Month: May 2022

The study asked about eight different online actions taken in the prior six months, from downloading an app to posting on social media, and from visiting a website to making an online purchase.

Unsurprisingly, the study found that OOH is on par with other media — including television, video ads (including the platforms), display ads, radio and print — in eliciting action from those consumers who recall seeing the ads.

The twist in the study is that, since OOH is much less costly on an eyeballs basis, it’s a far more effective means of influencing consumers, dollar for dollar — its value relative to other media was underscored in the study’s conclusions. Of the $179 billion spent on all media, OOH attracts only 4.1 percent, $7.35 billion, according to Magna data that OAAA and Comscore used.

An index was created that analyzed the relationship between action share among media and spend share. Among all eight actions, OOH over-indexed between 350-600 points above the mean, while TV and video ads indexed below 100. Radio and print averaged no higher than 100 points above the mean.

“We drive five to six times higher activation than any of the other media formats, which means you get a ton more for your money,” said Anna Bager, CEO of OAAA, in explaining the motivation to update an earlier version of this study, which was first conducted in 2017 with Nielsen.

“This survey is an eye-opening look at the mental connections audience make between media and online activity,” said Diane Williams, senior director of OOH at Comscore.

Bager noted that privacy concerns, and more people being literally out of their homes, are working in the medium’s favor, along with what she called a general dissatisfaction with online advertising. She cited a poll OAAA conducted with the Harris Poll that found 68 percent of respondents frequently skip online ads due to digital device burnout, and 43 percent are actively trying to spend less time on their phone, or computer, or reduce TV viewing. “Consumers are sick of online ads and ads in general,” she said.

But the fringe benefit Bager pointed to is the sharing of strong OOH creative work that happens — but almost never does with other media. “You get television-type effectiveness, but if you do it right you might get extra media out of it because your ad actually gets shared on other channels.”

The OAAA plans to get this research in the hands of its member companies and beat the drum in front of media agencies. But Bager said OAAA’s newly-formed brand council this month, which includes CMOs from Pepsi, Diaego, Allstate and others, will amplify the trade org’s beat.

There’s some logic to the OAAA’s thinking, said Scott Bender, global head of client strategy at Prohaska Consulting. “When you think about the buying community and how strapped they are, and you make it easy [to plan and buy] — just as we’ve seen the portals do — spending goes up. Then make it easy to and track and measure performance, and spending’s going to go up,” he said. “Ideally, programmatic is going to make that easier.” 

The key numbers:

• BuzzFeed Inc. revenue increased 26% in Q1 2022, compared to the same quarter in 2021, to $91.6 million. Notably, BuzzFeed Inc.’s Q1 2022 earnings includes Complex Networks’ revenue, while Q1 2021 did not, as BuzzFeed’s acquisition closed in December of last year.
• Ad revenue (display, pre-roll and mid-roll video products sold directly and programmatically) grew 26% year over year to $48.7 million.
• Content revenue (long and short form custom content, and film and TV projects from BuzzFeed Studios and Complex Networks) grew 65% year over year to $32.3 million, “driven primarily by the acquisition of Complex Networks,” BuzzFeed CFO Felicia DellaFortuna said during an investors call on May 16.
• Commerce revenue (affiliate sales and product licensing revenue) dipped 27% year over year to $10.6 million.
• Time spent declined 4% year over year to 184 million hours across BuzzFeed Inc’s owned-and-operated properties and on third-party platforms.
• Adjusted EBITDA dropped 294%, or from $4.3 million in Q1 2021 to $16.8 million in Q1 2022 (net loss was $44.6 million, compared to a net loss of $11.3 million in the first quarter of 2021).
• BuzzFeed projected Q2 2022 revenue will be up by at least 20% year over year “to surpass $100 million,” BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said during the earnings call.

