Month: March 2022

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

Village Marketing was recently acquired by WPP to become a division of Wunderman Thompson. What does that actually mean for the agency?

Village is a full-funnel influencer shop. That means that we build brands and we drive growth, we do all of it. So first and foremost, finding an agency that aligned with our vision and that saw where Village fit within it was crucial. What does that mean for the agency? It means that we get to be a part of a broader platform, but we also still get to be Village. We’re [now] a division of Wonderman Thompson, which means that we are running the influencer marketing division, which previously hasn’t existed and we get to work with the different arms of Wonderman while also maintaining the work that we’re doing and the vision that we have just within the broader platform. That’s gonna help us achieve the global scale.

There are a number of influencer marketing agencies that brands often work with for influencer marketing rather than traditional creative shops. Why is that?

Influencer marketing has traditionally been very siloed. We really haven’t seen influencer marketing fully integrated into a broader agency the right way at scale. [Village Marketing becoming a division of Wonderman Thompson] is a huge signal [that influencer marketing is becoming less siloed]. What this signals is [that] not only is influencer marketing no longer meant to be a siloed part of your media mix or your creative approach but that broader creative agencies are going to start to figure out how to integrate influencer marketing in a different way into full plans. That’s a huge shift from what’s traditionally been happening. Even when creative agencies have an influencer division, it has almost always been an add-on. We haven’t seen strong integration of an influencer shop. We’re now gonna see that. And I think we’re gonna continue to see it over the next year.

Do you see a shift in the perception of influencer marketing overall? 

Influencer marketing has traditionally been looked at as media. Or even worse, it’s been looked at as just [communications]. It is so much more than that. As influencer marketing becomes a channel for commerce, meaning that you will be able to shop brands all the way through the entire funnel on Instagram and on TikTok, that is now going to change the way that we think about social media and creator marketing in its entirety. This is now going to be a commerce platform in addition to being the media. That shift is going to happen and is going to be big, which means that we have to think more holistically about the way that we integrate brands into platforms. Commerce is no longer going to just be retailers plus e-commerce, it’s going to now also be social commerce. That is an entirely new way to look at social in the creator space rather than just media.

How so?

Everything is about the consumer journey, the steps in the process equate back to how much you sell directly. It’s an enormous difference when you no longer have to click off of Instagram and go to another website to purchase when you get to stay within Instagram and just pop things into your cart. That UX makes buying simpler. You do not have to click off to another website. It’s gonna go straight into your cart. What we know to be true as marketers, and this is a fact, the easier the funnel is the simpler the more people purchase.

And so it is a pretty significant difference to not have to go off platforms to shop. That’s really important if you are driving sales from the creator space. With social commerce, the creator is the start and end to the purchase. And what does that mean for you as a brand, if no one’s ever landed on your website to shop? How does that change the experience when you ship the product to your door, if they didn’t get to hear about you from the way that you wanted to talk about it, they were only hearing about you from a creator?  That puts a lot more emphasis and importance on that creator’s post. It’s the biggest change that will happen in the creator space since the launch of Instagram stories. It is that big.

Last year, the company reported that its stories were read by 40 million consumers across the U.S., by way of its own homepage as well as the newspapers and TV and radio stations that subscribe to the service. Among its clients are some of the largest purveyors of local news, including newspaper chains Hearst, Tribune and McClatchy and TV station group Nexstar. Stacker said its publisher network grew by more than 300% between 2021 and 2020.

CEO Noah Greenberg co-founded New Jersey-based Stacker in 2017 with three of his former colleagues from Graphiq, a data aggregation and visualization company headquartered in Santa Barbara, California, that was bought by Amazon the same year. Stacker’s managing editor is Nicole Caldwell, who earlier helped launch the news org Green Matters and was an editor at lifestyle site Thrillist.

Greenberg, Caldwell and their team homed in on what they call “the white space” in the content landscape, particularly that which has been typically provided by newswires like the Associated Press and Reuters. Stacker takes a different approach to the traditional news service, however, by offering content for free to its local and national publishing partners, subsidizing its newsroom by working with brands to underwrite select content through Stacker Studio.

