Month: April 2022

Disqo’s study refers to this differential as the “say-do gap,” surveying nearly 54,000 consumers about their shopping behavior in the last 30 days, then comparing the self-reports to actual digital behavior data collected over the same 30-day period.

“It shows that asking people about what they did is not necessarily the most accurate way to finding out what they actually did,” said Anne Hunter, Disqo’s vp of product marketing. “However, it doesn’t negate the value of asking people why they did it.” 

Disqo drilled into three categories of online shopping — autos, travel and grocery shopping — matching keyword searches, website visits and mobile app launches to lists of keywords, websites and apps. Each consumer who had five or more of these digital events was labeled an “Active Shopper.” 

The gap between what the auto-shopping consumers said they did versus what they actually did was 53 percent, while the grocery gap was 33 percent and the travel gap stood at 28 percent.

“You need to double check the data collected from behaviors as well as from opinion sources, which are increasingly seen as a solution with brands trying to collect massive amounts of first-party data,” said Hunter. “It shows the loss of behavioral identifiers … can’t necessarily be replaced by asking people about their behaviors. And finding sources of accurate observed behaviors to combine with opinions is even more critical.” 

Media agencies said Disqo’s findings bear out in a few ways.

“This research confirms a great deal of what research psychology already knows about unreliability of memory, and the gap between what we call expressed intent and revealed intent,” said Steve Grant, senior vp of human integration at Horizon Media’s WHY Group. “This is a great example of why incorporating social and consumer psychology into marketing research is so important. For any of the categories [in the study], cueing recall through messages and building clear paths of action through choice architecture would aid in consumer memory, and likely spark more actual buying behavior.”

“We’re not surprised by these findings, as they reinforce the discrepancy between perceived and actual online behaviors” that Omnicom Media Group’s Hearts & Science uncovered in its 2019 Conscious Disconnectors research, said Pamela Marsh, OMG’s managing director of primary research. In that study, said Marsh, “we saw a 33 percent gap between the average self-reported time spent daily in apps [3.26 hours] versus average actual time the  respondents’ spent in apps [ 5 hours] every day.”

Cutting across age groups, the largest gap was 35-44 year-olds, which to be fair is arguably the demographic most busy juggling career, parenting and a host of other issues. Hunter said Disqo didn’t dive into why the gap exists, but noted the data shows that parenting age cohort had the biggest gap. 

Another surprise to Hunter was the inverse relationship between peoples’ confidence in remembering things right and their actual memory. Generally men, affluent people and in middle age brackets demonstrated more confidence. “It may be the Dunning Kruger effect [in short, the less you know about something, the more you think you know] displayed with facts,” she noted. “Brands need to question when they ask ‘How confident are you?’, whether that is a signal of the data being accurate, or perhaps a signal of it being inaccurate.”

“Before, you had creators do a teaser for your brand; now, you need them to do the full show,” said Vickie Segar, founder of influencer marketing shop Village Marketing, which was recently acquired by WPP. “That’s a totally different prompt. Before they had to garner interest and drive someone to a [brand] where the brand would then close that sale. Now, brands need creators to close [sales] entirely.” 

As platforms like TikTok and Instagram prioritize social commerce, marketers, agency execs and creators will need to navigate a “monumental shift” in strategy as working with influencers will move beyond brand awareness and media play to a “commerce engine” within the platforms, noted Segar. As previously reported by Digiday, major marketers like L’Oreal are already focused on commerce via TikTok.

“E-commerce has generally been about replenishment — there are often functional and practical motivations behind it,” Lex Bradshaw-Zanger, CMO of L’Oréal U.K. and Ireland, previously told Digiday of the brand’s focus on shopping on TikTok. “TikTok and the creators there are all about discovery so that shopping experience is being reinvented around that discovery element of scrolling through the app being brought together with the entertainment people get from watching creators.”

