Month: April 2022

“More and more people are recognizing that success is a multi-layered effort that requires you to be healthy and well and of sound mind and the pandemic really made a lot of people pay more attention to that… We increasingly believe that success in life and success in business go hand in hand,” Murray said.

Murray declined to share specific details on how much CVS has committed to spend with Fortune through this deal. The deal with CVS is “one of the biggest” Fortune has landed, Murray said. The company declined to share just how big the deal is. Previously, software companies like Salesforce and Workday have paid to sponsor content hubs and franchises with Fortune, around topics like the return to work and the changes to the CFO role, with articles, newsletters, videos and event series.

Jennifer Fields is the new wellness deputy editor at Fortune and will oversee the vertical’s editorial content. Fields, who was previously executive editor of wellness and lifestyle at PopSugar, will hire up to 10 people this year for Fortune Well, including full-time staff and freelancers. This comes as Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell — who in September became the first woman to lead the business publication — has hired around 50 new employees since December, representing about 25% of Fortune’s total headcount.

Fortune Well’s target audience of mid-level managers is a relatively new focus for Fortune, Shontell said, outside of its core readership of C-suite executives. “This will be more for that younger manager set that we haven’t historically gone for, but that Fortune is actively pursuing in our growth,” she said. Reaching this audience has become an “additional priority” for Fortune, as part of Shontell’s vision for the publication as the new editor (which includes a new Success section that went live in February aimed a new, mid-level and rising managers, supported by a team of reporters led by executive editor Lindsey Stanberry), a spokesperson said. 

The Washington Post’s upcoming wellness section — which will be edited by Tara Parker-Pope, who was previously founding editor of The New York Times’ consumer health section, Well — is also a bid to reach a broader, younger audience with service-oriented journalism. In February, the Post announced it would add 20 new positions to cover climate and extreme weather this year, as part of this push for younger readers.

While Fortune was previously producing some lifestyle coverage, Fortune Well will be a dedicated destination with a mix of articles, videos, infographics and rankings. It will have its own franchises, a section in the print magazine, videos and social handles. While content will begin publishing on a hub on Fortune’s website, Fortune Well will migrate to its own microsite within Fortune.com and have its own look and feel in July, once the tech infrastructure and editorial team are established.

To start, the two main coverage areas for Fortune Well will be around mental health and long COVID, or long-lasting COVID-19 symptoms, Fields said. Fortune Well will also cover balance, burnout, workplace wellness programs and other advice, such as how to choose a nursing home for an elderly parent.

As part of the deal, CVS Health will select some of its managers to become fellows of Fortune Connect, a membership community for mid-career professionals on track to becoming executives. Since launching in October 2020, Fortune Connect has worked with 50 companies and about 1,000 fellows, Murray said. With new revenue lines such as Fortune Connect, the company’s digital ad revenue has grown by 100% since last year and is projected to increase another 40% this year, Murray said. Digital ad revenue makes up about a third of Fortune’s total revenue, he added, and the company overall was profitable last year. Murray declined to share specific revenue figures.

CVS employees will also get complimentary subscriptions to Fortune. Fortune began offering some enterprise subscriptions to its advertising clients in the last year or so, Murray said. CVS will also be a sponsor of Fortune’s Brainstorm Health conference in 2023. (Aetna, the insurance company owned by CVS, had an ad in the first print edition of Fortune magazine in February 1930, Murray noted.)

Last year wellness publishers saw an increase in spending from advertisers outside of the health and wellness category. And some non-endemic publishers are moving into the wellness category. This latest initiative from Fortune comes in the same month The Washington Post announced it expects to debut a wellness section this summer, supported by a team of 20 people.

The addition of non-endemic publishers to the wellness category means brands have a lot of options when they are looking to spend around health and wellness content. In order to succeed, Fortune has to “carve out a very specific swim lane” to attract an audience, said Whitney Fishman Zember, managing partner of innovation and consumer technology at GroupM’s Wavemaker agency.

“Fortune isn’t going to replace Women’s Health magazine, but if they are focused on [covering] a long-term ailment or ways of saving money through health, there’s a certain angle,” she said.

As more media companies move into covering health and wellness, “consumers will find the sources they trust and can consistently rely on and invest in with their time, attention and money,” Fishman Zember said — and advertisers will want to work with publishers who can show “proven value and utility with the consumer first.”

This success comes during a wave of uncertainty in the NFT space, which was recently marked earlier this month by an NFT of the first-ever tweet decreasing in value from the original $2.9 million sale to a top bid that only reached $277. This has started getting people to look for other reasons to buy outside of the potential monetary gains.

