Month: April 2022

“The Great Recession and Shecession has driven so many out of work,” said Jodi Patkin, svp of brand marketing and communications at theSkimm. “Having that balance and being able to make an informed decision is more important than ever.”

The database features details around which companies offer paid parental leave, how much, fertility leave and adoption options, as well as any transition back to work plans. So far, major brands like Adobe and Bank of America, as well as advertising holding companies, like GroupM, have signed up. There is also information and resources to help users launch efforts at their own companies. 

The database officially went live March 23 and is available to the public for free, not only as a resource to job seekers looking to compare benefits across companies, but to encourage companies that don’t have paid family leave policies to create their own, Patkin said.

It’s part of theSkimm’s #ShowUsYourLeave campaign, sparked by debates last year on Capitol Hill as to whether President Biden’s Build Back Better plan would include paid family leave. According to Patkin, it also stems from conversations around the pandemic-induced, so-called “Shecession,” in which working moms and caregivers were bled from the workplace due to lack of childcare and lackluster company flexible work policies.

“Paid family leave is exacerbating the gender pay gap,” Patkin said. “It is having women fall behind in their careers. Through #ShowUsYourLeave, people have spoken up and told us what they want in terms of how we hold companies accountable.” 

Unlike other industrialized countries, the United States does not currently have national standards on paid family. That’s still up for debate as Biden’s Build Back Better plan heads to the Senate floor. However, theSkimm is not alone in rallying public support for paid family leave measures. 

Within the marketing and advertising industry, a coalition of creative firms established Pledge Parental Leave, a pledge pushing other firms to offer three months’ fully paid leave for new parents. Meanwhile, communications agencies like Jennifer Bett Communications and Inkhouse, have created in-house efforts to give employees time off for pregnancy loss. 

At this stage of the pandemic, within the advertising industry and beyond, there seems to be a new interest in providing employees with as much leave as possible, said Simon Fenwick, executive vice president of talent, equity and inclusion at the 4A’s.

“The Great Resignation has been eye-opening for a lot of organizations,” he said. “They sort of expected people to stay in their jobs, only leave if they had another job, and be grateful for their positions.”

That hasn’t been the case. Across the world, millions of people have quit their jobs in part of what’s being called the “Great Resignation.” In marketing, more than half of the marketers who identify as women have left or considered leaving the industry due to the complexities of the pandemic, according to LinkedIn research published in MarketingWeek.

Per Fenwick, the changes show that people have started to reevaluate what’s important in life, prioritizing things like paid parental leave, mental health and flexible work environments. If companies don’t keep up with the demand, they risk losing the talent wars, he said. 

Since the onset of the pandemic and the 2020s social justice movement, the advertising industry and corporate America at large, have signed initiatives similar to #ShowUsYourLeave, including Black Lives Matter and pledging to invest more dollars in minority-owned companies. Conversations around those efforts have since quieted, but Fenwick hopes employee pressure will keep the momentum going. 

At theSkimm, Patkin says there are plans to update the public database once per week, allowing companies and individuals to contribute through surveys and forms. 

“We haven’t even scratched the surface. We want to continue growing this to provide more information,” she said.

Publishers were investing more in commerce as an approach to diversify revenue streams, according to 139 publishing professionals surveyed in the first quarter of 2022. However, that share reported that affiliate commerce revenue leveled off after a pandemic-powered year of significant gains.

And despite the considerable hype surrounding the promise of emerging technology for the media and marketing industries, publishers seem neither hugely impressed with or planning for significant investment in these burgeoning areas. Close to half of the 122 publishing execs surveyed in February think none of these emerging technologies will have a significant impact on their businesses over the next few years. The metaverse, NFTs and blockchain held the most promise, albeit small, while virtual reality and cyrptocurrencies were far lower priorities.

Clearly, the social network label view hasn’t stunted TikTok’s ads business too much. If anything, it’s probably helped it carve out its own share of social media ad budgets — to a point. 

Spending on the app continues to grow at a clip. It now accounts for between 10 to 20% of ad agency Mekanism’s ad spending on social media. Even those marketers who aren’t as confident in TikTok plan on doing more there eventually. The app’s share of Tinuiti’s social ad budgets is still in the single digits, for example, but spending on it grew 160% for the year to March 2022. 

“Generally, we are still working with social teams, rather than dedicated TikTok teams, and they have their own budgets,” said Joe Saw, director of communications at influencer marketing agency FanBytes. “However social budgets are certainly trending upwards.”

Encouraging as these gains are, TikTok could be raking in so much more. It could be dipping into other budget pots entirely — just like it did at the onset of the pandemic. Back then, media dollars earmarked for outdoor and experiential advertising were moved into online platforms. And they’ve stayed there ever since for the most part. 

In TikTok’s case, a lot of this money went (and continues to go) on its takeovers, hashtag challenges and brand effects — or in other words its coming from brand advertisers. 

