Month: March 2022

In the latest edition of the Confessions series, where we exchange anonymity for candor, Digiday reached out to a prominent minority female Twitch streamer and TikTok creator to discuss how she has learned to deal with hate raids through both platform-provided tools and support from her community.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. 

Tell me about your first experience with hate raids on Twitch.

I’ve been raided by other streamers before people were even talking about hate raids, so I thought they were just a normal thing on Twitch — I didn’t know that this was a new thing that was going on. But last night, I was live for two hours, and I got hate raided five times. I got hate raided before I was even in my starting screen before I even started the stream.

There was one hate raid where it was just repeated messages, where it was spamming my chat. So whenever that happens, I try to put it in follower-only or subscriber-only mode. It does get in your psyche a bit because they know it bothers you, so they’re going to keep doing it until you stop streaming — which has happened with a bunch of Twitch streamers. They’ve just completely stopped streaming because of it.

How did your community react?

I tried to keep a mental note — don’t let it bother you, just continue streaming. When I’m streaming, it’s my point to make sure all my viewers are having a good time and enjoying the stream, and I can’t do that if I’m worried about some hate raids. I also have really, really good moderators, some of the best mods I’ve ever had. So they clean up really quick and help take care of it. I’m very lucky in that regard; my mods are absolutely stellar. [Moderators are usually viewers/community members elevated to a position of authority by the streamer.]

Do you use any other tools to fight online harassment?

TikTok and YouTube allow you to put in words that you don’t want to see; I think Twitch does that too. For TikTok, it will automatically not post comments when someone says those keywords. When I first blew up on TikTok, there were a bunch of kids saying, “aren’t you that girl who is begging for $5 on stream?” I just put that — ”$5 aren’t you that girl on stream” — in my keywords. YouTube’s the same way; YouTube will hold certain comments that seem a bit too aggressive, and they will put them in “Held for Review.”

On TikTok and YouTube, if somebody has a lot of symbols in their comments, it’ll automatically get held for review. But on Twitch, when somebody puts a bunch of symbols in to hide a really bad word, that gets through the moderation bot. So [keywords] aren’t as helpful, because they’re just going to spell it in a different way.

Do you have any idea who is behind the hate raids?

From what I’ve seen, I think it’s just a massive bot that they’ve programmed to raid a bunch of streamers because it mass follows you. And it’s crazy because the moment I was on stream and I was talking about [my identity and] it felt like three hate raids hit after that back-to-back — right after I said [anything about my identity]. But I don’t know if that’s it, because it could be anything.

Have you experienced online harassment outside these hate raids?

Whenever I compete in big tournaments — and these are things I’ve experienced firsthand — they do not moderate their chat. Big female players or players who are of color go on camera, and immediately there’s all this hateful rhetoric being said in the live chat. I always wondered — why are you not moderating this? You invite creators to come on your stream and give your event visibility, but then you will allow anything to be said about these creators on stream.

Should platforms be doing more to protect creators from this sort of harassment? Why haven’t they figured it out yet?

Twitch needs to find a way to moderate those events, because ignoring it doesn’t make the situation any better. I really do think they’re trying to come up with a solution, but it’s such a unique situation that hasn’t happened before. I don’t know how they would find a solution to this, other than forcing a bunch of moderators to work across the site, and there are so many people streaming at once that it might be impossible.

Some in the ad world see the moves as clear-cut. “Pulling out is a no-brainer in the short term,” said Allen Adamson, brand consultant and co-founder of Metaforce, when asked about the impact on the ad world. “This is a moment in time when the amount of revenue you can make by staying open in Russia is diminished by the pressure to do the right thing.” 

Others have a more nuanced take on brands and agencies’ response to the ongoing invasion. Some agency execs and industry observers say that while they support businesses pulling out of Russia as it may send a signal to the Russian government, they also feel for people in the advertising community in Russia who don’t support the atrocities that the Russian government is committing against Ukraine. 

Some wonder about the possible precedent these businesses may be setting with this decision. 

“It’s a slippery slope for offices to be closed irrespective of business or organization,” said one media buyer who requested anonymity. “What happens when more countries behave like Russia? What happens when the war stops? Do those offices reopen? What about the humanity and dignity of innocent hard working people at those companies whose economic livelihoods are harmed from this?” 

The impact of the ongoing invasion in Ukraine also has ripple effects for those in other countries as they watch the horrors of the attack from afar. Some say that business leaders need to be cognizant of that impact as well.

“The trauma of war and adding another pressure to what has already been a panic enduring two years with COVID,” said Duane Brown, founder of performance marketing agency Take Some Risk. “Brands need to give their people space and time to think and heal. You never know who has friends, family and loved one’s based in Ukraine.”

3 Questions with Cristina Ferruggiari, evp and director of advanced and connected TV, Lockard & Wechsler Direct

As the lines between the different video mediums (linear television, OTT, CTV, etc.) become more blurred, what does that mean for marketers?

