Month: January 2022

And as one might expect from an industry whose digital sector is projected to grow by 39% in 2022, most respondents foresee a good year. Three quarters of them agree their ad revenues will grow in the new year; among publishers that do not rely on consumer revenue at all, 85% agree that ad revenue growth is on the cards.

Yet there are nuances to how that optimism is distributed. Among publishers that consider subscriptions to be a primary source of revenue, for example, a greater share are optimistic about their subscription revenues growing than the share that’s optimistic about their ad revenue.

The data also reveals that media’s pivot to paid is still in motion. A bit less than one fifth of the respondents that do not have subscription businesses said that they expect subscription revenues to grow this year, for example. Similarly, nearly half of all publishers — 47% — said they expect their commerce revenues will grow in 2022.  

The optimism that most respondents feel about their own employers’ prospects only extends so far, though. 

While more than 40% of respondents strongly agreed that they were optimistic about their company’s prospects for 2022, only about 20% felt the same about the media industry as a whole. 

“RTO and work-from-home policies are important issues in all of our current negotiations,” Lowell Peterson, executive director of the Writers Guild of America, East, told Digiday in an email.

“Some companies seem to have an abstract institutional imperative to ‘get people back in the office,’ regardless of what’s happening with the pandemic,” he added. “Our members have made it clear, through mobilization and petitions and letter-writing campaigns, that they are willing to take collective action to protect themselves and their families, while continuing to do their jobs.” 

Unions demand involvement in RTO discussions

At the end of last summer, the main tension between media unions and management was the issue of productivity: Management said they needed staff back in the office for better collaboration, creativity and company culture, while employees argued they were just as productive, if not more productive, working from home during the pandemic. 

Now, the root of the tension is management setting what unions say are arbitrary dates for when they want employees back at their desks — and resisting coming to the bargaining table to negotiate a return with the union, according to interviews with members of the NewsGuild of New York and the Writers Guild of America, East. 

Office return dates have been delayed time and time again. When unions at Meredith, Condé Nast and Hearst filed Unfair Labor Practice with the National Labor Relations Board against their respective companies’ return to office plans last summer, the Labor Board responded to Meredith Union’s charge, saying that a return to the office is a mandatory subject of bargaining. Management, in other words, cannot force employees back to the office without first negotiating it with the union. In August, Meredith Union launched a public petition to management, asking them to delay the return to office indefinitely and engage in bargaining with the union over the plan.

The New Yorker Union at Condé Nast, which is represented by the NewsGuild of New York, has a contract that contains specific language allowing employees to work from home if they feel personally unsafe returning to the office, according to Lainna Fader, director of audience development at the New Yorker and New Yorker Union steward. “So whatever the company says— and they can’t implement anything for us unilaterally anyway — we still have that protection, and continue to discuss the specifics of RTO with the company on top of that,” Fader said. The union had a bargaining session over return to work and submitted information requests to management, she added. Condé Nast decided this month that it’s putting its flexible return to office plans on pause until Jan. 31 at the earliest. (Condé Nast did not respond to a request for comment before publishing time.)

The risks of returning

The situation isn’t so simple at other large media unions. There is also concern that the plans in place can’t ensure employees’ health and safety, despite companies requiring vaccinations or mask-wearing. 

A recent interview with a Hearst employee revealed that loose adherence to these requirements within office buildings may not be enough to prevent spreading the virus at work. Within a few weeks of Hearst making it mandatory for staff to come into the office twice a week at the end of November, a few employees were testing positive for COVID-19. Hearst management told employees they could work from home through the start of the new year, and then the company delayed the return to office again until the end of the month. Hearst Union, which is represented by the Writer Guild of America, East started a letter-writing campaign on Jan. 10, urging management to negotiate with Hearst Union “for a safe and flexible return” and pushing back on its return to office mandate. Hearst delayed the return again on Jan. 13, saying employees could work from home “until further notice.”

“The safety and wellbeing of our employees is our first priority,” a Hearst Magazines spokesperson said, when asked about employees’ concerns regarding COVID-19 precautions at the office — and how the positive cases were handled by management. “All Hearst employees and visitors are required to be fully vaccinated to enter our office locations, and we are following the CDC guidelines and recommending that everyone wears a face covering when social distancing cannot be maintained. As we continue to monitor developments, closely follow NYC guidelines, and update our policies as needed, employees who are not comfortable coming into the office have the option to work from home until further notice.”