And it’s not hard to see why and especially the way TikTok frames it:  the app drives nine times more engagement than Facebook, per data the company shares with marketers. Moreover, advertisers on TikTok average 21 times more reach than Facebook or Instagram. Oh, and the engagement rate per follower on TikTok averages 8% per follower versus 0.09% on Facebook and 1.6% on instagram. 

But there’s more to marketing there than going viral without a following. There’s ecommerce, search and even app installs. In other words, performance advertising. Getting advertisers to see that, however, is another story. To them, TikTok is either a social network or something else entirely; in short, a conundrum. 

“When you talk to execs at TikTok they don’t like being called a social network,” said the senior marketer at a fast moving consumer goods manufacturer, who spoke to Digiday on condition of anonymity over concerns they’d harm future relationships with the platform. “It’s clearly something they’re trying to get away from as they move into the next phase of growth.”

This next phase of growth will be further down the marketing funnel. It’s been the plan ever since the app made a beeline for commerce in 2019. Even back then, decision makers were wary of becoming another avenue for cheap reach for advertisers. They saw commerce as a way to show marketers that TikTok could be a place for their performance dollars as well as their branding ones. And yet, it’s only really over the last six months or so that the idea has really started to percolate in the minds of marketers. Not least because TikTok has been drumming it into them. 

“With a lot of the advertisers now, TikTok has become the primary focus,” said  Brendan Gahan, chief social officer at Mekanism

Moreover, gone are the days when TikTok execs were focused squarely on trumpeting the platform’s reach with younger audiences to marketers. Now, there’s a focus on showing what that reach can do for a company’s bottom line. Pixel tracking and optimized audience matching on TikTok are regular features of meetings with brand marketers as are the multitude of ways to buy products while watching creators.

“There’s a lot more information shared on the updates TikTok is doing to its tech suite,” said Tim van der Wiel, founder of social technology agency Gospooky. “It’s increasingly set up to appeal to marketers who want the full funnel approach to marketing and also see a clearer return on investment.”

The more this happens, the more stable spending on TikTok becomes. Yes, it’s trending upwards, but TikTok isn’t viewed as another branding or performance channel in the same way Facebook and Instagram are. Which is to say advertisers compare Facebook against search when drawing up budgets for the year or the quarter, whereas TikTok gets compared against other social networks. Closing that gap isn’t easy when neither targeting or measurement on TikTok is as sharp as they are on Facebook. 

Nevertheless, it is starting to happen. Not only are there more performance advertisers testing out the platform, larger advertisers are spending more. 

Take L’Oréal, for example. Last year, it tested commerce on TikTok. Fast forward to today and it’s letting users purchase creator-endorsed product selection boxes as they scroll through the app. 

It’s a similar story for many other advertisers — from Hollister to Duolingo —moving beyond experimenting with ads on TikTok. In fact, there are a growing number of instances where TikTok will account for the top non-Meta-owned channel for ad spending like at independent agency and TikTok marketing partner Tinuiti. 

“This year there are marketers saying to us “here is our social bucket of money, what will be our split across Facebook and Instagram as one entity” and then they’re doing the same for TikTok as another entity,” said Avi Ben-Zvi, the agency’s vp of paid social. “It’s the first time that we’re starting to see TikTok move out of that innovation bucket.”

These are the marketers who are leaning in somewhat blindly to advertising on TikTok. They know they’re not going to get a full picture of what their ads there do and how well they do it, but they’ve seen enough to believe those ads will ladder back up to the business eventually — especially as targeting and measurement continue to improve on the platform.  

This irks some of the more hard-line performance advertisers, of course, but even they are starting to come round to this way of spending dollars — albeit due (at least in part) to more opportunistic reasons. 

Think about it: the success of any performance campaign is a balancing act between what a marketer pays for traffic and how valuable it is when it gets to the intended site. Ultimately, that’s affected more by the market than anything else. Given there aren’t lots of performance advertisers on TikTok, the cost-per-clicks are low enough that performance there will be higher than on other channels — for better or worse. Rarely, does this rationale work out well in the long-term. 

“We’re trying to convince advertisers not to view TikTok as just another way to try and drive lower funnel results like they do on Facebook and Instagram,” said Ben-Zvi. “This is a channel where you can have unprecedented reach from an audience that’s super leaned in, and you can generate tons of engagement from that, which in and of itself will move a marketer’s brand forward across coveted demographics that could make direct response efforts a lot more effective in the long run.”

While the technology isn’t accredited by the Media Rating Council yet, several media agencies have experimented with it. Adelaide, a private company helmed by CEO Marc Guldimann, held a private event on March 31, that Digiday attended, during which several media agencies using Adelaide’s AU metric tool talked about what they’re doing with it and how it’s impacted them.