How declines in time spent on Facebook are hurting BuzzFeed’s business

BuzzFeed’s audience is continuing to spend more time on Instagram and TikTok and less time on Facebook, putting pressure on BuzzFeed’s commerce and advertising businesses. BuzzFeed mainly monetizes via branded or custom video content on those two platforms, which still have limited revenue share opportunities compared to Facebook.

Time spent declined primarily on third-party platforms but also on BuzzFeed’s owned and operated platforms, DellaFortuna said. BuzzFeed’s time spent metric relies on measurements from Comscore and Facebook and does not capture time spent on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat or Twitter, she said.

While BuzzFeed’s advertising revenue grew year over year in Q1 2022, that growth primarily came from BuzzFeed’s owned-and-operated properties as the ad revenue generated on third-party platforms was lower year over year “consistent with the trend in time spent,” said DellaFortuna.

The time spent decline is also a reason why BuzzFeed’s commerce business has taken such a hit: “The majority of audience traffic to our commerce content is generated through Facebook,” DellaFortuna said. Less time spent on Facebook means less traffic to BuzzFeed’s commerce content — and fewer sales.

In the first quarter, commerce represented 12% of Buzzfeed’s total revenue, a decline in share of BuzzFeed’s overall revenue compared to 2020, when it represented 13%. This is far from the 23% share BuzzFeed projected its commerce business will represent this year, according to its investor presentation released last June. (However, it remains to be seen what share BuzzFeed’s commerce takes in the 2022 full year, as the fourth quarter often boosts affiliate and product sales due to holiday shopping).

Predictions for Q2 2022: $100 million+

Next quarter, overall company revenue is expected to grow “by a low 20s percentage year-over-year,” with adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $2 to $7 million, according to BuzzFeed’s latest earnings report. In the investors’ call, Peretti said the company expects second-quarter revenues “to surpass $100 million for the first time in our history.”

Growth will be led by BuzzFeed’s content revenue, DellaFortuna said. However, content revenue is BuzzFeed’s lowest margin business compared to advertising and commerce, meaning it will “have some impact as it relates to our adjusted EBITDA numbers,” she said.

Programmatic ad revenue will also face some headwinds in Q2. DellaFortuna predicts the growth rate of BuzzFeed’s advertising revenue “to soften” in the next quarter. 

“Many of our largest advertising partners continue to face macroeconomic challenges. Our clients continue to be challenged by supply chain constraints” and “rising inflation,” DellaFortuna said. “As a result, some advertisers are pulling back or delaying spending,” she added. She cited tech, CPG and retail advertisers in particular.

Going forward, BuzzFeed will invest in three areas in particular, Peretti said: short-form vertical video, its combined creators program now called Catalyst and its first-party data solution, Lighthouse.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This year, for the first time, YouTube has scheduled its upfront presentation for the same week when the major broadcast TV networks host their upfront presentations. Beyond the timing of YouTube’s upfront presentation, how is what YouTube is pitching in this year’s upfront different from last year?

Most people recognize now that consumers are embracing streaming video more and more. But the reason that we made this change and what we’re trying to emphasize this year is that it’s not just a growing trend; it’s really achieved a level playing field status with traditional linear TV. It’s not a separate segment with different audiences and different content. It is right there, as part of an emerging convergence. 

Consumer behavior demonstrates that, not just if you look at the raw data of time spent with digital video, but then the range of content and screens from long-form, studio-produced shows to creator-led content, from connected TV in the living room with your family and friends to the more personal environment of watching on a mobile device. All of that’s coming together. And if a marketer, an advertiser wants to reach the audience they’re accustomed to at scale with the right reach and frequency in the right mindset, you have to look at this as a totality and not as fundamentally different segments. 

We think that this year is a good year to make that statement loud and clear by coming to the conference and really showing how YouTube is the best example of this. It’s in the middle of it all.

Connected TV viewership has been a big area of growth for YouTube and one that has led some TV ad buyers to reevaluate the platform as being in the broader TV and streaming bucket. Is YouTube rolling out any new ad products this year specifically designed for CTV?

