Month: January 2022

In 2021, over 140 advertisers ran ad campaigns on Insider using Saga data, up from 48 in 2020. While many of those were first-time customers, a significant percentage were not. The advertisers that bought ads from Insider using Saga had a renewal rate of 48%, and the amount of money those advertisers spent on average tripled, according to a company spokesperson. On the whole, the amount of revenue Insider generated on campaigns using Saga rose 175%, from a not insignificant base. “We went from millions to tens of millions [in revenue],” said Jana Meron, Insider’s svp of programmatic and data strategy.

After launching quietly in February of 2020, after about a year of testing with select clients, Saga (named after the Norse goddess of history and storytelling), had a bit of a coming-out party in 2021. Above and beyond the ad revenue it’s driven, Meron said that Saga is now being used by different parts of the Insider’s organization for a number of different initiatives, including audience extension projects designed to drive subscription growth.

As 2022 unfolds, it will have to continue to make inroads with agencies and coax clients to try out more of its capabilities, all while continuing to leverage the data for its own internal goals.

“Saga has changed the way we do almost everything, both from a direct and a programmatic standpoint,” Meron said.

Insider is part of a cluster of publishers with large millennial audiences, including BuzzFeed and Group Nine, that have opted not to tie their first-party data to audience email addresses. It uses Permutive to store reader data locally, without cookies.

While that could take them out of the running for participating in certain advertisers’ private marketplaces, it shouldn’t negatively affect Saga’s business prospects over time. “Advertising consent is still consent, whether you give an email or not,” said Alexander Knutsen, vp of solutions engineering at Amobee.

Insider’s decision not to pursue email-based identity partly came down to what was on the market. “This whole email thing wasn’t a thing when we started going down this path,” Meron said. “The IDs of the world weren’t in anybody’s sights; our subscription product had just started.”

But Insider remained committed to their approach as part of an overarching priority of driving results for advertisers. “For us, this was saying, ‘We know that demographics aren’t always the end-all, be-all,’” Meron said. “It makes more sense to focus on the actions they [readers] take, versus the actions of a very small subset of known users. If I buy your product, and I’m not in your demographic, do you care? Generally, the answer has been no.”

It also made sense, Meron added, to focus on an approach that didn’t let the publisher’s scale go to waste — Insider reached 99 million unique users in the U.S. alone in November 2021, according to Comscore, plus substantial reach across social platforms.

Buyers can reach Saga users with four products. To date, the most popular has been Saga Surround, a kind of page takeover-style experience that gives advertisers 100% share of voice. It has also had success with Insider Extend, which does allows advertisers to do audience extension and attempt to reach audiences on social platforms.

“We find that our data performs better than the platform data when you’re targeting,” Meron said. “We saw higher [clickthrough rate] back to our sites.” 

As 2021 unfolded, the number of publishers incorporating first-party data and alternate identifiers into their ad sales deals grew healthily, with two thirds of publishers now saying that at least some of their ad sales deals involve these tools. 

But these third-party cookie replacements also remain a minor portion of publishers’ business overall. Just 15% of the respondents to a Digiday+ poll conducted in the fourth quarter of 2021 said that alternate identifiers figured in more than half of their ad sales deals, a sign that the industry’s move away from third-party cookies still has a way to go. 

“Media buyers care about results, of course, but they also care about efficiency,” said Troy Lerner, CEO of the agency Booyah Advertising. “The publishers that need to be worried are those that can’t scale, regardless of their first party data methodology.”

Tamara Alesi and Jasmine Presson, two media agency vets with experience at GroupM and Omnicom, were tapped at the end of 2021 to lead Mediaplus, respectively as chief client officer and chief strategy officer. They take the reins from Phil Cowdell, a longtime media agency veteran who had run Mediaplus the year prior but left in late 2021 to join health-driven marketer Vaxxinity. Both report to Matthias Brüll, who oversees Mediaplus globally.  

Alesi and Presson, who were recommended to take over Mediaplus domestically by Cowdell himself, said the push to expand now in the U.S. is driven by opportunity stemming from client frustration with holding companies. “Clients are really rejecting [the] bloat of fees, the timelines, the opaque media plans” of the holding companies,” said Alesi. “If COVID taught us anything, it’s that efficiency does not equal effectiveness. Advertisers’ responses are really varied — we see a lot more in housing happening, we see a hybrid approach. The most frustrating part is there’s this systematic, wasteful, re-pitch every two to three years.”