Perhaps the biggest surprise to the media agency execs who kicked the tires on AU — including Sébastien Hernoux, chief data and technology officer for OMD, Caitlin Russell, director of marketing analytics and data consulting at Havas Media, and Ed McElvain, executive vp and director of P3 (digital platforms and data-driven media buying) at Mediahub — is its value as a measure of both brand and performance effectiveness.

“There was a strong correlation between attention and performance metrics,” said Hernoux. “We’re optimizing against attention — and now we’re working on how to fold it into our activation plans.” Hernoux noted that it’s harder to fold attention into the planning process as it is into activation because “it’s a bit harder to prove results that way.”

McElvain, who works a lot in programmatic buying, said it’s helping his agency zone in on more effective investments for clients: “Today we’re buying better inventory because of attention,” he said. 

But effective can also mean expensive, which is a challenge when working with brands’ procurement folks, since the use of attention metrics tends to point investment toward more expensive inventory — the bane of procurement folks everywhere. As Havas Media’s Russell noted, it’s a matter of making proper use of attention metrics to prove to procurement people money wasn’t wasted. “This can help prove that expensive campaigns showed value,” she said.

Will attention become a currency? Irwin Gotlieb, former CEO of WPP’s GroupM and an investor in Adelaide, who spoke at the event, said he ultimately believes it should be, but doesn’t think that should be a concern today. “I wouldn’t debate whether this should be currency or not,” he said. “We always had secondary and tertiary currencies. Eventually when knowledge asymmetry goes away, it can become primary.” 

“While we continue to focus on the buy-side, an evolution of the market is inevitable as more advertisers optimize using AU,” said Guldimann after the event. “So we are planning for a time when more of the market is using AU, creating scarcity of quality impressions. At that point advertisers may be better off asking for guarantees denominated in AU rather than optimizing.”

A brief look at this week’s Media Buying Summit

If you’re not signed up yet to attend Digiday’s Media Buying Summit, this week from April 5-7 at the Miramonte Resort & Spa in Indian Wells, Calif., here’s a quick look at the conversations and topics you’ll be missing: 

• Multi-scenario planning
• Several angles on independent agencies
• Leading, not following, with advances in digital
• Cross-screen measurement
• Digital audio and podcasting
• Key trends in commerce
• AI and machine learning in the agency world
• Finding new audiences for clients without losing existing ones.

I hope you’ll be there as Digiday’s managing editor Sara Jerde and I host the conversations. 

Color by numbers

Instagram may still be a hot property for marketers to promote their wares, but it may be cooling off. According to recent HubSpot Blog Research, many Instagram marketers reported losing followers between 2020 to 2021. Two out of five cited not posting enough as the main reason brands lose followers. HubSpot surveyed more than 1,000 marketers on how to combat the dropping numbers: 

• 78% of marketers use Instagram Stories, of which 43% post on behalf of their brand multiple times a week;
• 18% of respondents said Instagram Stories content that reflected their brand’s values produced the greatest ROI; 
• From the consumer side, 35% of consumers prefer short narratives with a mix of photos, text and videos.

Takeoff & landing

• Stagwell bought Canadian multicultural full-service agency Dyversity Communications, which specializes in Chinese and South Asian communications. The agency will be folded into Stagwell’s Donor Partner Network, and Dyversity’s founder Albert Yup will continue to run the shop as CEO. Terms were not disclosed.
• Dentsu’s iProspect hired Performics’ chief client officer Josh Dwiggins to be its global chief client strategy officer, reporting into Amanda Morrissey, iProspect’s global client & brand president. 
• Media investment analysis firm Ebiquity bought two companies, Media Management Inc. (whose founder and CEO Thomas Bridge becomes Ebiquity’s president of North America), and MediaPath Network (whose founding partner, executive chairman and chief product & innovation officer Susanne Elias becomes Ebiquity’s chief business integration officer). 
• National CineMedia launched a new data intelligence platform, NCMx, which aims to give brands and advertisers deeper data insights into moviegoers and connect with them through retargeting on mobile and digital devices before and after visiting theaters. 

Direct quote

“As the media industry and the marketing industry concurrently advance with better technology and more innovative formats channels and solutions, the marriage of those things is super exciting. It allows us to be at the service of the patients and the physicians that we support, and make sure that we’re using all of the innovation that’s happening in marketing for the best possible ways to help close that gap in what has historically been a really challenging space to navigate. Even in the 15 years that I’ve been in health media, it’s been really encouraging to sort of see the difference of what it was. It was a drop in the bucket compared to what we can do today.”

— Andrea Palmer, president of Publicis Health Media, speaking about advances in healthcare marketing.