Stacker has never received outside investment and, according to Greenberg, became profitable after six months, with revenue forecast to grow 250% in 2022 versus last year. (Revenue is approaching eight figures, according to the company.) The content team has grown to some 30 employees and 60 freelancers who produce around 150 stories per month.

On the sponsored content side, about 35 pieces per month are funded by brand partners, with Stacker attracting about 100 partners since launch.

One such client, London-based Simply Business, a venture-backed fintech company in the insurance space, sought to promote its bona fides among the small business community through an integrated content and earned media strategy designed by Stacker. After unearthing relevant content in the SMB space, the service produced multiple articles, each earning around 170 media pickups. Within 6 months, the company had earned more than 1,000 media placements. “Stacker has really streamlined our link-building strategy,” said Mariah Bliss, the brand’s senior manager of digital content.

Added Chris Fleguel, director of growth at the Canadian eco-friendly product manufacturer Pela, another Stacker client: “Having the opportunity to invest in both quality journalism and in Pela’s growth has really been a win-win. In partnering with Stacker, we’re able to work with a team we trust will create stories on our behalf that publishers want to run, which then bolsters our brand’s awareness and authority. There’s no other model like it.”

Greenberg noted how content marketing has evolved in recent years, moving toward a focus among brands on “real journalism,” noting, “There’s just a lot of investment going into producing actual, authoritative content from brands.” Lately, companies like crypto giant Coinbase have created their own news operations.

That said, most brands don’t want to build their own newsrooms, and many don’t know how to get their content produced and disseminated except by way of a company website or blog. That’s where Stacker comes in. “We’ve found ourselves in a really interesting place where we can turn those [brand] dollars into real quality content and make that freely available to news outlets across the country — and with that also fund our entire newsroom,” he said.

Stacker delivers hyperlocal insights at scale, spanning news, business and lifestyle topics and localized across all 50 states and 384 metro areas to help small newsrooms bolster local coverage. Whether it’s stories about rural hospital closures or a breakdown of voter demographics by state, Stacker uncovers the stories often hidden behind troves of data.

That requires expertise, naturally, and unlike many other news operations, Stacker is looking to hire journalists. “Obviously, for seven verticals, we need a lot of subject matter experts, so we’re constantly recruiting,” Caldwell said.

The editor explained the way the content process functions for clients. Say, a real estate brand signs on to sponsor content. Caldwell’s team then brainstorms hot topics in the real estate industry, finds datasets to illuminate those trends and determines their methodology. It presents its insights to the client who then signs off on the story scope.

Transparency with readers is essential, with content labeled as sponsored. Stacker avoids tactics like keyword stuffing and promotional language. As Caldwell put it, “We’re just producing the straight story, just like we would for any other Stacker piece. Once we’ve matched a subject with the subject matter expert, we do all the same rigorous [work] as in any newsroom in the country.” Advertisers may chime in with a suggestion, but they are not involved in the editing process, the editor stressed.

“We are sending our content to newsrooms around the country,” she said. “Our integrity and reputation are everything, so we can’t afford to have anything feel like sponsored content or to be promotional in any way.”

World news

The key hits: 

• The hyper-personal TikTok algorithm makes it difficult to break news unlike on other platforms.
• Vice World News and The Washington Post are turning journalists into personalities to establish trust in their brands.
• CBS News is treating the Gen Z-dominant TikTok audience like its traditional nightly news audience.

As of last Thursday, many users’ TikTok “For You” pages (homepages on the platform tailored to individual users’ interest) may have looked noticeably different than they did a day prior. Videos of bombings and missile attacks on Ukraine were circulating the web at warp speed as Russia began an invasion of its western neighbor in a violent and unwarranted attack. TIkTok users around the world were given a first-hand look at the beginning stages of war.

News outlets, including CBS News, The Washington Post and Vice News, have been using TikTok to cover the conflict and have recorded the platform’s audience of 1 billion people be receptive to that coverage.

“Gen Z cares deeply about current affairs in the world and they have proven time and time again that they want and deserve quality, original journalism that feels authentic to the platform where they consume it,” said Christina Capatides, vp of social media and trending content at CBS News. “It’s a gross misunderstanding of younger audiences to assume that news content needs to be somehow dumbed down to be made palatable to them.” 