Mediaplus’ goal, Presson added, is to present itself to clients as a business partner, and not as a “bulk buyer of media,” she said. “Whether it’s dealing with some unexplained, unexpected supply chain bottleneck, or a TikTok trend, we’re built to pivot quickly when necessary. Independence allows us that flexibility. Tam and I see ourselves as permanent beta.”  

Andy Smith, global marketing director for Yu MOVE, a pet health company in the U.K. that’s expanding into the U.S. market, said Alesi and Presson have seamlessly slid into Cowdell’s place, given that Cowdell had won the client for Mediaplus a year ago. “Culturally they’re very similar to the previous team,” said Smith. 

The brand had planned a veterinarian-targeted rollout last year, but pulled back when COVID prevented people largely from visiting vets. Now, under Alesi and Presson, Yu MOVE changed tactics and is pursuing a sponsorship-based plan. “Given [the U.S.] is a new market, we felt like we needed a business partner, and that was vindicated because of all the headwinds COVID threw our way,” said Smith, who noted the pivot helped Yu MOVE avoid lots of wasteful spend. 

Siemens Healthineers, a medical device firm, is another global client expanding in the U.S., for which Mediaplus handled B2B work that involved goefencing and AI-driven targeting. “The U.S. is one of our focus markets so it was important for us that Mediaplus has strong representation there,” said Kathrin Wild, head of promotions and campaigns, in an email to Digiday. “The team … moved our traditional B2B approach forward… We are demanding but collaborative in order to achieve our aim of pioneering breakthroughs in healthcare — an attitude that matches the spirit of Mediaplus.”

The German connection among Mediaplus’ clients is no coincidence. Mediaplus is one of three central units belonging to parent company House of Communication, a German mini-holding company that also owns creative network Serviceplan as well as a digital IT firm called plan.net. Mediaplus claims to be the largest independent media agency in Europe, with media spend, mostly in Germany, around $1.3 billion in total, according to Comvergence data. 

Mediaplus also leverages its partnerships with corporate cousins. For example, Alesi and Presson work out of Pereira O’Dell’s New York office (Serviceplan owns a 30 percent stake in POD). Mediaplus activated POD’s recent ad for client crypto.com, featuring Matt Damon. 

Externally, Mediaplus and Stagwell Inc. have an agreement to partner where relevant, which makes sense on paper since Stagwell is looking to beef up its presence outside of the U.S., and Mediaplus wants to strengthen its domestic foothold — in other words, complementary footprints.

So much so that one observer familiar with the European media marketplace wondered if Stagwell might move to acquire Mediaplus.

“They’re experimenting with each other in Europe, and there’s a lot of synergy there for a new-breed holding company who has to have some traditional chops in order to be relevant for big clients,” said the executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “They look the most likely to potentially overtake Havas as the sixth biggest holding company” if an acquisition were to take place.  

Stagwell declined to comment and Mediaplus’ Brüll would only say via email: “Our global expansion strategy is to grow Mediaplus … organically, partnering or participating in local agencies.” Privately, execs on both sides strongly dismissed the notion of an acquisition or merger.

Color by numbers

Super Bowl LVI is coming up quickly on Feb. 13, and the runup to the Big Game is fraught with figuring out which advertisers are back in and who isn’t willing to pay the reported $6.5 million for a 30-second spot in game. For those that do pass on jumping, the Out of Home Advertising Association of America offers two alternative ways to spend that budget, and what you’ll get out of it, citing what it says is higher audience recall than other media. 

• A “traditional” campaign using print and digital OOH and based on 600 target rating points would let an advertiser buy 50 of the top U.S. markets, achieve an average reach of 84 percent and frequency of 7.2 in those markets, earn more than 1 billion impressions and cost a CPM of about $5.40.
• A programmatically executed digital-only OOH buy with the same TRPs nets 27 of the top markets, achieves an average reach of 64 percent and frequency of 9.5, earn 930 million impressions and cost a CPM of $7.

Takeoff & landing

• Publicis Media’s hot streak of wins continued last week when Spark Foundry won back KFC’s $166 million media business; Wieden + Kennedy had won the business away from Spark Foundry in 2018.  
• Separately, Publicis Media will also be the first media agency network to test NBC Universal’s alternative ratings system, OnePlatform, to which iSpot.tv just was added as a ratings supplier. 
• GroupM North America unit named JiYoung Kim its chief product & services officer, a new position. Kim was most recently chief digital officer at Dentsu’s Carat.
• Sarah Salter was named Wavemaker’s global head of applied innovation, bumped up from head of innovation at Wavemaker UK.