Speed reading

• Digiday senior media editor Tim Peterson outlines the push and pull between networks and brands/media agencies over programmatic buying in this year’s upfront.
• Digiday’s senior news editor Seb Joseph and senior ad tech reporter Ronan Shields tag-teamed on an explanation of just what exactly Google is up to with its latest Privacy Sandbox trials, and lingering concerns among publishers and buyers.
• Social Media Today has a good roundup on Twitter’s latest tests with new ad formats.

While private publishers have revealed their cards from time to time with announcements of wins and reported setbacks, publicly traded publishers like The New York Times, Gannett, The Arena Group, IAC, News Corp., and now BuzzFeed, provide more of a glimpse into how specific revenue streams are bouncing back as well as audience behaviors around how they are consuming news.

Below are some insights we’ve gathered from six public publishers’ most recent earnings reports, most of which for the full year 2021 (News Corp’s Dow Jones/WSJ reports on its fiscal year, which runs July 1 – June 30). 

Nearly all publishers in the above chart saw year-over-year growth from 2020 to 2021, which isn’t overly surprising given the pandemic’s hit to the economy and the advertising industry in the second and third quarters of 2020. Gannett, however earned about $200 million less this past year compared to 2020, though this only about a 6% decrease year over year. 

On average, publishers saw a 20% change in their annual revenue between 2020 and 2021. While many of the publishers can equally celebrate in that growth, the breakdown in where that new revenue came from varies.

Where BuzzFeed and Gannett have advertising contributing over 50% of their annual revenue, the Times only earned a quarter of its revenue last year from ads. Meanwhile, IAC’s Dotdash Meredith and The Arena Group only delineated between print and digital in their reports, however, IAC added print revenue from the recent acquisition of Meredith Corp at the end of 2021.

Dotdash Meredith’s revenue breakdown changed the most drastically, thanks to its M&A dealings. In 2021, digital revenue consisted of display advertising, performance marketing and licensing, while print revenue is comprised of subscription, newsstand, print advertising and performance marketing revenue, according to its 2021 annual SEC filing. In 2020, Dotdash’s revenue was broken down by display advertising, performance marketing and affiliate commerce commission revenue, which totaled $214 million.

BuzzFeed is one of the only publishers willing to break out its commerce revenue and not classify it as “other” in its reports. And what we can tell from their 2021 commerce business is how significantly publishers were impacted by supply chain issues in the fourth quarter, though BuzzFeed claims that the 26% decline year over year in the fourth quarter was not exclusively because of the shipping delays and inventory issues.

Instead, the company’s CFO Felicia DellaFortuna attributed a portion of this drop off to “the world reopen[ing],” resulting in the return of in-person shopping, during BuzzFeed’s earnings call on March 22.

That said, BuzzFeed’s total commerce revenue for the year increased by 19% from 2020, totaling $61.6 million compared to approximately $50 million earned in 2020. This means its commerce content is attributable to approximately $600 million worth of transactions last year.

Publishers broadly are bullish on their commerce businesses in 2022, despite the return to in-person shopping, including Vice Media Group’s chief digital officer Cory Haik, who said earlier this year on the Digiday Podcast that she expects commerce to account for one-third of total revenue by 2024.

Each of the publishers — the Times, Gannett and WSJ — saw growth quarter to quarter, indicating that any existing churn didn’t leave a significant dent, but there were some trends affecting readers’ propensity to subscribe in 2021, such as the post-Trump slump and subscription fatigue.

News Corp’s Dow Jones and WSJ division saw modest growth quarter to quarter, but The New York Times hit a milestone in its subscriptions business at the beginning of 2022 — three years earlier than expected. The publisher had a goal of reaching 10 million paid subscriptions by 2025 and instead hit that threshold after the acquisition of The Athletic closed in February this year and added 1.2 million subscriptions to its total. 

That said, the Times had made significant advancements on its own thanks to a surge in readers’ interest in news, as well as having multiple, vertical-specific subscription offerings around cooking, gaming and the Wirecutter. Between the acquisition and this multi-offering approach, the publisher is optimistic about achieving its new goal of 15 million subscribers by 2027. 

In 2022, Gannett expects to exceed 2 million digital subscribers, an increase of 400,000 from the end-of-year total the company saw in 2021, and from there expects to grow at a 40% rate year-over-year through 2025, ultimately bringing the company to its goal of having 6 million digital-only subscribers by 2025, according to its latest earnings. 

As Gannett had just launched a paywall on its marquee USA Today brand halfway through 2021, it only added 200,000 additional digital-only subscribers between first and second half. The goal for 2022 is to double that, which seems reasonable as the company tests different tactics to fill the subscriber funnel this year. From 2023 through 2025, however, significant bumps in new subscriptions well over 1 million per year will be required when compared to the 400,000 figure it’s looking to reach in 2022. 

While IAC doesn’t break out subscriptions, of note is that Dotdash Meredith’s print business was still very impactful to the bottom line, contributing close to 57% of its total revenue in 2021, with digital accounting for the remaining portion.