L’Oreal isn’t alone. Marketers and agency execs say conversations about social commerce and plans to test out strategies on platforms to focus on social commerce are heating up. “We’ll be doing a number of test campaigns with live social commerce this year,” said Brendan Gahan, partner and chief social officer at Mekanism. “There’s definitely a broader awareness of this and excitement. Overall, the space seems very nascent, but it’s clear it’s an arena that is going to be big.” 

Gahan continued: “It ties into this macro shift as well, [in which] iOS 14 targeting is not what it once was, so collaborating with communities to sell directly via social seems like it’s going to grow considerably.”

How brands will work with creators, platforms and agencies to adapt to a changing social landscape where more shopping is done via platforms rather than brands’ websites is yet to be seen. Even so, brands are looking at ways to capitalize on social commerce as platforms emphasize it. 

“Social commerce is only going to become more and more normal for more people to use,” said Cheryl Gresham, CMO of phone carrier Visible; the phone carrier doesn’t have a retail presence and is focused on garnering new customers via e-commerce. “We’re thinking about it. We’re watching the space right now and thinking about how we need to build for the future to reach potential members this way.” 

Gresham added: “It’s going to become more and more common simply with the inertia of technology.”

3 Questions With Jessica Spence, president of brands at Beam Suntory

What has changed at Beam Suntory since you arrived two years ago? 

We had been a very commercially-led, market-led model historically, despite having some amazing global brands. I was brought in to take on a new role, actually reconfiguring our model to put the brands at the heart of it, and to make the brands really the heart of the P&L. How do you stand up teams that do that? So cross-functional teams, not just marketers but marketeers, commercial, [and] finance, all supporting the brand supply chain, and put the brands at the heart of it.

The way that people shop is changing. How do your current efforts keep up with that?

One of my pet theories is that I think that the line between marketing and sales is really becoming very, very blurred. The way that we used to think about it, quite a traditional consumer journey, is really breaking down and we’ve seen that becoming a lot more flexible. Every engagement point you have with the consumer is an opportunity to do it all, and you have to think about it that way. 

How does that translate into work in action?

What we’re saying to our teams is whenever you’re looking at your plan, there [are] three jobs that you’re trying to do every time you touch a consumer, wherever that is digital, [the] real world doesn’t matter. You have to obviously engage them with something meaningful about the brand that connects to them in their life. Second big one, you have to get primary consumer data. And thirdly, close the sale. You’re not always going to hit all three, but that’s the jackpot if every time we connect with the consumer, you hit all three of those. — Kimeko McCoy

By the numbers

People are watching more videos now than they have in years past, whether it be streaming their favorite sitcom or tuning in to a live sporting event. Advertisers are taking notice, giving digital video a bigger piece of the advertising pie. While that trend is expected to continue, an inaugural report from Nielsen reveals that viewers find their content options overwhelming. Find key details from the report below:

• Americans increased their average weekly time streaming video by 18%, with a year-over-year increase from 143.2 billion streamed minutes to 169.4 billion between February 2021 and February 2022. 
• 46% of survey respondents feel overwhelmed by the growing number of services and platforms that makes it more difficult to find the content they’re looking for. 
• 64% of respondents indicated they wish there was a bundled video streaming service that would allow them to choose as few or as many video streaming services as they wanted. — Kimeko McCoy

Quote of the week

“As we begin to create and invest in the next environment where people spend their time, and their money, we need to be clear on what we are building and what we need to prevent — amongst all the hype — to make sure people don’t have an experience that is riddled with scams. The currency in Web 3.0, is not crypto, it’s trust.”

— said Conny Braams, chief digital and commercial officer at Unilever at an event hosted by the World Federation of Advertisers in Athens, Greece last week.

What we’ve covered

• Here are the takeaways from IAB Playfronts.
• Why this DTC brand is putting paid search front and center in its ad strategy.
• To go broader, Supergoop is adding OOH, print and platforms like Twitch to its mix.