Key numbers:

• 1 million: the number of new followers Vice World News gained in just under two weeks after it started covering the unrest between Ukraine and Russia. It now has 1.2 million followers and all of its TikTok coverage is and will be dedicated to this conflict indefinitely.
• 25,000: The number of new followers The Washington Post saw last week, which is 2.5 to 5 times higher than the average weekly follower count. Three-fourths of the Post’s TikTok posts covering the conflict will be dedicated to this war for the time being.
• 200,000-300,000: The number of new followers CBS News estimates it’s gained since last week. It currently is posting a mix of Ukraine news and other U.S. and world news.

TikTok is not a friend to breaking news 

TikTok’s algorithm does not always favor breaking news. That can help to explain why the publishers aren’t necessarily racing to post videos on TikTok that cover the Russia-Ukraine news as it breaks. Instead, they’re focusing on second-day analysis and humanitarian stories from the ground.

Unlike Twitter, TikTok’s algorithm is more interest-based than chronological, so it’s not uncommon for users to see a video that was originally posted a week prior by the time they come across it. Because of that, being the first news outlet to post a breaking video of a missile attack or a family attempting to flee their home is not likely to matter much in the grand scheme of the algorithm.

“The unique platform trait of TikTok is you really can’t rely on the content that you post today to be seen today,” said Nick Cicero, vp of strategy at streaming and social intelligence company Conviva. 

Where tweets on Twitter see upwards of 90% of engagements within the first 72 hours of being posted, he said TikTok will continually serve users videos that were posted days or weeks ago.

To try and expedite the process of gaining virality, Capatides said her team goes after a high completion rate, which is rewarded by the algorithm, and “combs through our broadcast and streaming coverage for the most superb morsels that can communicate complicated current events in a way that they stand on their own.” This results in a mix of edited down, 30-ish second segments from “The CBS Evening News with Norah O’Donnell” broadcasted the night before.

Other than this, CBS News has on-the-ground correspondents interviewing locals about the unfolding events as well as reposting videos from wire services like the AP and Reuters and licensors like Storyful, with additional context written in text overlays on the platform.

Vice World News is covering the news as it unfolds, but breaking it themselves is not the main goal. Its correspondents are also on the ground filming interviews and content, but journalists based in the London office are posting analysis videos that recap major events or dispute misinformation. 

Meanwhile, The Washington Post has chosen to steer clear of breaking news altogether and post more second-day analysis and explainer-style videos, which has been its strategy since first joining the platform in May 2019, said Dave Jorgenson, a producer, writer and TikTok content lead at WaPo. 

Taking a personal approach in both content and delivery

It’s no secret that big personalities perform well on TikTok, as personalized and intimate of a platform as it is. So a lot of publishers have chosen to turn their journalists, correspondents and producers into the face of the coverage that they’re publishing about the Ukraine conflict. 

This is an approach that Jorgenson has done from day one on TikTok, as he has personally been in the vast majority of the posts the Post has made. The three-person, U.S.-based TikTok team is producing content from home that summarizes major events that took place that day in scripted sketches. 

Jorgenson has also started working with the publication’s correspondents on the ground in Ukraine and Russia who are creating explainer videos with their face in the frame, which he said is meant to hopefully provide the same level of recognition and trust that he and his teammates have done with its scripted content.

Vice World News has also relied heavily on its deployed correspondents, who are recurring faces on the brand’s TikTok account, to cover what’s happening with videos that are created intentionally for TikTok, though they’re responsible for reporting stories for a number of different platforms while on location. 

“[It’s important to] have journalists who act as your companion on a given news event — someone that you feel like you know, and trust, and you recognize them,” said Katie Drummond, svp of global news at Vice News.

But the posts that are performing the best are ones that take a person-on-the-street-style approach. 

“It’s really important for us that we highlight the human impact of this conflict and that we share the human stories,” said Drummond. “Some of our best performing videos have been our correspondent in Kiev interviewing people about how they’re feeling about the potential for a Russian invasion.” 

As for CBS News, showing the humanitarian impact of war is as important as showing a surveillance video of an attack or a politician speaking about the unrest. 