We’re always focused on improving the experience both for viewers and for advertisers. Last year and into this year, we’re doing more to create interactive and engaging experiences. So you still have full sight, sound and motion, but what can you do knowing that you and your family members are likely on the phone on the couch watching together? How can we help you learn more about what a brand is offering? So we have a variety of different ways that consumer can engage there, from scanning a QR code to getting a push notification to their phone. It’s a very natural thing for people to want to learn more in a non-interruptive way, so the ad itself plays, people get engaged and then back to their content, but in parallel we can go learn more about what they just saw. 

And then, it’s more behind-the-scenes, but It’s absolutely critical for the industry — we’re very focused on improving the conversion measurement story. While for consumers, CTV and traditional TV have effectively merged in their minds, on the measurement front for advertisers, there’s still a lot of work to do to make them apples to apples when it comes to measuring reach and other key metrics. Those are high priorities for us.

On the measurement point, at Amazon you were the vp of multichannel advertising, and your team focused on advertising measurement and analytics. A lot of people in the TV and streaming ad industry are focused on measurement right now, specifically on what measurements can be used as the currencies on which transactions are based. On digital platforms like YouTube, the currencies have historically been impressions and clicks as measured by the platform. YouTube supports third-party measurements like Nielsen’s Total Ad Ratings and Comscore’s Campaign Ratings, but is YouTube supporting these or other third-party measurements as currencies for upfront advertisers?

Third-party measurement is critical, we realize, for not only the credibility that comes with independent measurements, but then the cross-platform, apples-to-apples comparison. It’s going from cross-platform within digital to cross-platform between digital and linear [TV]. So we’re rolling out support for Total Ad Ratings that allows for deduplicated reach measurement between both digital and linear. 

And of course, CTV is a critical piece of that. So that’s the big new thing coming. And then co-viewing. When you buy TV today, you are buying the model estimate of how many people were in the room watching at that time based on yesterday’s panels or other mechanisms. Knowing that CTV is YouTube’s fastest-growing surface — 135 million people in the U.S. watching YouTube on a TV screen every month — this is a super high priority for us to get right. 

Is co-viewing something where you’ll just be providing that measurement for advertisers for them to be able to assess how many people they reached, or will they actually be charged based on that co-viewing measurement?

This year it’s just measurement. We’re going to learn our way into this, get feedback from advertisers and see where to go in the future.

Another measurement that’s kind of a newer type of metric and something that advertisers are seeking out more and expecting to eventually transact against is outcome-based measurement: being able to pay based on how many site or brick-and-mortar visitors they received, how many products they sold or sales lift. Is YouTube doing anything in the realm of outcome-based guarantees by not only measuring outcomes but actually transacting against outcomes?

Not at this point. It’s not something we’re hearing our customers ask for. Certainly they want to measure those things, and we’re embracing all of the different ways that you can do that from [marketing mix modeling] to holdouts to other third-party mechanisms. But what we hear from customers is, “Help me understand reach, frequency, demographic. Who am I reaching? How often? And then how do I compare this to what’s the incrementality of each channel that I’m using?”

On the other end of the spectrum from CTV is short-form video. YouTube has started testing ads on YouTube Shorts. What is the Shorts ad format?

What we’re testing looks like existing Video Action [campaign] demand, which was a very successful direct-response product on YouTube already, and extending it to the Shorts experience. And of course, the visuals, the full screen and the vertical, all of that stuff’s really important. So those are the things we’re testing, trying to make sure we can adapt. We want to make it as easy as possible for advertisers to scale into the Shorts environment without having to do a lot of work. And that’s why we’re in this early stage of figuring out what works.

What’s the length of the ads that you’re testing inside of Shorts?

Shorts, by definition, is really a user-controlled, user-initiated experience, in terms of how long they want to engage. So we’re testing a wide range there. I can’t be too specific at this stage. But I think it’s one of the most critical things to recognize there is the control that the user has because they can swipe at any time. Not going to mess with that.