Creator duo Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry have a YouTube channel with more than 700,000 subscribers. But a little more than two years ago, they came close to calling it quits. 

“I have our 2019 [profit and loss record], and we were $18,000 in the hole,” said Chaudry in the latest Digiday Podcast episode. While the pair was producing videos for their YouTube channel “Colin and Samir,” their primary source of income was elsewhere. “We were doing freelance production projects, getting paid very little to do them, and that’s what was funding the channel,” he said.

Then, in early 2020, Samsung offered Rosenblum and Chaudry an annual contract to become brand ambassadors. Securing that income provided the pair an opportunity to finally figure out the focus of their YouTube channel. The lack of content focus had been a strain since 2016 when they left Team Whistle — to which they had sold their previous company The Lacrosse Network — and struck out on their own as independent creators.

“We went through three to four years of struggling to find our identity, struggling to find out what our business was,” said Rosenblum.

Since then, their business has become the business of being a creator. Across their YouTube channel, their podcast and their newsletter The Publish Press, Rosenblum and Chaudry maintain a singular focus on covering the creator economy, which spans interviews with creators as well as analyses of creator trends and stories from their own experiences as creators.

That focus on the creator economy not only provides Rosenblum and Chaudry with their own bedrock, but also offers a solid foundation to kick off the Digiday Podcast’s new limited series that is similarly focused on creators. Over the course of four episodes, we will interview creators from top platforms Instagram, TikTok, Twitch and YouTube, starting with Rosenblum and Chaudry.

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

The brink of burnout

Rosenblum: How we define burnout is creative output without direction. That’s where we were for about three to four years. That meant I’m editing in my bedroom, long hours for two weeks to put a video out. The video doesn’t do well, and Samir and I have to huddle up and figure out how to change it. And Samir’s editing too. And it got to the point where, truly coming into 2020, it wasn’t even an option for us to continue the way that we were continuing because we didn’t want to live that lifestyle.

The importance of operational support

Chaudry: The most important role for a creator is to bring in someone who has an operational mind: to actually understand how to develop process around what you’re doing, how to organize what you’re doing. I don’t know that people recognize that, as a single- or double-person media company, a lot of time we’re doing the same amount of work as a traditional media company — as the primary leadership, but we’re also the product, the creative directors, the producers. And it can get extreme challenging. Bringing in some level of operational support is required when you actually find what we call content market fit. And when you’re actually developing into a business, it’s required.

A physical center of operations

Chaudry: We have an office, and we have six people who work full-time in that office. So we keep pretty regular hours in an office. Typically everyone’s in by 10 am, and then we’re out between six and seven. That is what is standard. We’re all coming into an office. We’re working on a variety of projects, and we’re leaving. That’s not what every creator’s business looks like, but that’s how we operate. And a lot of that is because we produce a show and that show is produced from our space. No matter what our highest priority every day is to produce a best-in-class show for the next Monday.

Building a company

Rosenblum: The fact that we come into an office and we have a team has less to do with the fact that we produce a show that requires that team and more to do with the fact that, from a lifestyle perspective, Samir and I require it and it’s part of our history. When we first started working together, we were in an office, and I was technically his employee. That was the basis of our working relationship. It was not your stereotypical idea of what a creator business may look like where someone just takes an Instagram story or does a TikTok dance. For us, it’s always been building a company and leading with that as opposed to just filming and editing and putting something on the internet.

Technically, CTV doesn’t have a cookie problem because the web’s de-facto identity technology doesn’t work on CTV. But CTV does have an identity issue in the form of the IP address. 

The IP address is CTV’s version of the cookie, both in how it provides an identity backbone but also in how vulnerable that backbone has become amid increased privacy scrutiny. “The IP address as a standalone identifier is going to end up like the cookie,” said Jay Prasad, chief strategy officer of identity technology provider LiveRamp.

