Month: April 2022

Cleanup time

The key hits:

• Publishers are fretting over how many clean rooms they may need to support.
• Interoperability among clean rooms is also a concern shared by publisher and agency executives.
• The situation will likely shake out based on which clean rooms the most advertisers get behind.

A year ago, publishers were trying to sort out which cookie-replacing identifiers they needed to support. A year later, they are undergoing a similar exercise with data clean rooms that serve as intermediaries for publishers and advertisers to match their respective first-party data sets.

The clean room conundrum was a topic of conversation among the publishers in attendance at the Digiday Publishing Summit (DPS) in March, both on stage and in a closed-door working group on the post-cookie landscape. “The biggest problem is 700 different clean rooms being out there, and each brand having its own clean room — that’s not scalable,” Chris Moore, head of strategic partnerships at Publishers Clearing House, said on stage in a session on the future of identity and addressability.

“Clean room interoperability is problematic,” said a publishing executive during the working group, in which participants were granted anonymity in exchange for their candor.

But the discussion around the challenge with clean rooms was not geofenced to DPS in Vail, Colorado. It has carried over into conversations with executives from publishers, agencies and ad tech firms. And for such a technical topic, the gist is pretty straightforward.

Neither publishers nor advertisers want to support a surplus number of clean room providers, but at this point, they have no idea how many they may need to support. The situation would be simplified if there was some interoperability between clean rooms, so that a publisher supporting Clean Room 1 and an advertiser supporting Clean Room 2 could bridge the two. But that connection between clean rooms would seem to contradict the entire purpose of this technology to effectively vacuum-seal companies’ data.

“Interoperability between clean rooms, I don’t know if that’s a reality,” said an ad tech executive.

OK. Then, for publishers and advertisers to avoid having to support 700 different clean rooms, winners and losers will need to emerge. However, the challenge with separating clean rooms is that the technology is considered a commodity. “They just want to be programmatic pipes. They don’t want to own data but to just you connect with partners. But no one wants that,” said a publishing executive.

Clean rooms want to be a Switzerland for sharing first-party data between parties, but some publishers and agency executives want them to be able to augment those parties’ data in some way.

For example, the publishing executive would like clean rooms to provide data enrichment services so a publisher could plug its first-party data into a clean room and the clean room could augment the profiles of people in that data set. “Where clean rooms have a massive opportunity is once I upload an audience, I want them to tell me the people’s name, age, gender,” the executive said.

Meanwhile, an agency executive would like clean rooms to overcome their inherent scale limitations. “Everyone is thinking [clean rooms] will be a panacea, but they only give a view into an individual publisher,” said the agency executive.

Nonetheless, winners and losers will eventually emerge. This is the way of capitalism. And to that end, the deciding factors will be largely financial. It will come down to which clean rooms have the right combination of the lowest data storage and technology licensing fees as well as the highest advertiser demand, which is the same equation that publishers have used to evaluate supply-side platforms as well as alternate identifiers. 

“Clean rooms will be the same way because they’re not as difficult to onboard and they do that have privacy-compliant layer. What they’re trying to accomplish is the same thing that SSPs are trying to accomplish,” said the publishing executive.

To that end, major advertisers and media companies are adding support for clean rooms.  Activision has adopted Habu’s clean room technology for its marketing. Disney has added support for Snowflake, and the media conglomerate has gotten Omnicom Media Group — which just so happens to count Disney as a client — to sign on to its clean room solution. And clean rooms appear to be ramping up their courtship of publishers as well as advertisers.

During the working group session, one publishing executive relayed their experience with one clean room provider that sought to use the publisher to bring advertisers on board. “If you have five advertisers we can connect with, it costs this much, and then it’s a lower tier for everything else,” the executive recalled. This person added, “So they’re trying to incentivize you to get more.” — Tim Peterson

What we’ve heard

“You got to make sure that you’re comping them for the work that they’ve done with their current client list, if their client list is going to change.”

— Dotdash Meredith chief business officer and president of lifestyle Alysia Borsa on reorganizing the combined company’s sales compensation structure

3 questions with Gizmodo’s editor-in-chief David Ewalt

It’s been a busy (and contentious) few years over at G/O Media, the publisher of 11 properties including Jezebel, The Root, Lifehacker, The Onion and Gizmodo.