I know it’s early, but have there been any takeaways you have had in terms of what works or what doesn’t work when it comes to Shorts ads?

Yeah, not ready to talk about that, other than the results are really promising both for advertisers and for the user experience.

TikTok recently announced a revenue-sharing program for creators, and YouTube executives have said your platform plans to eventually add a revenue-sharing program for Shorts creators. When will that be introduced?

I don’t know. I’m not even [sure] even if I am the right person to answer that question. 

YouTube has opened its platform to Comcast’s FreeWheel ad server, which will make it easier for media companies to incorporate their YouTube channels’ inventory into their ad sales and delivery. Will YouTube be doing anything like this on the buy side, such as opening up its platform to third-party demand-side platforms? A frustration among advertisers has been that they have to use Google’s DSP Display & Video 360 to buy YouTube inventory programmatically.

Nothing to announce at this point. To reinforce, it’s not just Dv360, but you can use Google Ads as well.

Okay, but basically Google tech. On the FreeWheel news, I think I have a solid understanding of the significance — that it makes it easier for media companies to incorporate their YouTube channels’ inventory into their broader sales pitches. But is there anything else that’s important for either buyers or sellers to know in terms of the FreeWheel integration?

I think you got it right. Media companies are really important partners for YouTube and vice versa. That distribution for them and YouTube, and great content for our users on the YouTube side. And so we have a long partnership with FreeWheel on a technical level, and the partnership’s not adding anything new fundamentally. It’s adding a little bit of granularity to existing features, some capabilities around audience segmentation, ad creative APIs, but it’s all iterative. I don’t think there’s any big headline on something new or different here. It’s just improving what already existed.

There’s a trend bubbling up this year in companies’ upfront pitches around dynamic ad insertion, including the ability to dynamically place products inside of programming. Is YouTube doing anything in the realm of automated product placement inside of videos?

Nope, no. It’s an interesting idea. It’s not something that we’re prepared to talk about. But you’ve seen a lot of emphasis in the last year, especially in Q4, with live shopping events on YouTube. We know that there’s a lot of product research and shopping intent on YouTube. And that’s something we recognize as valuable for marketers. So there’s lots of opportunity there.

As the third-party cookie apocalypse approaches, it’s looking increasingly likely that there will not be one sole replacement that will satisfy publishers’ and advertisers’ needs. That’s never more evident than when you ask a media company about the different data collection strategies they’re testing right now. 

At Hearst UK, Faye Turner, head of commercial strategy and insight, and Ryan Buckley, head of digital, are leading the charge of finding and testing various methods of data collection. On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, they share how over the past few years, they’ve tested and implemented different alternatives to third-party cookies ranging from 50,000-person audience panels to newer options like clean rooms and data matching.

But with any new tech, possible downfalls and red herrings are bound to reveal themselves in what Buckley calls the “gold rush” of third-party cookie alternatives, including clean rooms. 

Highlights from the conversation have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. 

How readers play into business strategy

Turner: We have an in-house, Hearst UK audience panel, and these are readers [and] also digital users who are really engaged with our brands. They’ve put themselves forward to effectively be part of our business and support our business, in giving their opinions and providing information to us that we can also use in both our editorial campaigns and creating content for commercial campaigns. But they’re so engaged, that it’s really quite lovely that they trust our brand so much they want to be part of our journey. We’ve got around 50,000 of them on the panel, currently, we’ve been growing that for a while now. So that does show that the level of engagement that we do have, and we have them across all of us are 21 brands [so] we can cut those audiences in many different ways. We do have a full spectrum of audiences, very much covering all the different types of people that we do have here in the U.K. And we hold a certain amount of data on them.