NFTs were not the only source of blockchain-related revenue for Time in the past year. Two advertisers (both of which are cryptocurrency investment firms) have paid in crypto since the option was first offered in April 2021: Grayscale in Bitcoin and Galaxy Digital in Ethereum. The combined total was equivalent to more than $1 million. The company would not share what the total revenue was from these deals.

In a little more than a year, Time has developed a sweeping blockchain business:

• In March 2021, Time launched its first NFT project, a three-part collection of digitized magazine covers from decades prior, and the top-selling one sold for the equivalent of $250,000 (135 ETH at the time).
• In April 2021, the company started accepting cryptocurrencies as payment for both subscriptions and advertising deals. 
• In September 2021, the publication launched its TIMEPieces project, which convenes crypto enthusiastic audiences into one Discord-based club (currently it has 40,000 community members) and labels all of its NFT drops under the same uniform TIMEPieces heading. 

TIMEPieces has dropped four collections on its own and two collaborations with musical artist Timbaland and with artist Pablo Stanley, who is behind the Robotos NFT collection. Its sixth collection and first musical NFT project with Timbaland drops Thursday and is called The Beatclub. It will have 252 buyable NFTs and prior to launch 2,000 people were pre-registered and approved (to avoid bots and malicious accounts).

Time has used the collaborations as a way to reach other crypto-native audiences and introduce them to TIMEPieces. Robotos, for example, has a community of 70,000 with 10,000 NFT holders. To reach that group of people, following the NFT partnership, Time Studios came on board to create a TV show from that collection’s illustrated IP. Including this project, the Studios arm has partnered with four NFT communities to bring their IP to life on video, according to the company. 

The crypto learning curve

Growth has come with its costs, however. After the first TIMEPieces launch last September, which sold out in 45 seconds, Grossman said they were exposed to bots and gas wars, which drove up the fees associated with NFT purchases because a surge of bots and buyers added demand in prioritization for minting. Though learning curves are expected with new tech, Time president of digital Bharat Krish said it caused his team to prioritize exclusivity and security of future drops.

“Initially when we started, we did have [a] naive approach where we thought we were going to be inclusive by opening up to everybody, which led to gas wars and we learned a lot from it,” said Krish. “Now, our product is a lot more secure, [by requiring] a registration process.” His team also added a raffle option and slowed down the timeline for drops over a few days so that people have a better chance of getting to participate, regardless of where they are in the world.

The separation between Time’s blockchain and publishing businesses

The TIMEPieces community has been the biggest contributor to growth in the publisher’s Web3 business, Grossman said, but growing the group by any means is not the goal, especially by getting current Time readers to become community members. “What would actually undo the success of TIMEPieces would be if we tried to dilute TIMEPieces with the larger Time brand,” he said because non-crypto native readers wouldn’t add much in the way of participation in the group.

In fact, Grossman believes there is very little crossover — an estimated 1% or less — between Time’s magazine, its online readership and the people who are in the TIMEPieces community. So the perk of owning an NFT and getting a free subscription to Time doesn’t end up cannibalizing the subscription business, because they’re newly entering into the Time ecosystem through its Web3 channels.

To date, about 6,000 of the 12,000 individuals who own a Time NFT (which on average sell for $1,100) have connected their crypto wallet to Time.com to access their free digital subscription (which goes for $24 per month on average), according to the company.

Nurturing the TIMEPieces community — through access to exclusive events, raffles and regular contact with Grossman and his team — has helped to support the performance of the NFT projects. 

Similar to limited editions and rare one-of-a-kind NFTs being sold for thousands of dollars, the smaller the audience, the more valuable the membership is because of the benefits, like being able to ask a question to a special guest speaker or winning a ticket to a Time event through a raffle, are less competitive, according to David Cohn, senior director of the Alpha Group, the in-house tech and media incubator for Advance Local, and cofounder at text subscription platform Subtext.

But from a business perspective, Cohn said that the retention rates of smaller, more curated groups are far better than for large groups who might be fans of the brand but don’t ever receive the one-to-one interactions.

“Our ability to scale this is just going to happen organically. We’re not going to attempt to force it faster than consumer adoption can handle it. That’s what Web2.5 is in our world — it’s not the forcing of both communities, it’s the use of both assets to create value for the community,” said Grossman.