The importance of audits

“We want to go back to the workplace when it’s safe,” said Adam Carlson, politics editor at People magazine and a member of the mobilization and communications committee at Meredith Union, which is represented by the NewsGuild of New York. Sometimes that means the unions taking it upon themselves to ensure it’s safe — or not.

At Dotdash Meredith — the newly combined company that includes over 40 magazine and digital media brands, including People, People TV, Entertainment Weekly, Shape and Martha Stewart Living — Meredith Union performed a health and safety audit of the company based on their airborne infectious disease exposure prevention plan. Meredith failed the audit on Dec. 16. Among the issues listed? Multiple employees and building personnel were found walking around unmasked. Dotdash Meredith has had over 20 confirmed cases of workers who were voluntarily in the office and exposed to someone with COVID since the start of December, according to a representative at the NewsGuild of New York.

“Our top priority is the safety of our employees. We continue to closely monitor CDC as well as state and local data and guidance to determine the best date to officially return to our offices,” said a Dotdash Meredith spokesperson.

The audit “really underscores the need for this, for us to go to the bargaining table,” said Carlson.

A second NewsGuild of New York representative told Digiday that it will train members to do more audits at their companies’ buildings, and this is “something we intend to do” more of in the future.

Homeward bounds

The key hits:

• As TV ad measurement moves beyond Nielsen, it is moving beyond a unified definition of a household.
• Households are typically defined using deterministic and probabilistic data, but methodologies and data sources can vary.
• The varying definitions make it unlikely that a unified definition will arrive to span all measurement providers.

Recently I’ve been polling agency executives on what questions they have as TV networks expand their measurement options. “How are they defining a household?” said one agency executive.

Huh?

Of all the present uncertainty in the TV and streaming ad marketplace, I did not realize how high on the list was the question of what’s considered a household. The issue of household-level consent? Sure. But what qualifies as a household and how to quantify a household? It turns out that the ill-defined definition of a household is a foundational issue complicating the future of TV and streaming advertising.

“I know it seems silly to still talk about households, but I think that’s one of the big issues: When we’re talking about household and audience-based measurement, who are we using and who’s the arbiter of the right household?” said Nicole Whitesel, evp of advanced TV and client success at Publicis Media, during a virtual forum on connected TV advertising that Digiday hosted in December.

The household definition dilemma is not that the industry lacks a definition of a household, but the opposite. There are varying definitions of a household. Those definitions break down into two general categories that are commonly referred to as deterministic and probabilistic. 

• Deterministic: Associating devices as being part of the same household based on explicit information, such as email addresses, physical addresses and phone numbers, that can be tied to individuals.
• Probabilistic: Associating devices as being part of the same household based on implicit information, such as IP addresses, that are used to build device graphs by linking devices even if a person is not signed in to an account.

Both categories have their pros and cons. Deterministic sounds definitive because it’s based on explicit information, but consider the prevalence of people sharing their streaming accounts with individuals outside their households. Probabilistic, meanwhile, isn’t confined to registered accounts, but it is prone to people being part of multiple households, such as visiting friends or family members who use a person’s Wi-Fi. Because of these trade-offs, data providers can use the two data types to supplement one another, such as by using IP addresses to filter out devices that share accounts but not domiciles.

But the issue is more nuanced than deterministic vs. probabilistic household definitions. Data providers may have differing methodologies for identifying devices that are part of the same households, and that can lead to an overlap in the data sets and duplication in measurement. Or the data providers can have identical methodologies but gaps in the households they respectively cover. “It’s not possible to have one unified source,” said a second agency executive.

For an alternative explanation of the household definition dilemma, check out this video skit I produced.

One way advertisers are working around the issue is by consolidating their campaigns to a single data provider to ensure a singular definition of a household, Raphael Rivilla, partner and svp of media at Marcus Thomas, said during last month’s CTV virtual forum. For example, if one of the agency’s clients was running a campaign featuring interactive CTV ads served by Innovid across different streaming apps and CTV platforms, then it would stick to Innovid’s household graph. “That way we’re not messing around with different definitions of households based on pulling data from different places,” Rivilla said.

