adding that companies dealing with the Great Resignation are seeing that happen now with employees leaving agencies.
While companies have made strides in their policies and offerings, there’s still a long road ahead until the “Shecession” is in the rearview mirror, said Stacey Delo, CEO of Après, a career resource for moms. It’s especially true as the new Covid-19 variants loom above, creating new breaking points for working moms, she added. In fact, recent projections from McKinsey and Oxford Economics suggest that women’s jobs will take longer to recover. In the best-case scenario, gender-parity improvements could be on the up and up by 2030, per the report.
It’s easy to create initiatives that look good on paper, Delo said. But it’s another to make sure that hiring managers, managers, human resource leaders and executives are well-equipped to follow through on them.
“We still don’t know what it will look like when more businesses actually return to the office, and how that will impact women,” she said. “And unfortunately, we still can’t predict what else Covid has in store for us.”
Looking ahead, Wunderman Thompson Intelligence predicts that the “Shecession” is likely to affect businesses for years to come. Companies that adopt policies for women and caregivers sooner rather than later will best weather whatever is to come, per the report.
“It’s one stream in a larger, more macro trend that we’ve been reporting, which is the liberation of the workplace — workplaces working better not just for women, but for people that have different physical abilities, people of different ethnicities and backgrounds,” Safian-Demers said.
The post ‘The liberation of the workplace’: Industry experts sound off on 2022, the year of the ‘Shecovery’ appeared first on Digiday.
This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at how TV news networks like CBS News are adding programming featuring their top TV talent to their standalone streaming services.
The key hits:
TV news networks’ streaming war has advanced to the talent front. CNN is stocking its upcoming CNN+ streamer with anchors from its linear network as well as its rivals. NBCUniversal is similarly continuing to add faces from its traditional TV networks to NBC News Now and Peacock. And now CBS News is plugging more of its own TV talent into its seven-year-old, freshly rebranded CBS News Streaming Network.
“There’s not a single person who doesn’t know that streaming is the future. So aligning the resources and pointing to that North Star is what we’re doing,” said Neeraj Khemlani, co-president and co-head of CBS News and Stations, of the ViacomCBS-owned news organization’s move to put its top TV talent on its streaming network, such as Norah O’Donnell hosting a reboot of interview series “Person to Person.”
Everyone may recognize that streaming is the future, but it has taken TV news networks a while to really reflect that. CBS News, for example, debuted its streaming network (formerly called CBSN) in 2014, and other networks like ABC News and NBC News have followed suit with their own standalone news streamers in the intervening years. But those services have typically lacked the networks’ biggest names like O’Donnell.
General-interest news needs a general audience, though, and generally audiences continue to increasingly be getting their news outside of TV. In 2021, 51% of surveyed U.S. adults said they often get their news on digital devices, compared to 36% who said they often get their news on TV, according to Pew Research Center. So TV news networks need to cater to digital audiences, and they have been. But in the digital arena, there is more competition for those audiences’ attentions. One way for the TV news networks to capture those audiences’ attentions is through the same talent that continue to captivate millions on traditional TV despite the continued rise of cord cutting.
It can also help to attract advertisers. “Clients want to be associated with brand names, with household brands, and [the streaming news services] haven’t had those household brands,” said an agency executive.
To be fair, the networks’ streamers have not been entirely devoid of talent from their TV networks. CBS News’s streamer has carried shows hosted by its TV talent like “CBS Morning News” anchor Anne-Marie Green and correspondent Vladimir Duthiers.
“We weren’t streaming anchors,” said Duthiers. He added, “Almost all of us [who appear on the CBS News Streaming Network] — myself, Anne-Marie, Elaine Quijano — are first and foremost, or at least were, part of the network broadcast operations before we took this on.”
Conversely, last year ABC News had one of its streaming anchors, Linsey Davis, take on anchor duty for the weekend edition of its nightly TV broadcast “World News Tonight.”
Now news networks are in the midst of completing the cycle. Having taken some TV talent and put them on streaming and some streaming talent and put them on TV, they are now having their biggest talent, such as CBS News’s O’Donnell and NBC News’s Chuck Todd, appear on both TV and streaming. What this all seems to amount to is the overarching trend of TV, streaming and digital video converging to the point where it’s all TV.