The company — which was formed following the April 2019 sale of Gizmodo Media Group (formerly the Gawker Media portfolio) from Univision to private equity firm Great Hill Partners — was already starting in diminished form, with the acquisition closing for under $50 million — only about 25% of what Univision it paid for the titles in 2016, which was close to $200 million over two separate deals. But it only took about half a year before rumblings of dissatisfaction at the company began rising to the surface and regular fighting with the company’s leadership over editorial autonomy started to occur. 

Deadspin’s entire editorial staff quit in November 2019 after disagreeing with G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller’s editorial mandate to stick to sports. (Later those former employees formed their own media brand Defector Media). A couple weeks into the start of the pandemic, the company laid off about 5% of its workforce. And since then, a steady stream of turnover has taken place at The Root and Jezebel.

And just at the beginning of March, the Gizmodo Media Group Union, organized by the Writers Guild of America East, which represents 100 editorial staffers from six of G/O Media’s brands, led a strike against the company that lasted five days and resulted in raised salary minimums, severance packages and parental leave, among other agreements. 

All in, that’s a lot of change for a company to endure while also combatting the pandemic’s impacts and for its employees navigating a stressful and never-ceasing news cycle. But for Gizmodo’s editor-in-chief David Ewalt, who was appointed in September, it was also a whole other balancing act that he had to figure out when meeting his staffers and figuring out how to manage the threat of burnout and fears of instability at the company. — Kayleigh Barber

The conversation below has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. 

What are some of the things that you’ve needed to do recently as a leader to  address and combat some of the concerns that staffers might have, given the past couple of years?

Anybody who’s worked in media knows that when there’s an ownership change, there’s typically some turnover in staff. That’s just the way it works really, in any company. It’s not even an immediate thing — G/O Media has seen all of our sites have new editors-in-chief over the last, say, 12 [to] 16 months. 

I am really happy that, since coming on as EIC of Gizmodo, we’ve been growing [and] we haven’t lost a ton of people. I think that I’m lucky that Gizmodo staff are really dedicated to the brand and to their beat coverage. These are people who love the Gizmodo voice, who embrace it, who want to work here. I also, frankly, really lucked out. I came in where the other editors are just first-rate and have been here for a while, and we’re really able to keep the ship, not just afloat, but cruising along, during the ownership change.

My focus has been on communication, and really checking in with every single reporter. We started having a lot more weekly meetings — I never want to bury people in meetings, but I think it’s really important to connect with every single staff member. I made an effort when I started to literally meet with every single person and have a conversation with every single one of them, even though they were all remote at that point. I’m doing that again every couple of months, like check back in with everybody. 

What are you doing to invest in your staff and help provide a sense of security?

The first thing probably worth noting is just, in the first quarter, we’ve been hiring a ton. We’ve added a bunch of new roles. I’ve added six people, just in April. So the staff is bigger than it’s ever been [and on a trajectory to reach 37 total editorial staffers by the end of this year].

I tend to think, in general, [data analysis] is a big part of the future of journalism that is an essential skill that every reporter is going to have to embrace in the coming decades because so much of our source material is going into databases and that’s where the best stories are going to come from. It is an area that I’m pushing hard, that this is something that Gizmodo needs to be on top of because, especially when you’re writing about tech companies, what happens if someone leaks to us a giant database from Facebook instead of emails. We have to have the skill to analyze the numbers and these massive data files and deal with big numbers and figure out what that says. So it is something I’m pushing and trying to train more people to be able to handle.

This is not a thing that most journalists trained for, you know, they just don’t, it doesn’t usually come up in journalism school like your first couple of reporting jobs.

What are some challenges you’ve identified while leading a newsroom during this period in time? 

It’s often a challenge to remind people: work in order to live, don’t live to work. Your job is important, and yes, we want you to throw yourself into it and we admire and desire your passion, but don’t burn yourself out. Don’t work too hard. Keep in mind that we are in a really difficult environment and if you need to take time off to get your head straight, go do that. If you have a sniffle, stay at home, take some time off.