The irony of all this is that the TV advertising industry has had a unified definition of a household for decades: Nielsen’s. Obviously, though, the issue with depending on Nielsen’s definition has proven to be Nielsen’s recent deficiencies in accurately counting viewership. So the industry now finds itself in a sort of limbo in updating its counting systems and accounting for all the different counting methods.

As Whitesel said, “I’ve heard a lot of people say, ‘Wow, we complained a lot about Nielsen for so many years. But now it’s amazing to think about they got everyone to agree to on household and demo data. And now we’re in a place where that becomes even more difficult because there [are] even more data sets.”

What we’ve heard

“Netflix doesn’t take any money for integrations. They do in-kind co-marketing deals. You use their IP and commit to spending $10 million on marketing to support it. The beautiful thing about [going to movie and show producers directly for brand integrations] is we don’t need to go through Netflix at all.”

— Branded entertainment executive

Streaming watch time stays stagnant

Welp, streaming’s share of TV watch time stayed stuck at 28% through the entire second half of 2021, according to Nielsen’s updated The Gauge measurement report.

However, while previously streaming’s share seemed to be capped by people tuning into traditional TV — especially football games — the most recent culprit was likely gaming. In November, the “other” category, which includes gaming, represented 7% of TV watch time, and in December, that figure grew to 9%. In a company blog post, Nielsen attributed the uptick to gaming and in particular the period toward the end of the year when many new games are released, to coincide with holiday shopping.

Figuring out what more to make of Nielsen’s numbers for December is somewhat tricky since the measurement provider changed up its tallies this time around. Previously, Nielsen rounded to the nearest whole number but is now including the first decimal point. As a result, it’s unclear whether Disney+, for example, ceded any viewership share in going from 2% of watch time in November to 1.6% in December, which would otherwise round up to 2%.

However, Netflix did surrender some viewership in December, having slipped from 7% in November to 6.4% in December. Broadcast TV similarly saw its watch time share slide by less than a percentage point.

Numbers to know

$15.49: The new monthly subscription price for Netflix’s most popular tier, which exceeds HBO Max’s monthly rate by $0.50.

559: Number of scripted original shows that aired on traditional TV and streaming in 2021, a new peak even when compared to the pre-pandemic era.

15 million: Number of people who use Vizio’s SmartCast smart TV platform each month. Up from 12 million in March 2021.

$54 million: How much money YouTube star Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson earned in 2021.

17.1 million: Average number of people who tuned into each NFL game this season on traditional TV or online, the most since 2015.

What we’ve covered

How a record label fits into wider media ambitions for G2 Esports:

• One of Europe’s largest esports organizations has compared a metal song to launch a new jersey created with Adidas.
• The move signals how, for companies like G2 Esports, esports is a marketing outlet.

Read more about G2 Esports here.

Gimbal/TrueX reveal the reason they merged: a new targeting tool for CTV:

• The ad tech firm has developed a new targeting tool for connected TV ads.
• Gimbal/TrueX is among the ad tech companies trying to pivot to CTV to seize a share of the ad dollars moving there.

Read more about Gimbal/TrueX here.

What we’re reading

YouTube cuts back on original programming:
YouTube’s original programming ambitions have (largely) come to an end. Coinciding with the news of its original programming boss Susanne Daniels departing in March, the Google-owned platform has announced it will no longer invest in original shows or movies outside of its Black Voices and YouTube Kids Funds, according to Variety.

Google’s smart TV platform footprint:
Google continues to sign deals with smart TV manufacturers to make its platform the default on their devices. All but three of the top 10 smart TV makers have devices that feature Google’s platform, according to Protocol. But Google faces the challenge of trying to transition folks away from its old smart TV platform (Android TV) to its new one (Google TV).

The problem with streaming project paydays:
Streaming services and the people that work on the shows and movies they distribute continue to duke it out over who gets rights to what revenue. While streamers have dealt with the issue by backing up the Brinks truck upfront, they may look to switch tact in order to avoid overpaying for underwhelming projects, according to Variety.

CNN’s streaming service staffs up:
CNN has arranged a roster of big-name talent for its upcoming streaming service CNN+. As Vanity Fair points out, the WanerMedia-owned news organization seems to making many more high-profile hires for its streamer than its traditional TV network, though it will still face the challenge of converting viewers into subscribers.