As marketers, we must think about TV/video from a holistic lens to capitalize on full audience reach potential and impact. [That means] including OTT/CTV within a total video approach, acts as a compliment to linear TV to capture migrating audiences that may not be exposed to linear TV messaging. It also presents the opportunity for our clients to take advantage of digital capabilities on the biggest screen in the home by enabling data-driven audience targeting that reduces waste and maximizes return.

Has Covid-19 impacted how LWD works with clients?

Partnership and collaboration with our clients is at the foundation of what we do and is critical to driving business growth together, but both have become even more critical throughout the pandemic. Today, our marketplace is increasingly dynamic, we continue to work hand-in-hand with our clients to navigate our evolving ecosystem with the consistent goal of driving performance on their behalf.

How so?

We analyze and adjust campaigns daily to maintain and improve performance for our clients.  Throughout COVID, we’ve had to manage campaigns in lockstep with supply chain constraints on client inventory. In addition to impacts on client business, supply chain challenges also impacted the media marketplace. Many advertisers had to pull back media spend resulting in an increased availability of premium inventory. At LWD, we are always in the market, which allows for us to negotiate many highly efficient opportunistic deals for our clients which leads to improved performance and increased ROI. — Kimeko McCoy

By the numbers

The brands have discovered the metaverse. Increasingly, brands all the way from Disney to Ralph Lauren are racing toward the virtual space to meet audiences there — that is, if they are actually there. As the metaverse gains more buzz, experts caution against working with snake oil salesmen. Meanwhile, others question if the metaverse is worth the hype. According to a new report from research and consulting firm Gartner, Inc., many consumers have never even heard of the metaverse. Find key details from the research below:

• 35% of those surveyed have never heard of the metaverse.
• 8% of respondents have either heard of the metaverse but do not know what it means, or think they understand the metaverse but would struggle to explain it to someone else. 
• Only 6% of people identify as being comfortable enough in their understanding of the metaverse to explain it to others. — Kimeko McCoy

Quote of the week

“We’re relied on more to do more of what the sales operation has done in the past. And we’re expected to work right across product, sales and customer divisions to be able to deliver insight on purchasing habits and past trends and future predictions. I spend a lot of my time looking at the past to predict what the next quarter is going to look like.”

— Jennifer Smith, CMO at video player Brightcove, on how the CMO role has once again evolved.

What we’ve covered

• How the Ukraine invasion impacts brand safety.
• Why podcast agencies are wary of moving away from host-read ads.
• Curious about marketing mix modeling? Read our latest WTF.

Mark Garner’s job would have been much simpler a decade ago. As evp of global content sales and business development at A+E Networks, he’s charged with doing deals to distribute the company’s own original programming. 

“My job is to sell all the content that we have in our library and all of our upcoming content that we’re producing on a go-forward basis across a multitude of partners,” Garner said in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.

“Multitude” may not capture the magnitude of distribution outlets. In the past, the distribution would have been largely limited to selling the shows through storefronts, be they brick-and-mortar like Blockbuster or digital like Apple’s iTunes. But the scope of those deals now spans the spectrum of streaming services, from Netflix and Discovery+ to The Roku Channel and Crackle. And then there are A+E Networks’ own streaming properties, including its 24/7 channels running on free, ad-supported streaming TV services.

Setting up these deals isn’t so simple as selling to the highest bidder, though. Sometimes a near-term deal can cut into the long-term payday. “While there might be some really interesting check that could be written in the near term, they may, in fact, not take into account the opportunity cost of the long-term value, the lifetime value of this content,” Garner said.

The equation would likely only get even more complicated if A+E Networks were to decide to roll out a standalone streaming service a la Paramount’s Paramount+.

“Right now we’re very happy with where we sit in the ecosystem where we have the opportunity to distribute our content broadly across a number of different places,” said Garner.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.

Evaluating a show’s long-term upside

There are franchises we have that we think, by preserving them in a certain way, they will create greater value for us in the long run. It’s really difficult to say what is going to age well and grow over time. A lot of that has to do with seeing how well it performs in its initial days on the linear networks where we premiere them. 

Valuing a linear TV show based on its digital distribution

We had a show “Kings of Pain,” which we had on the History channel. It was a really interesting show: these two guys going around to various countries and locations and measuring pain thresholds. But honestly it didn’t perform as well as we would have liked it to perform on History. But it did really, really well in some digital environments. And it became an opportunity for us to produce a second season and have these digital environments be the real reason why we were continuing with that show.

Extending a TV show’s lifetime value

It’s both a quantitative exercise as well as a very qualitative exercise. It takes into a lot of demographic, psychographic, environmental factors about where it’s going to work best. What I love about all of this that we’re going through right now is that something that used to probably only have a life cycle on a television network for a couple of years can be extended for years and years and years if you do it right. 

Shrinking the length of distribution deals

You’re seeing shorter deals getting done. As much as many of us would like those deals to be longer, the deals are getting shorter, so the deal cycles are happening more frequently.