Direct quote

“There is a certain segment of the sports fandom that’s really attracted to amateur sports. We don’t need to look any further than the Olympics and other large events that are focused around amateur athletes. You can get really surgical and participate in states like California, Texas, Florida and Michigan where high school sports are a part of life. We love the idea that the hyperlocal component of marketing can come into play, where brands can look at content that’s about human achievement and is brand safe.”

— Craig Sloan, COO of Playfly Sports, which is expanding its representation of high-school sports media as the quality of media coverage improves.

Speed reading

• In his latest Future of TV briefing, senior media editor Tim Peterson explains how the various ratings alternatives to Nielsen will avoid stepping on each other’s toes. The short answer: The ANA’s cross-media measurement organizational efforts. 
• Digiday’s senior reporter of ad tech Ronan Shields’ sat down with Sir Martin Sorrell, who explained the rationale behind Media.Monks’ latest acquisition. 
• And Digiday’s senior marketing reporter Kimeko McCoy explained marketers’ move toward more full-funnel marketing, now that quick and easy digital wins aren’t as doable in performance marketing anymore. 

To say, the track came out of left field is an understatement. And yet it seems to have had the desired effect. Feedback from fans in the 10 days since the track went live has been overwhelmingly positive, said Rodriguez. Similarly, demand for the jersey has been boosted. Unsurprisingly, Rodriguez declined to clarify that statement with actual numbers. He did, however, say it was on track to exceed expectations. 

If anything the reception points to how attuned the organization is to one of the most active fanbases in esports. Not only was G2 the team with the second most views last year on Twitter, it also had the eighth most talked about esports athlete in Mixwell amongst its users, per the social network. That said, success was never clear cut. How could it be with such an off-piste plan? So Rodriguez and his team spent six months and a considerable amount of money trying to improve those odds — no mean feat when working with musicians who all expect a certain amount of freedom and autonomy, said Rodriguez. 

“You have to think about the universe we’re building — it’s the same way you’d think about what Marvel has built,” said Rodriguez on how he tried to keep his passion project in lock step with the wider trajectory of G2. “By that I mean, you create something that has personalities, stories, big events and a legacy. On top of that we also have this dynamic of success or failure around competition that’s built on a mix of reality like the tournaments we’re in and fantasy with the characters we create. Most if not all existing entertainment IPs don’t have that.” 

Whether he’s right is besides the point. Being a competitive esports team isn’t enough for many CEOs. Regardless of how successful they are, teams like G2 can only earn so much because they don’t own the games they play.

Ultimately, it’s the owners of the games (the publishers) that determine how much they earn because they own the IP. It explains why esports teams find it so hard to carve out new revenue streams. They have to dig deeper to leverage their brands and fillings in search of those dollars. Content is one of those ways. It’s why teams like Faze Clan and 100 Thieves aren’t really esports organizations. Sure, the teams are important, but only as part of a wider business being built on media revenues (creator-led livestreaming on Twitch) and apparel. 

“Pure sponsorships deals have never been successful. The era of slapping a logo onto an asset is dead. Look at Fazeclan, they are more a media house than an esports team now,” said Magnus Leppäniemi, president of esports at Esports Entertainment Group. “They have influencers creating content that resonates with the audience, making affinity for the brand and the team.”

Simply put, esports is a marketing outlet for these organizations. Now, the idea of an esports organization releasing a single no longer sounds so far-fetched — maybe even astute, considering the fact that it’s launched from the organization’s record label. Neither is necessarily new. Riot Games, for example, has a team of in-house composers, who have been scoring anthems for its tournament since 2013. Rodriguez has been taking notes. 

“The same way we have players who compete or creators who produce our content, we will have musicians who create music for us,” said Rodriguez. “If you fast-forward five years the playlist we have on Spotify is likely going to have between 60 to 80 of our produced songs.”

Some of those songs may even come from films his organization has produced. Rodriguez said: ”Music is definitely connected to how we think about entertaining our fans. I can see us scoring our movies in the future, as well as shows and video games.”

That’s about as much of an outline there is for the record label right now. Rodriguez isn’t too prescriptive about it’s role from the outset. It could be a vehicle for signing acts just as much as it could be a platform for releasing more tracks from the G2 brand — everything is up for consideration at this point, he said. Take the prospect of more tracks, for example. There’s no hard and fast rule on how many should be released, said Rodriguez. But when they are released it’s likely they’ll span other genres beyond epic rock. 

“It started as a small project that I expected to spend a few thousand dollars on, but in a matter of three or four months it expanded in scale,” Rodriguez. “When fans see other jersey launches from other teams, they’re going to think to themselves ‘I remember when G2 spent a million dollars on their own.”