“We’re cracking the code there and it’s working really well,” said Allison Ellsworth, Poppi co-founder and chief brand officer, noting that most of the drink brand’s SMS and email signups stem from TikTok. Per Ellsworth, Poppi sees an estimated 1,000 email and SMS signups for marketing alerts and discounts per day, and has grown that list to more than 200,000 signups total, in part because of its growing popularity and discover-ability on TikTok. 

The Poppi team has a community manager who oversees social copy on Instagram as well as in-house TikTok creation, posting to the brand account up to several times per day. In addition to working with influencers, Ellsworth herself will post explainer videos on everything from how the drink improves gut health to what each flavor tastes like. Other times, Poppi’s TikTok videos stem from what’s trending on the app, like the ‘Jerk’ dance move.

Per Ellsworth, TikTok has become Poppi’s main brand awareness channel.

Ahead of Poppi’s viral video where Ellsworth told Poppi’s origin story, the brand, which launched during the onset of the pandemic, didn’t have a portion of its media budget dedicated to TikTok, opting for organic posts. At present, the beverage brand still posts organically multiple times per day to its more than 150,000 followers. But now, an estimated 20% of its marketing budget goes to TikTok, mostly working with influencers including Noah Beck, who has more than 32 million TikTok followers, and Bryce Hall, who has more than 21 million followers, said Ellsworth, who declined to discuss the brand’s marketing budget in terms of dollars spent.

The remainder of Poppi’s ad budget is divided up between Amazon, programmatic advertising, YouTube and Instagram ads. Later this year, Ellsworth said streaming video advertising will be added to the mix.

“Before, what we had was TikTok [like a] black ops budget, testing and seeing how things go,” she said. “Then, the majority [of ad spend] was Instagram. Now, it’s flipped.” At present, less than an estimated 30% of Poppi’s ad spend is dedicated to YouTube and Instagram. The brand no longer regularly runs Facebook ads, Ellsworth added.

That’s not to say that TikTok is the end all, be all of marketing. In fact, advertisers have long since said that going viral is not a strategy. Ellsworth herself is skeptical of being too reliant on TikTok, questioning how long the TikTok phenomenon will last as more advertisers look to leverage it. 

Leah Staenberg, lead content strategist at Dagger agency, says it’s true that as TikTok has become a driver of culture, more advertisers have jumped into the space to get in front of its growing, and young, audience. However, “you can’t ride one wave forever,” Staenberg said. 

“For many brands, utilizing TikTok is necessary to be culturally relevant — but it likely doesn’t reach the entirety of a brand’s audience,” she said. “For long-lasting relevance, brands need to diversify and grow beyond a single piece of content or one platform that’s been successful in their social media strategy.”

At Poppi, Ellsworth said they’ll ride the TikTok wave as long as it lasts with no plans of adding a marketing budget cap as long as the conversion, email and SMS signups remain consistent. 

“TikTok is changing small brands’ lives. Lean in, keep trying. This is the future, I promise,” Ellsworth said. “But don’t get caught up in that. You still have to do your marketing 360. It all works together.”

Take Johnson & Johnson, for example. 

The advertiser is working with ad tech firm Vidmob to analyse the creative behind its ads. Doing so should give its marketers a clearer picture of what parts of the ad, from the colors used to whether it features humans, incite the best responses from people, said Ander Lopez Ochoa, head of digital, media and e-commerce marketing at Johnson & Johnson. Based on those learnings, his team can use the platform to produce new, optimized versions of the ad via its network of creators who have access to additional insights. 

That’s not to say this will cause swathes of creative ads to be nixed on the fly. This is more about tweaking certain elements of those ads, which in many ways is a lot trickier. For years, marketers have talked up the need to be armed with a high volume of creative concepts and iterations so that they’re able to tailor their messaging for audience personalization, for A/B testing and optimization. In reality, though, most of them haven’t been able to perform the creative chicanery needed to pull this off. Not only does it require marketers to think about the production process differently it also calls for more collaborative ways of working especially between media and creative teams, be they in-house or at agencies. Having the right tech is just the start. 

“No matter how good you get at optimizing your media performance, if your creative is not fit for purpose then it’s not going to work as well — we reached that point of diminishing returns,” said Ochoa. Even more so in markets where online ad spending is either close to, or already accounts for, he whole media budget. “It raises the need to have these sorts of solutions.”

Still, a lot needs to be done before the benefits of optimizing creative assets in this way can be realized. 