We can really support our editors in the content they are producing, but also speak to our commercial partners, finding those kinds of really interesting aspects of how people’s lives have changed, and therefore how they can support them better in their lives through campaigns and digital content with us. So it’s a really useful tool that when we overlay it with digital behavioral data, and also the expertise that we’ve got from our editors and our Hearst Institute product testers and other experts of our brands, it becomes a really powerful trinity to be able to use the panel.

The appeal of clean rooms and data matching for Hearst UK

Buckley: Where we see a transition is in data matching. That is a whole new world that is coming through [with] data matching and clean room technologies. There’s a massive emergence around that. And I think it’s really exciting because this is an area where we can start to build really good, robust, strong relationships with our partners, whilst respecting our users’ privacy, and building out a really strong picture of how users are reacting. For example, if you took a client that was in the entertainment field, they would know exactly what their consumers are purchasing in those categories. They know what types of TV products they would be buying, what their budgets might be, etc. Now, the bit that they miss at the moment is, what’s their life choices? How do I reach my consumers? How do I extrapolate a wider reach of users and consumers for my products, and I think that’s where the interesting part of the cleanroom emergence [comes in.]

There is an opportunity now that we can bridge that gap, share and look at the enrichment processes that will allow us to not only understand our audiences more but on the other side, allow our clients to understand their [target consumers’] lifestyle choices and how we should speak to them.

Wariness around clean room technology remains, however

Buckley: Whilst we see [the] emergence — and this could be any technology that we see evolving and emerging — [of] clean room technologies, they absolutely can be a powerful tool for good and to increase engagement, insights [and] understandings. But there are areas that could be misused in different directions. And I think a testament to our own legal team, they are very keen to ensure that the privacy of our users are upheld completely.

But I do think that there is a downside to this emergent technology in terms of it creating a gold rush, that is the new data rush, shall we say in terms of everyone wanting to build their own known database. And I think this produces some challenges — and it may be more specific to European countries initially – where publishers now are seeing a need to drive their own known databases. I can see the different strategies coming through in terms of how they’re capturing emails. Now, this is new technology, albeit a few years old maybe, but it’s really got the spotlight right now. So you see an evolution amongst publishers in terms of, how do we grow our own database. 

For now, the most common strategy that is in the market at the moment is around the data walls. [Readers] are exposed to a certain amount of articles, and then you have to register and sign-up to get unlimited access. Now, picture a world where every single publisher you go to, has got the CMP for GDPR compliance, in terms of consent, and then all of a sudden, you’ve got a restriction around the amount of articles you can see for free. That, to me, seems like a potential major transition around the free internet as we know it today. There has to be an element of collaboration and I think that that exists within publishers, but also with clients and agencies and any partners that are involved with that chain, because whilst we really stand strong on the user experience, first, we have to adopt that as an industry.

The results are contained in a report released today from marketing technology provider Zeta Global and Forrester Consulting which also concluded that marketers believe that data management is the most important feature of such technologies, but they now require further capabilities.

For instance, they also require martech providers’ wares to analyze data and generate insights, tailor campaigns (including the ability to personalize messaging) and measure performance across channels according to the Forrester report commissioned by Zeta.

Zeta’s CTO and head of product Christian Monberg said the results demonstrated the growing gap between the promise, and performance, of most martech-providers’ offerings, a byproduct of complexities in the contemporary marketing landscape.

Forrester quizzed over 300 of Zeta’s customers to generate the results with Monberg citing further studies that document how the average enterprise organization has more than two CDPs, a sign of how many organizations silo their data when they need to unify it.

Monberg further recounted how much of the existing technologies that are popularly labeled as CDPs evolved from the tag management ecosystem and data management providers — the latter is a sector of the ecosystem threatened by the decline of third-party cookies.

“Anecdotally, what I hear from customers is [there are many] niche solution providers,” he added, “a marketing provider will try and solve one problem and take data from, say, Shopify and into Google Analytics, and that solution probably grew into the label of CDP.”