You often have to remind people just to do those simple things and I think that’s a big challenge for any manager, right now, is just to remind your staff that the impulse working in a for-profit corporation is obviously often to make the company money. You [work] and you make the numbers go up. But you know, that happens so much easier and so much better if everyone is healthy and is taken care of. And I think that’s a huge part of any manager’s job right now.

Numbers to know

13%: How much lower the median salary for The Washington Post Guild’s female members is compared to that of its male members.

303: Number of news organizations that responded to the News Leaders Association’s annual diversity survey this year.

78.6%: Percentage share of U.S. digital ad revenue in 2021 that was sucked up by the 10 top digital publishers and platforms.

420,000: Number of digital-only subscribers that Le Monde currently has.

What we’ve covered

How YouTube stars Colin and Samir went from nearly quitting to creating their own media company:

• Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry cover the creator economy across their YouTube channel, podcast and newsletter.
• The creator duo kick off the Digiday Podcast’s new limited series on creators.

Listen to the latest Digiday Podcast episode here.

Food52 lays off 20 people in company restructuring:

• The layoffs primarily affected the publisher’s content, creative and marketing teams.
• No employees from the commerce-related companies Food52 acquired in the past year was let go.

Read more about Food52’s layoffs here.

How Dotdash Meredith is reorganizing after the merger:

• Meredith plans to switch from its centralized sales structure to Dotdash’s verticalized approach, Dotdash Meredith exec Alysia Borsa said at the Digiday Publishing Summit.
• Dotdash and Meredith do not share much overlap among the companies’ respective top advertisers.

Read more about the Dotdash Meredith merger here.

What we’re reading

Snapchat revives RSS:
Snapchat’s new Dynamic Stories product is enabling publishers including CNN, Insider and The Wall Street Journal to publish articles to the platform via RSS feeds and receive a cut of the resulting ad revenue, according to Axios.

Substack approaches a pivot point:
Substack has reached the point in a media-dependent tech company’s development where the newsletter platform is trying to act more like a media company but without the responsibilities of becoming a publisher, according to The New York Times.

The Guardian prepares a paywall:
The Guardian plans to start testing a paywall inside its news app this month, though its site will remain free, according to Financial Times.

The New York Times’ Twitter timeout:
The New York Times has released new Twitter guidelines for its journalists, and the updates basically amount to “get off Twitter (at least sometimes),” according to Nieman Lab.

Local newspapers stop the presses:
Local news publishers are cutting the number of days per week they publish print editions, according to The Washington Post. The publishers include Gannett, which has set an ambitious goal for amassing digital subscribers.

This past January, 100 Roses from Concrete, a non-profit network for men of color, paired seven 40-plus mentees (ages ranged from 40 to 50) with mentors, both a junior and senior mentor, at agencies and brands including Deutsch, Swift, State Farm, FCB Health, Digitas Health, RPA, Ogilvy, VMLY&R and Duncan Channon with the goal of helping them get hired following the 12 week virtual program. 

“From January 4th to March 29th, they were all just totally different people,” said Thacker, adding that the program seemed to help boost the mentees’ confidence. “One of the fellows we were actually able to get hired. They started at an agency two weeks ago; the connection they got through the program. The rest of them are either interviewing or finishing up their portfolio books. Their confidence levels literally went from like zero to a hundred in 12 weeks.” 

Over the course of the program, the seven mentees worked with a junior mentor and a senior or executive mentor to get two different perspectives and advice to help them, whether they were looking to enter advertising or re-enter the business, explained Thacker. Aside from weekly check-ins with mentors, mentees also had weekly check-ins with Thacker and Heinsdale. While 100 Roses from Concrete traditionally focuses on men of color, this program was open to various people over 40 in need of mentorship.

Following the program, mentees are now interviewing at agencies, working on creative certifications as well as interviewing for internships and residences to help boost their portfolios and make their way into or back into advertising. At the same time, the mentees will also participate in executive coaching sessions funded by 100 Roses from Concrete this summer to continue to work with them and help get them hired. The program helped mentees up-skill how to present themselves in today’s ad world as well as how to negotiate and navigate new roles.

Thacker declined to reveal the identity of the mentee who was hired as he didn’t want to single out or spotlight someone’s age as they are looking to get hired. In surveys following the program, mentees noted that they had a “renewed confidence.”