“It’s really one of the first times that the young people of the world are witnessing a war on the ground,” said Capatides. “We’re trying to bring them the scenes of what war looks like,” such as the line at a gas station in Kiev that stretched down the street or Ukrainian mothers crying and hugging their kids after they were reunited at the border of Hungary. – Kayleigh Barber

What we’ve heard

“We cover disinformation as a core theme at Vice World News and disinformation on social media as it pertains to [the Ukraine-Russia] conflict. But for us to sort of wade into user-generated content at this moment in time just doesn’t feel like a judicious editorial strategy.”

— Katie Drummond, svp of global news at Vice News, on the sourcing of first-hand accounts of the Russian invasion of Ukraine from social media

The neverending debate around podcast ads

If there’s one topic that keeps coming up at the podcast events I’ve attended, it’s the tension between host-read, baked-in ads and dynamically-inserted, pre-produced ads.

This debate fired up a panel and the audience at the podcast-focused Hot Pod Fest at On Air Summit in New York City last week, where advertisers commiserated on the struggle to maintain the “authenticity and intimacy” of the host-read ad but overcome the limitations of that native podcast environment at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Podcast Upfront in September.

While Dan Granger, CEO and founder of audio ad agency Oxford Road described host-read ads as the “golden goose” of podcast advertising — a listener recognizes and trusts the host’s voice, and its endorsement of a brand or product — dynamically-inserted ads overtook host-read ads as accounting for the majority of podcast ads in 2020, according to the IAB 2020 Podcast Advertising Revenue Report. The reasons for dynamically-inserted ads’ rise largely stem from the buying and insertion processes being automated, quicker and easier — and usually cheaper. Those may sound like pros and effectively settle the debate, but they also amount to a potential problem that further inflames the issue.

Agencies are wary of the growing desire for dynamically-inserted ads, after seeing what programmatic buying can do to video and digital display. Automation makes pre-produced ads easier to buy, driving down the price of CPMs, leading to higher ad loads (in other words, more ads — and eventually, potentially poor quality ads). That could ruin the “magic” of podcasting, which generally has fewer ads than other mediums like radio, Granger said.

Agencies are worried about just that — that podcasts could turn into radio (the horror!). “If a listener wants to hear 30-second scripted ads, there’s a great thing called radio,” said Stephen Smyk, svp of podcast and influencer marketing at audio agency Veritone One.

Granger worries the podcast advertising space is becoming an “either-or” situation rather than a “both-and.” “The marketplace will always go towards scale and efficiency — it must, that’s progress. But in doing so you end up losing the humanity of it and the humanity of it has a lot of commercial benefits,” Granger said. (Most of the clients Oxford Road is working with are spending their podcast ad budgets in dynamically-inserted, host-read ads, he said.)

So how long will we be talking about the rise of dynamically-inserted, pre-produced ads? “This ain’t going away for a while,” Granger said. – Sara Guaglione

Numbers to know

1 million: The number of paid digital subscribers that the Financial Times has converted, making digital revenues equal all the rest of its revenue streams combined.

100: The number of writers and content producers from Jezebel, Gizmodo and other G/O Media websites that went on strike this week.

$50 million: The amount of money Ben Smith and Justin Smith told investors they anticipate burning through before breaking even on their new global newsroom venture.

What we’ve covered

Ukraine invasion exposes balancing act of brand responsibility in advertising:

• News publishers are not seeing ad revenues grow despite upticks in traffic for their coverage of Russia’s Ukraine invasion.
• One publisher said prices for ads appearing against content discussing the war are 20% lower than average.

Read more about advertisers avoiding publishers’ Ukraine coverage here.

Months after putting up USA Today’s paywall, Gannett has big ambitions for digital subscriptions but a long road ahead:

• Gannett aims to have amassed 6 million digital-only subscribers by 2025.
• It ended 2021 with 1.6 million digital-only subscribers and only expect to add 400,000 to 600,000 in 2022.

Read more about Gannett here.

WTF is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO)?:

• DAOs are basically clubs for crypto enthusiasts but with a communal bank account.
• Some publishers have started pitching DAOs on advertising opportunities.

Read more about DAOs here.