The evolution of the space has meant that many, both marketers and martech-providers, have assembled marketing clouds that now contain “a series of gaps” leading to dysfunctionality on such platforms.

“What we’re hearing from our customers is that RFPs [request for proposals] for CDPs are on the rise,” noted Monberg, adding that potential customers are increasingly asking for an integrated offering. “Every conversation turned into a joint marketing cloud and CDP conversation … people would come to us asking about email but then within two weeks, they’d come to us asking for an email plus CDP offering. So, it’s fairly obvious that you can’t really do your marketing without a centralized understanding [of the customer] full-stop.”

Privacy regulations fragment tech, spreading confusion

Robert Webster, co-founder of Canton Marketing Solutions, a consultancy that helps marketers better hone their online efforts, told Digiday a lot of the dissatisfaction stems from the investments of large marketing cloud providers in the early-to-mid 2010s.

However, a lot of these technologies have grown defunct because of evermore restrictive data privacy laws meaning technologies like DMPs are largely redundant, and the immediate substitute solutions on the market fall short of requirements.

Webster also pointed out that for most martech offerings to demonstrate value to a marketer, first-party data is required to fuel them, but not every brand possesses that luxury. “In the DMP-world, all you needed was a tag on a website, and off you’d go,” he said, “but with a CDP, if you haven’t got anybody signed up [with their registration data], then you can’t do much.”

He further cited skills shortages in areas such as advanced data analytics, or even sophisticated media buying techniques, across the industry as another crucial factor as to why so many marketers are frustrated by such technologies.

“This causes stress and confusion, you have over 100 CDPs out there, and they all have different claims, and they cost quite a lot of money,” explained Webster, adding that few CDPs on the market have customer support that is widely regarded as worthwhile. “And if you bought one of those, and you don’t know what to do with it, you’re going to be pretty unhappy.”

Few standards and not much communication

All sources consulted by Digiday spoke of widespread confusion over what exactly constitutes a CDP with many stating that martech vendors, be they simple providers of point-solutions or more comprehensive marketing cloud providers, capitalizing on this ignorance.

Tasso Argyros, CEO of ActionIQ, pointed out how the term “CDP means different things to different people” with some classifying “a data lake with customer data” in this category, while others would say a “fancy web tag manager” qualifies.

“The biggest reason CDP projects fail is lack of definition of what a CDP is and lack of clarity on requirements,” said Argyros in an emailed statement, adding that few vendors in the space can handle the sheer amount of data required to offer services that are fit for purpose.

He added, that it is “common knowledge in the industry” that many of the sector’s household names have been selling “CDP solutions” for years but that many of them are repurposed, incomplete technologies that “look great on slides but consistently miss customer expectations.”

Meanwhile, David Raab, founder of the CDP Institute, pointed out how his organization’s “RealCDP program,” which is subject to third-party verification, poses six criteria for vendors to meet before they can receive accreditation.

These include the ability to:

• ingest data from any source
• capture full detail of ingested data
• store ingested data indefinitely (subject to privacy constraints)
• create unified profiles of identified individuals
• share data with any system that needs it
• respond in real-time to new data and to profile requests

Speaking with Digiday, he said that many marketing teams can have such technologies foisted upon them from their peers in the IT, or even procurement department — an observation Zeta’s Monberg also noted — and that the subsequent communication and skills shortages can lead to shortfalls in execution and widespread frustration.

“Sometimes, it’s not the technology, it’s the implementation that goes wrong,” he said. “One thing that happens within organizations is that someone will get excited about CDPs and they’ll get a project team together and then go out and buy the thing. But if most of the people who are actually going to use the thing are not engaged in the project then they’re going to say, ‘What is this thing, I didn’t ask for it, and how am I supposed to use it?’”

This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

How are you planning to market these new features?