Not only do privacy laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act categorize the IP address as personal information, but Apple and Google have taken aim at limiting companies’ ability to access the IP addresses associated with people’s devices, which would allow companies to identify people through a controversial method called device fingerprinting. “If you’re associating an IP address and then using that to try to understand somebody, then that’s the definition of fingerprinting,” Prasad said.

Considering that the third-party cookie continues to persist, the IP address may as well. However, given regulatory red flags popping up around the IP address, companies would appear to do well to wean themselves off it asap and work on adopting CTV ad strategies reliant upon contextual targeting and/or first-party data.

Myth: Premium CTV ad inventory isn’t sold programmatically.

Programmatic has a reputation for referring to remnant inventory, which would appear to be antithetical to TV-quality ad time. But, despite being a computer-based method of buying, programmatic is not so binary.

TV networks and streaming-only sellers like Amazon, Roku and streaming pay-TV provider FuboTV make their top-shelf CTV inventory available for programmatic purchase. Usually, this takes the form of programmatic guaranteed (PG) and private marketplace (PMP) deals so sellers can maintain some scarcity and not open themselves up to the lowest bidder in the programmatic open auction. “Programmatic, when it’s done directly, that’s the majority of what we see from a CTV perspective,” said Diana Horowitz, svp of ad sales at FuboTV.

But these top-tier ad sellers do also open up their premium CTV inventory to the programmatic open auction when private programmatic buyers have not snatched it up.

“There’s a lot of premium inventory that the networks are saying is only available [via traditional direct deals] or PG, and we get reports back from our programmatic buys that tell us the opposite. There’s a decent amount of premium inventory available through PMP or the open exchange,” said one agency executive.

Myth: Ad viewability is not an issue in CTV.

The question of an ad’s viewability — whether enough of it appeared onscreen for a long enough period of time for a person to notice it — would not seem to apply to CTV where ads are typically given 100% share of voice and 100% of the TV screen real estate when they run. And yet there are situations where an ad may run but not be viewable.

According to an announcement by ad verification firm DoubleVerify published in February, one in four top CTV “environments continued to play programming content — including recording ad impressions — after the television was turned off.”

Dave Morgan, CEO of TV ad targeting firm Simulmedia, likened the issue of CTV programming and ads continuing to play after a TV has been turned off to instances when web pages running in the background automatically refresh and serve up new ad impressions despite not being the tab displayed on a person’s computer screen. “This idea that we actually have a more accountable world [in CTV], we haven’t solved that,” he said. “You can have campaigns where 25% of the units were delivered when the screen is off. That doesn’t mean it’s all [CTV] ads in the whole market, but those kinds of things are happening.”

Myth: CTV’s transparency problem is a technical issue.

For years, advertisers and their agencies have complained about CTV’s relative lack of transparency compared to traditional TV. On traditional TV, advertisers can know the exact show that carried an ad, whereas on CTV, their insights typically are confined to which streaming app or channel on a free, ad-supported streaming TV service and, at best, the category of programming that carried an ad. However, this issue is not symptomatic of CTV’s ad infrastructure still being developed.

“Yes, it’s a problem, but it shouldn’t be,” said a second agency executive. “It’s not a technical limitation. It’s a partner-providing limitation, as this is something that can be provided, but we need partners to have that as a standard way of working on what information is passed back in the bid streams.”

Myth: CTV and OTT are the same thing.

This may be more misnomer than myth, but it makes the list because people continue to use CTV and OTT as if they are interchangeable terms. They are not. CTV refers to the type of device on which someone may stream a show, movie or video — a TV connected to the internet — whereas OTT refers to the method of making a show, movie or video available to stream. 

Even with that distinction, OTT is an outdated term that originated in the early 2000s as a label for TV networks making their programming available to access without need of a set-top box — that is, “over the top” — or a satellite dish. Two decades later, the acronym can be retired and replaced with a term that everyone can understand and already uses: “streaming.”