“Mentoring from the youth to the more aged point of view on the world is so important,” said ad industry talent recruiter Christie Cordes when asked for her perspective mentorship. “It’s an opportunity to bring fun back into the creative workplace and strengthen a trust-based environment too. Creative companies need to prioritize experimentation in a learning culture.” 

Thacker plans to run another mentorship session for people over 40 next winter. He believes that the ad industry needs to seriously rethink their ageist nature when it comes to hiring. 

“They need to know that the shiny quarter — and I call the shiny quarter people 25 and younger — are not always the answer when it comes to talent,” said Thacker. “People that are probably two quarters, 50, or even more, they’re just as much as the answer as shiny quarters. Sometimes they shine even brighter because of life experience.”

Underrepresented but important

Scott’s work in CLG’s player development department focused largely on players’ mental health and what they could do to support it out-of-game, including organizing physical and psychological therapy, advocating on behalf of burnt-out players and otherwise supporting them as human beings.

“I was there to just take note of how all the pieces were working together, with that outside lens — how the coaching styles were blending with the players, how the players were learning, if it can be accelerated in any way — overall looking to tweak and tune the dials for all the people working there,” Scott said. 

Player development is an important way for teams to support players as they transition away from active competition. When former CLG Super Smash Bros. player Kevin “PewPewU” Toy stepped back from competition in favor of an internal operations role in 2021, Scott was integral in helping him make the switch. “If there had not been a player development coach like Summer, I don’t think I would’ve been able to smoothly transition from professional player to staff,” Toy said. “I had someone in the trenches, in Summer, who was looking out for me, not only competitively, but also professionally. The role of a player development manager and head is not only to be invested in these players as competitors — it’s to be invested in their lives.”

Despite the clear value of player development for individuals like Toy, many esports orgs still underrate its importance; during her early days, Scott recalled getting axed by an organization so they could hire a live-in chef. As increasing numbers of players burn out or retire from competition, some teams are beginning to realize the importance of out-of-game support — but others are simply continuing the practice of chewing their players and spitting them out when they’re done.

“For a lot of teams, it’s just a matter of resource allocation. The teams that have the resources and are able to put out the whole suite, they’re probably going to do those things,” said Daniel Lee, who formerly worked alongside Scott as CLG’s business development manager, head of data management and general manager. “But for teams where they barely have a budget for talent, what’s the next most important thing? Is it the social media guy? Is it the guy that shoots the videos? I don’t really envy those kinds of decisions.”

Forging a new path

When Summer Scott graduated from Rutgers University in 2013, she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life. She’d studied psychology, but she wasn’t interested in pursuing a master’s. She also happened to be a lifelong gamer who had met her husband inside World of Warcraft.

“I’m a nerd about games, and I’m a huge nerd about the human brain,” Scott said. “Those are just the two things that I’m always going to nerd out really hard about, so I was trying to find a way to be able to blend those two worlds together.”

The trajectory of Scott’s life was forever altered when she watched a panel about women in esports that featured CLG director of development Stephanie Harvey speaking about the lack of female role models in the space.

“As soon as I realized that getting into esports could be something that wasn’t just for me, but a gift that I could offer other people, my innards just went on fire, and I immediately started trying to get my foot in the door,” Scott said. 

Scott Googled “esports psychology” and got in touch with Weldon Green, an early advocate for mental health support in esports. She offered to write for his blog, and her articles immediately became some of the best-performing on Green’s website.

That summer, Green asked Scott to assist him in running player development boot camps for Team Liquid. The boot camps were a success. When Green wasn’t able to make it to the next one, he asked Scott to handle it — and her career was born. “Whether it succeeds or not in launching your career is just based on how good you are, and she kicked butt,” said Green, who served as a coach for CLG between 2018 and 2020. “And they were like, ‘forget this, we’re just going to hire her.’”

Over the next couple of years, Scott worked as a psychology consultant and performance coach for teams such as NRG Esports, Gold Coin United and Phoenix1 Esports. In 2017, she joined CLG, which is owned by Madison Square Garden Sports, the operator of the New York Knicks and New York Rangers, as a player development coordinator. Less than a year later, she became CLG’s head of player development, a position she held until her promotion to director of team operations in January 2021. 