We have a huge campaign that we’re starting in June. It’s really about teaching people about Categories. The way that we approach marketing and the way we approach brand [purpose] is a little different than most companies. We believe that brand isn’t just about a campaign or putting out values and promises. It’s really two things: It’s how you behave and what you make for people. On the how you behave front, being brand-driven is doing things like what we’ve done for the Ukraine crisis or Afghanistan and using our platform to help people. That comes from a place of deep, deep belief for us. What we make is our product. 

With Categories, it’s a totally different way to search. When you look at searching for travel today, it’s an industry paradigm to rely on search. The problem with that is that a search box only knows to go get what you type into it. When it comes to travel, it’ll only go get what you tell it to get. You only know about a thin slice of the world. It’s like going to an ice cream parlor and not knowing any of the flavors. Categories is about organizing our supply into categories that make things unique or things you’re interested in. We have a category for design — there are tons of Frank Lloyd Wright homes listed. You would never know to search for these things but they’re exposed through categories. We have Categories on surfing, camping, ski-in, ski-out. It’s a much better way to search. The marketing is about getting people to understand this is a better way to travel. 

Is the in-house team still responsible for the creative? What about media? 

It’s all done in-house. All of our creative, all of our marketing, all of our design, it’s all done in-house. In total it’s a few hundred people. We work with an agency to buy the media. Strategy and execution is all done internally. Creative is done internally, production is done internally.

We’ve heard that some companies have been taking more of a hybrid approach to in-housing media recently, working on strategy in-house and an agency to execute. That seems to be the approach you’re taking.  

It makes a lot more sense. With something as specialized as media buying when it’s all about scale, [and] connections, it doesn’t make sense to build that. The strategic part of it, absolutely. The planning, absolutely. For us, on the creative side, everything is internal. That’s something I’m deeply passionate about. The best way to create great work is to create it in-house. [Over the last two years,] we have built out an advertising team on top of the creative team we do have. We’ve also deeply integrated it a lot more tightly. We have our advertising team working tightly with our marketing team working tightly with our design team, product team, the whole thing is much more integrated. By integrating deeply, that allows you to create some of the stuff we launched.

Split Stays, [the new feature that allows people to split stays across multiple properties], is a perfect example of that. It’s a feature we made as we found out people are booking long-term on our service. It automatically pairs stays together for the time that you’re looking for. It’s super unique and interesting. Most people probably wouldn’t have thought to try to connect the stays but it saves hundreds of hours. It’s a really useful feature.

Remote work has changed travel for some. How does that impact Airbnb’s marketing and advertising messaging? 

When we think about what our brand is doing and what we’re thinking about [now] it’s centered around the idea that the world has changed ridiculously fast. How we live and work is changing. Where we live and work is totally changing. As a result, how we travel is totally changing. Our goal is to constantly innovate our product to keep up with those changes and to provide people a unique and interesting way to take advantage of travel in this changing way, however, they want to do it. The marketing will be a natural outcropping of that.

By the numbers

Over the past year, brands have been running with stakes and flags to claim a spot in the burgeoning virtual world of the metaverse. The amount of people who are aware that the metaverse exists has doubled. However, the number of people who understand it is a different story. A new report from Wunderman Thompson Intelligence breaks down just how the world is thinking about the metaverse. Find key details from the report below:

• Only 15% of survey respondents said they know what the metaverse is and can explain it to someone else.
• 76% percent of people who responded to the survey feel the metaverse will allow for authentic self-expression.
• Out of those surveyed, 90% think the metaverse will have an impact on sport and entertainment. — Kimeko McCoy

Quote of the week

“I think the pendulum swung too far toward a total in-house solution and that clients are recognizing that it is almost impossible to manage.”

— Nancy Hill, founder of The Media Sherpa and former 4A’s president, on why more brands may seek hybrid over fully in-house when it comes to media planning and buying.

What we’ve covered

• What you need to know from the IAB Podcast upfront
• How Blue Apron is returning to spending more on marketing
• Inside Walgreens-owned Boots’ vision for data clean rooms