Despite this influx of activity, many marketers still believe it’s too difficult — or at least not worth the trouble — to measure the performance of gaming ads, particularly those of the intrinsic in-game variety. “It’s understandable why most big advertisers are a little bit hesitant about playing in this space,” said Mike Sepso, CEO of the gaming and esports infrastructure company Vindex. “They’ve been told they don’t understand it, they’re outdated, they don’t get it — but they haven’t been given any tools to better understand it”.

While it can be difficult to navigate the current landscape of gaming advertising measurement, improvements are on the way. In February, the Interactive Advertising Bureau assembled a task force of industry stakeholders to develop new measurement standards for the viewability of in-game ads and help brands become more comfortable operating in the space. The new standards are already in the drafting phase and will likely be finalized for public use and MRC certification in June.

But brands are interested in ramping up their gaming advertising activity now — not in a few months. In response, companies in the space have already developed new tools and best practices for the measurement of gaming advertising. “We believe measurement is a critical part of activating in gaming to ensure that every dollar is working to drive equity or sales,” said Rob Master, vp of media and marketing for North America at Unilever. “We recognize that measurement in the space is a work in progress, but as gaming continues to scale, we need to see the implementation of rigorous third-party measurement.”

In March, in-game advertising firm Anzu announced a collaboration with Oracle Moat to provide viewability measurement for in-game ads across its inventory, describing it as “first-to-market.” To measure the viewability of its in-game ads, which often take the form of billboards or signs within game environments, Anzu uses games’ built-in ray tracing features, sending out waves of rays from the player’s point-of-view to determine how long ads remain in sight, the percentage of the ads viewable and other important metrics. “Almost every game has a physics library, and this physics library includes ray tracing,” said Anzu chief product officer Ben Fenster.

The announcement turned some heads when Anzu CEO Itamar Benedy told The Drum that the company’s measurement offerings followed “existing IAB and MRC standards,” as the current standards were authored in 2009 and explicitly deprecated in a memo the MRC released last year. Fenster defended the claim by pointing out that Anzu has been heavily involved in the IAB’s task force from the start, meaning its current measurement is based on the upcoming standards, not the current ones. “The differences [between the upcoming IAB standards and Anzu’s standards] almost do not exist,” Fenster said. “In reality, what we do now is even harsher, and when the new standards come out, they will actually be a bit more linear in specific places.”

Since it’s impossible for viewability measurement to be MRC-certified until the release of the new standards, some companies are focusing their energies on developing new metrics to strengthen brands’ confidence in their in-game advertisements. In-game advertising company Frameplay has rolled out a proprietary metric it calls “Time-in-View,” which measures the length of time an ad impression is viewable during gameplay. Through independent studies with eye tracking companies Lumen Research and Eye Square, Frameplay found that its Time-in-View metric correlated well with players’ interest and attention. Frameplay’s measurement also takes advantage of built-in game physics to glean its viewability data.

“The interplay between those game mechanics and our SDK [software development kit] allows us to uniquely understand the position of the ad placement at any given time while the game is being actively played,” said Frameplay chief strategy and operations officer Cary Tilds. “Because people move around in a game, the placement moves, and so you need to have the interplay between the SDK and that ad placement in order to understand the actual position of the ad.”

Frameplay is also involved in the IAB and MRC’s efforts to develop new viewability standards for in-game ads, which it hopes to support, not supplant, with the Time-in-View metric. “We’re contributing to that process; we’re still very much in it,” Tilds said. “You’ll have to ask them whether or not they’re going to push the boundaries on the time calculation — but you can’t have the time calculation unless you actually do the viewability part.”

The IAB is not solely focused on measurement in in-game advertising. Though PlayFronts was dominated by conversations about the in-game space, other prominent forms of gaming advertising would also benefit from refurbished measurement practices — specifically advertising around esports, which was slated to top $1 billion this year, according to a 2020 study by marketing intelligence company WARC.

To address this need, Vindex is collaborating with the IAB to launch the Vindex Intelligence Platform (VIP), which leverages the esports infrastructure firm’s access to major esports ecosystems and data collection capabilities to accurately determine the value and performance of ads throughout the gaming and esports industries. That said, the platform, which Sepso anticipates will be available to advertisers and publishers as a subscription service, is focused on the entertainment product of gaming — not in-game ads. But Sepso hopes that by increasing the transparency of gaming advertising performance measurement, the VIP will keep advertisers coming back as the role of gaming advertising continues to evolve. 

“If I’m a studio head, why should I care about esports? Or why do I care about how many people are streaming my game?” Sepso said. “Well, we’re pretty sure that we can show you that all of these things equate back to player engagement, and therefore revenue. And if you do it the right way, your players are going to be really excited about it — it’s all part of the game experience.”