Missed communication

The growth of the esports industry hasn’t always led to positive change. Throughout esports, formerly behind-the-scenes workers like Scott are increasingly becoming targets of fan scrutiny in their own right — and they often lack the institutional support given to players in the space. Sustained fan criticism can have significant effects on esports orgs, such as former TSM president Leena Xu’s decision to leave the company in November 2021 after years of fan ire, though Xu pointed to a change in business strategy as the direct impetus for her exit.

At CLG, these growing pains are perhaps most visible in the dearth of communication about the role of player development, which has led some fans to blame Scott for the team’s in-game struggles. Though CLG is the oldest active team in the League of Legends Championship Series, the highest level of North American LoL competition, it has struggled to find success in recent seasons, winning its last playoff in 2016.

A cursory search of the CLG subreddit reveals waves of vitriol directed at Scott, including threads criticizing her supposed inability to improve the team’s League of Legends skills. However, the team’s performance in the arena has never fallen under Scott’s out-of-game purview. “Simply put, I am the person to help create synergy among the pieces that are there,” Scott said. “I can’t always guarantee that the right pieces are there; if a cog don’t fit, it just don’t fit. But for the ones that can turn together, I was there to help grease the wheels.”

While CLG never intentionally put Scott forward as a scapegoat, some observers within the team pointed at its outward messaging as one cause for fans’ confusion. “I think a lot of the criticisms come just because she had appeared in one of our YouTube videos labeled as a ‘performance coach,’ and so people were like, ‘wow, your job title is performance coach, and this team is not doing well, so clearly you’re the issue,’” Toy said. “Oftentimes, people from the outside only get a tiny glimpse of things, and they’re quick to jump to conclusions.”

“There could have probably been better communication from the org; I don’t think that flow of information ever passed down, so I can understand why fans would naturally go toward a person they’ve seen in a video before,” said Lee. “She’s labeled as the head of development on the website, and there was never really any kind of clarification beyond that.”

Green, who was openly critical of CLG’s upper management, put the blame directly on the organization. “They made a post like, ‘we hired a person for this job title,’ and then they didn’t post anything for two years,” Green said. “I’m hyperbolizing, but their dearth of content and communication is emblematic of them being a defensive PR org. For example, when Black Lives Matter hit, every single NBA org was like, ‘we’re going to get in front of this and make a statement.’ Madison Square Garden was the only NBA team that was like, ‘no, we’re going to sit this one out.’”

A different voice

In spite of Green’s criticism of CLG’s management, he — along with everyone else who worked with Scott at CLG — had nothing but compliments for Scott’s work within the organization’s front office. And in spite of the BLM-related messaging issues, many of Scott’s former coworkers praised her as a leading voice for diversity and progressive change in the organization. “She’s not afraid if she’s the only advocate for something, or if there’s not more momentum, but she knows it’s the right thing to do,” Lee said. “When BLM was a big thing, she was actually invited to speak to all of MSG, when we were having these company-wide discussions, to take charge on those things.”

As a biracial Black and white woman in a prominent team role, Scott is not the typical esports industry leader, but she wasn’t always comfortable with her status as a role model. She spent much of her career feeling like her identity would be a limiting factor — which, in the overwhelmingly white and male of esports, it arguably was. “I was fearful of speaking too passionately in a meeting because I didn’t want to be labeled as the over-emotional woman in the room,” she said.

Since joining CLG in 2017, Scott has scaled the ranks of the organization, becoming increasingly confident in her ability to change the world of competitive gaming for the better. Together with Harvey, she helps lead CLG’s DEI initiatives. “We really believe that the internal CLG culture of being accepting and caring of people needs to translate to the gaming community,” Scott said. “We’re not willing to stop in our own walls.”

CLG may not have played every card right when it comes to its messaging around Scott’s role, but most members of its roster would agree that the team made the right move in hiring her. Scott’s ability to succeed and flourish in esports despite her nontraditional background is evidence that the organization is making good decisions internally, regardless of the struggles of its League of Legends squad. In sports and esports, competitive success comes and goes, but Scott’s presence helps CLG’s players develop skills for life — and then leverage those skills to benefit the organization.

“It’s hard for me to lift my head up and look around and see the success I’ve had,” Scott said. “But the few times that I have, that’s when I’m like, ‘holy shit, I have really come a long way.’”