“We talked about being digital-first for quite a while because it sounded good. And now what we actually see is that transformation occurring in real time,” said Wendy McMahon, co-president and co-head of CBS News and Stations. “Our newsrooms understand that the audiences are changing — how communities are interacting with [and] what they expect of our brands is shifting — and so we must change as well. And that means that we are responsible for ensuring the relevance of these brands across platforms for years to come.”
“We want to try to transact and actually guarantee on [non-Nielsen measurements], not overall but to do a few deals in the 2022-23 upfront.”
— Agency executive
The creator economy has lit up in the last week.
On one end of the spectrum, Instagram started testing an option for creators to sell subscriptions, and TikTok said it plans to follow suit. On the other hand, Hank Green — half of the pioneering creator duo Vlogbrothers and cofounder of creator confab VidCon — posted a video calling out TikTok for shortchanging creators with its Creator Fund.
Green’s primary contention is that TikTok’s Creator Fund effectively caps the money going to creators while preserving the financial upside for the platform. By designating a pot of money to pay creators for posting videos as opposed to introducing a YouTube-style revenue-sharing program, TikTok may be trying to financially incentivize creators, but it is not giving itself a similar incentive to support creators financially.
This criticism doesn’t just apply to TikTok, by the way, but also to Instagram and YouTube, which have their own creator funds.
In the wake of Green’s video, some TikTok stars have echoed the call with their own videos…that they posted to TikTok.
0.5%: Percentage share of visual effects supervisors for movies and TV shows who are women of color.
$58 billion: How much revenue TikTok parent company ByteDance reportedly generated in 2021.
27%: Percentage share of U.S. internet subscribers that use Samsung’s smart TVs as their primary streaming device.
7.2%: Percentage increase in number of Los Angeles-area shoot days in the fourth quarter of 2021 compared to the pre-pandemic average for the period.
What BuzzFeed learned from a year of livestream shopping:
Read more about BuzzFeed here.
Netflix’s subscriber growth sped up in Q4 2021 but fell short of expectations:
Read more about Netflix here.
With Marquee, Jellysmack looks to turn non-digital natives into a new generation of internet stars:
Read more about Jellysmack here.
How a startup drink brand is using TikTok after going viral on the social platform:
Read more about Poppi’s TikTok strategy here.
Entertainment workers call for new COVID protocols:
Entertainment workers want TV and film productions to adopt even more stringent measures to protect cast and crew members from COVID, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The industry’s existing health and safety protocols have been regularly renewed as the pandemic has worn on, but some workers they should be updated amid the Omicron outbreak, while others say enforcement is sometimes lacking.
NBCUniversal lowers Winter Olympic goals for advertisers:
NBCUniversal has reduced its viewership guarantees for next month’s Winter Olympics by as much as half, according to Insider. The Comcast-owned conglomerate is coming off last year’s Summer Games when it had to use its streaming and digital video inventory to offset low linear viewership for advertisers, and it’s facing a Winter Games, in which NBCUniversal will not be sending announcing teams to Beijing to call events in person.
Substack seeks out video creators:
After going after writers over the past couple years, newsletter platform Substack is turning its attention to video makers with plans to add a native video player to its platform, according to Axios. Substack’s plans are unlikely to keep digital video platforms like YouTube up at night, but there does seem to be a trend brewing of platforms looking to provide creators with paywalled video options. Patreon, for example, is developing its own native video player.
The post Future of TV Briefing: TV news networks are stocking their streamers with their biggest names appeared first on Digiday.
With mobile gaming activity at an all-time high, Turkey has emerged as a leader in hyper-casual game development.
Mobile gaming has exploded in popularity during the pandemic, with millions of users turning to hypercasual games — think Candy Crush — to while away months of lockdown and working from home. This influx of mobile gamers has led to a flurry of activity in the industry, most recently Take-Two Interactive’s $12.7 billion acquisition of social game developer Zynga earlier this month.