First, Ochoa and his team had to pour three years’ worth of first-party campaign data into the platform to give it a good baseline from which to provide future recommendations. On Facebook, for example, this might include whether or not to show the brand logo at the start of a video as well as the right length of it, said Ochoa. Some of those insights will come to include regional nuances between the various brands under the Johnson & Johnson umbrella and how well those differences are received locally. Next, those insights are turned into benchmarks of sorts that future ads are checked against. Eventually, the advertiser hopes to have enough data to be able to perform a meta analysis on how well ads perform.

Marketers have been fielding pitches for this sort of tech for several years. More often than not, at least for Ochoa, the tech hasn’t been good enough. And the pressure wasn’t there to urgently search for the right solution. Not when media optimization was able to compensate for creative shortcomings most of the time and the spending levels weren’t high enough to warrant more scrutiny when it didn’t. Now, however, that’s changed. Some advertisers are even replacing the usual, traditional creative they’d put in a banner ad, with content pulled directly from social media feeds. Call it social creative.

No, it’s not a new term and ad tech vendors have been pitching solutions like this for some time, albeit to varying degrees of success. The current state of the market bares this out: which is to say it’s not exactly filled with an abundance of choice. Indeed, Spaceback and Nova are among a handful of companies doing this level of customization of display ads at scale — proof that the technology has reached a point in recent years where it can start to deliver on its potential. Now, a marketer has the ability to pull the creative elements from a social network, from Facebook to TikTok, and make it all fit within an IAB standard 300×250 or 300×600. In other words, marketers can take the most viral or persuasive posts from each social platform and turn them into the marketing efforts with speed and at scale.

The trigger for B2B advertiser HoneyBook to do this was how well TikTok’s Spark ads, which let marketers create ads from organic posts on the app, perform. It used these ads to boost the organic post its members were already creating about the service. Swapping these posts into its banner ads was a natural next step. 

“HoneyBook is also at a growth stage where we’re trying to scale media spend as quickly as possible and we have not scaled our creative resources at the same pace while we invest in new paid channels such as programmatic display,” said Toby Skinner, growth marketing leader at HoneyBook. “So being able to leverage all of our organic and paid social assets is a life saver.”

Doing so is working so well that the social creative HoneyBook runs using the Spaceback platform is outperforming traditional banners by at least 50%, said Skinner. No wonder he anticipates that social media will take over as the primary creative tactic for any campaign with any sort of direct response performance targets. Not that he doesn’t still see a role for traditional display in campaigns. Rather, those types of ads will be used when the focus is strictly brand building. 

“When organic social content from Instagram or Tiktok performs well within the original platform, that provides us with an incremental opportunity to quickly deploy the same creative imagery and engagement equity in a social display format at scale on a CPM basis,” said Ben Morse, who oversees omni digital marketing at Deckers Brands. 

Like his counterpart at HoneyBook, Morse expects this sort of content to account for a larger part of its display advertising — not least because of how well it performs. While he did not go into specific details about the performance of those ads, he did offer a broad outline. 

“Social Display consistently provides a click through rate and ROAS advantage versus traditional display, he added. “The added value from genuine consumer engagement and ad recall lift are meaningful as well.”

It chimes with observations made by other marketers. Some have found that using social content in banner ads routinely leads to better clickthrough rates versus when traditional creative is used. In some cases it’s even contributing to return on actual sales. 

Clear as these benefits are, there’s more practical points for marketers to consider like “how will this image appear in social display placements?” that are necessary parts of the pre launch process.

“Now is a meaningful moment to turn to social creative in programmatic as advertisers look to simultaneously stand out from a sea of sameness in standard display and to leverage the proven stickiness and engagement of the social aesthetic,” said Daniel Rutberg, chief operating officer at ​​performance marketing agency at MuteSix. “Shoppers of all ages are actively using social media — and social creative enables us to take the most viral and persuasive posts from each leading social platform, and re-contextualize them into a performance-first programmatic environment.”

Of course, behind every trend there’s an adoption curve. When it comes to creative optimization online adoption is spreading fast,” said Oli Marlow Thomas, founder of Ad-Lib.io, a creative management platform that was acquired by ad tech vendor Smartly.io earlier this month. “Making these sorts of changes can be quite daunting and a lot of advertisers took a while to migrate their media to programmatic — typically the part of the digital transformation journey that precedes dynamic creative enablement.”