What we’re reading

CNN and The New York Times are preparing to fill two of their most prominent roles:
After CNN’s president Jeff Zucker resigned from his position earlier this month due to an undisclosed relationship with a colleague, the news outlet has been looking for a replacement and White House press secretary Jen Psaki is apparently at the top of their list of candidates, according to Puck. Meanwhile, the Times’ executive editor is preparing to retire and word on the street is that managing editor Joe Kahn is supposedly on deck to take over once Dean Baquet finally steps down.

ESPN’s Black-focused site The Undefeated is expanding its coverage and changing its name:
The Undefeated has been renamed to Andscapes as a way to expand its scope from the intersection of race, sports and culture to include music, food, technology, personal finance, parenting and travel, The New York Times reported. In addition to this, the site will also start getting into book publishing, live experiences, music, television and film.

Australia got Facebook and Google to pay up; now other countries are following suit:
Australia was the first country to get the major platforms to cough up payment for links to publishers’ content. The country’s “news media bargaining code” was a tough battle that threatened publishers’ traffic, but ultimately the Australian government prevailed and Facebook and Google paid those media companies accordingly. A year later, other countries are going after the same payment agreements for their publishers, according to Wired.

Amidst staff frustrations, The New York Times said it’s starting to prioritize retention:
Some of the Times’ employees are growing increasingly upset to the point of quitting because of the company’s policies on outside projects, according to Insider. The Times said it approves more than 90% of staffers’ external projects, but will set up a committee to review outside project proposals that compete with its own journalism. 

Publishers are starting to abandon Google in their mobile-optimization efforts:
Vox Media, BuzzFeed’s Complex Networks and BDG are starting to test their own versions of mobile-optimized article pages rather than using Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages framework to build out those pages, according to The Wall Street Journal. Google first introduced AMP in 2015, but digital publishers, including Future plc, have begun to seek out other options.

“We’re early on in a new wave of complexity that’s going to affect how agencies and advertisers reach consumers, and how media companies think about how they grow and monetize audiences,” said Shimmel, who said datafuelX is going public now in hopes of being used in the video upfront marketplace. “I’m concerned as an industry we’re not having a dialogue around what does currency need to morph into.”

datafuelX’s first product is a reach and frequency tool with cross-platform capability called precisionX that can calibrate against any number of the dozen or so data sets out there, making it “reusable” no matter the data set. Its value, explained Shimmel, is the ability to cut across linear, digital and streaming inputs, as a means to cross-platform activation. It models at an ID level who’s going to get reach and frequency and who gets none from a planned campaign. Then it lets users put the signals into their ad server and then suppress unwanted audiences, he added. 

The second tool datafuelX has launched is outcomeX, a predictive analytics modeling platform, mainly for media sellers/publishers. It builds forecasts of a sought-after activity, enabling sellers to build optimized schedules in dayparts where that activity is high.  

Given Aversano’s role as a co-founder, it’s no big surprise that Univision has signed up to both products. Brian Lin, Univision’s senior vp of product management & advanced advertising sales, said that after some internal alpha testing last year, the network in January partnered with search data provider EDO to use outcomeX’s modeling tool to optimize search activity for clients in the insurance, telco and beauty categories. 

“We saw really positive results, upwards of 20% lifts on top of, you know, what the brand did initially on their baseline plans,” said Lin. “It’s something that we think is going to be very sticky. We’re also continuing to explore a number of outcome based endpoints as well, things like web visitation and foot traffic with datafuelX.”

Lin attributed the precisionX tool to helping Univision accelerate its planning process in providing guarantees on data to buyers. 

One advanced TV executive at a major holding company media agency, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said datafuelX’s angle of reusability is a solid point of differentiation from many other data ad-tech firms out there. 

“Data is very expensive, and this might be a more cost-efficient, user-friendly, higher level of service” than the other guys. “They have the data scientists on their side, that know TV and how it’s transacted. They’re not the only game in town, but it’s an appealing plug-and-play option.”

The exec also cited datafuelX’s pure-play mission is singular in purpose, unlike many of the other data firms that are offering data services, but also selling media time and space, which could be seen as a conflict to some agencies or media sellers. “The way they’re approaching this in the market is unique. But it’s early yet,” said the exec. 

Shimmel said Jay Amato, former general manager of OpenAP, was brought on as the company’s president, while Horizon Media veteran Spencer Lambert heads the data science team as manager of product and partnership success.