Mobile is the fastest-growing game platform. The mobile gaming industry generated revenues of $93.2 billion in 2021 — a 7.3 percent increase year-over-year, according to Newzoo’s 2021 Global Mobile Gamers Whitepaper. Mobile games accounted for 52 percent of global games revenues in 2021. From 2019 to 2024, experts anticipate that mobile gaming revenues will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 11.2 percent.
Before getting gobbled up by Take-Two, Zynga spent the last few years on a tear of acquisitions of its own, buying a slew of smaller mobile developers that are now in Take-Two’s stable. Many of these smaller developers are located in Istanbul. All of that has taken an international gaming movement to Turkey. Zynga has purchased five Turkey-based developer studios over the past four years, including leading Turkish developers Peak and Rollic, though the Take-Two merger is unlikely to impact these companies, according to analysts at Newzoo.
Since 2017, Turkish mobile game developers have brought in billions of dollars in funding and investment, most notably via Zynga’s $1.8 billion acquisition of Peak in June 2020. These successes inspired other Turkish companies to get into the space, sparking a deluge of mobile game development in Istanbul. “This is good news for the market, right? When people see it, that will show that they can replicate that story, replicate that success,” said Ozan Şişman, head of Middle Eastern and North African sales for the mobile marketing analytics platform Adjust. “This is one of the reasons why the Turkish gaming ecosystem is super important.”
Turkey’s gaming industry is mobile-first; few, if any, Turkish game developers focus on major console titles. Unlike console developers, who can spend years fine-tuning their games, mobile game developers are able to follow a spray-and-pray strategy, cranking out scores of mobile titles until one catches on.
“It’s easy to produce, right? The idea of the gaming studios here in Turkey is to produce 10 or 15 games per year, and hoping that one or two can be hits,” Şişman said. This strategy has resulted in the development of marquee mobile games such as Peak’s Toon Blast, one of the top-five-grossing iOS games in the United States, in which players match colored blocks in a grid to score points.
This mobile-first approach is also effective within Turkey: of the $880 million consumers spent on games in Turkey in 2020, roughly half of those revenues came from mobile gaming, according to Gaming In Turkey’s 2020 Turkey Game Market Report. “That’s one of the reasons why the Turkish gaming companies are dominating the market,” Şişman said.
The emergence of game-focused Turkish VC firms such as Ludus Ventures is one downstream effect of the expansion of the mobile gaming industry in Istanbul; another is a marked increase in income and quality of life for Turkish coders and designers willing to make games for casual gamers in faraway countries and continents. This momentum shows no signs of slowing. As mobile gaming continues to rise, so too will the fortunes of the Turkish mobile gaming industry.
There’s a global economic impetus for the success of mobile gaming development in Turkey, too. With the relative value of the Turkish lira dropping precipitously in recent years, euros and U.S. dollars gleaned from the international mobile gaming market are more precious than ever to Turkish game developers and the Turks in their employ. “That makes the business very profitable for them,” Şişman said, adding that the Turkish government’s incentives to export their games abroad helps. Specifically, the Turkish government covers the commission fees charged by Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store, making it that much easier for Turkish mobile game developers to go international.
An article in Rest of World credits the popularity of Turkey’s kıraathanes, traditional streetside gaming parlors used for pastimes such as the tile-based okey, for the rise of the Turkish mobile gaming industry. However, some experts disagree with this diagnosis. “The people founding the gaming studios, they’re more focused on what’s happening in the United States — they’re all thinking, ‘what kind of games can I market to a U.S. citizen or tier-one country citizen?’” said İsmet Gökşen, a managing partner at Ludus Ventures. “So that’s why I don’t see any strong correlation between okey and mobile games becoming popular because it’s a local consumption trend.”
Indeed, rather than focusing on domestically popular games such as okey, Turkish gaming companies are increasingly using their success as a springboard into the international market. Bolstered by the success of its Turkish investments, Ludus has started funding game developers located in Singapore, Finland and even the United States. Following its acquisition by Zynga in October 2020, seven of Rollic’s games have reached the No. 1 or No. 1 spot on the U.S. iOS App Store. Though the Turkish lira appears to have reached a plateau in value, the relative strength of the U.S. dollar is likely to prolong this lucrative arrangement.
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