Month: May 2022

Join us virtually for the Digiday Commerce Publishers Forum taking place next Thursday at 12 p.m. ET. where you’ll hear from leaders at BuzzFeed, Vice, Vox Media and more. You’ll also gain access to the Commerce Week Town Hall happening next Tuesday at 11 a.m. ET.

Market check: shoppable video

The key hits: 

• Ad buyers are interested in both shoppable video and livestream shopping, but publishers will have to compete against platforms to win deals.  
• Condé Nast is boasting a slate of new shoppable shows that are tied to existing franchises in order to win over advertisers. 
• Vice Media is hoping to earn one-third of its revenue from commerce by 2024 and is looking to livestream shopping as a vehicle for achieving that goal.

Shoppable video has been touted by some retailers, publishers and platforms as the next big trend in online commerce in the U.S. for a couple years now, especially as livestream shopping has become a nearly $300 billion business in China. But the slow adoption rate from audiences, as well as advertisers, may indicate that additional value is necessary to get all parties on board.  

And after the Newfronts, it’s clear that publishers and platforms are eager to prove to advertisers that the time is now to jump into the shoppable video and livestream shopping space, using existing IP and innovative ad spots to sweeten the deal. 

During last week’s hoopla, Condé Nast announced a new slate of shows with shoppable capabilities and streaming platforms like Roku announced new ad spots that allow readers to buy products from their TV screen. Meanwhile, publishers like Vice Media and BuzzFeed are leaning harder on innovative commerce offerings like live streaming, as a means to increase affiliate commissions and be seen as an authority in product recommendations. 

But all of this experimentation could in vain if brands aren’t willing to back these projects with advertising revenue, especially since affiliate commissions have wavered a bit in the past few months due to supply chain issues and consumers returning to in-person shopping. 

It begs the question — can publishers that are bullish about video commerce convince advertisers and ad buyers that their approaches to live shopping and shoppable video are worth paying for in ad campaigns? 

Finding the ‘natural next steps’ in the buyers’ journey

Vice Media’s chief digital officer Cory Haik noted that advertisers are more willing than ever to include written commerce integrations into their digital media buys. 

From the first quarter of 2021 to the same quarter in 2022, Haik said the number of brands that have come to Vice Media asking for direct affiliate deals in written commerce content has increased by nearly 1,000%, which she said indicates that having more direct-sold opportunities in the commerce space for brands would be a strong growth opportunity in this business. Ultimately, her goal is to turn commerce into an equal revenue stream alongside advertising and consumer revenue (subscriptions and membership) by 2024. 

Haik is hoping that both consumers and advertisers alike see what she considers to be  the “natural next steps” of the content to shopping journey — livestream shopping — and Vice Media’s i-D Magazine is one brand that she said will help achieve that goal. 

Both the luxe nature of i-D, which increases the price points of items the brand can try and sell to its readers, and the different platforms i-D has honed an audience on, like TikTok, makes it ripe for commerce experimentation, she said. 

During Paris Fashion Week from Feb. 28 – March 8, i-D was paid to live stream all but one of the fashion shows on TikTok to its 220,000 followers through brand deals with the fashion houses, which included Bottega Veneta and Balenciaga. The natural next step, she said, is to work with the brands to include links to buy the items as they walk down the runway, which is something that the company is hoping to launch in the second half of the year. 

Where do buyers stand? 

Video commerce is appealing to Seth Hargrave, the CEO of media buying agency Media Two Interactive, mainly because of the ability to attribute the content to product sales for advertisers. 

“Shoppable video actually creates an opportunity to track the value of video [in a way] that’s a lot closer to the point of sale. So the ability to track return on your advertising spend or your return on your investment is going to be much greater with this particular format,” said Hargrave, adding that video is typically viewed as an upper-funnel format when it comes to media planning. 

That said, the type of advertiser — be it a big box retailer with thousands of skews or a smaller merchandise brand with 20 to 30 products available for purchase — is going to impact the approach taken to live stream shopping and shoppable video, he said. 

While a smaller merchant might want to incorporate some storytelling or a narrative that could lift the entire brand, something Hargrave said a publisher is capable of doing in its programming, bigger retailers might pursue a relationship with a platform like Amazon Live or Roku because they just want to focus on a select number of products and driving conversions rather than building brand awareness. 

The Amazon Lives of the world are also good experimental grounds for seeing how a lot of different products perform in live shopping, Hargrave said. It is also the starting place that he and his clients are targeting when planning their first campaigns tied to live stream shopping video. To date, none of his clients have actually activated in the live shopping space, but it is an area of focus in the next couple of quarters to test out before the fourth quarter holiday commerce rush hits. 

The product category is also a big factor in whether or not a buyer will consider shoppable video. 

“For higher ticket items, where more education/explanation is needed or items like skincare/makeup where consumers are craving that deeper content and opportunity for interaction, our clients are more interested in diving in,” said Allysun Lundy, vp and head of retail media strategy at Publicis Commerce. Chocolate or cereal marketers on the other hand might not be as successful in getting the conversions in the moment because consumers aren’t used to online shopping for these products.

But ultimately, publishers are going to need to prove their value in order to get brands to partner on their video commerce offerings, according to Lundy.

Using franchises to test shoppable video

The idea of shoppable video is not a new one for the Condé Nast. For years the company has poked at shoppable video capabilities in pitches to advertisers at the NewFronts and Condé Nast’s global CRO and president Pamela Drucker Mann even talked about getting into livestream shopping during an episode of the Digiday Podcast last year. 

But this year, the publisher seems to have doubled down on video commerce products and is using its brands’ existing video and event franchises to test these formats amongst audiences and with advertisers. 

“Live programming is great, but how cool would it be if you could buy the dress right off the red carpet,” said Drucker Mann during her portion of the presentation. She said that Vogue’s Met Gala live stream this year received more traffic than in prior years, though she did not provide any numbers.

In addition to selling products featured during live coverage of its events, popular video series are designed to be an attractive avenue for integrating shoppability, given the built-in audience that is already a fan of the content.

“Buying Open Door,” for example, is a shoppable spinoff of Architectural Digest’s “Open Door” YouTube series that Drucker Mann announced during the NewFronts. Where the original “Open Door” features guided tours by celebrities of their homes and workplaces — and receives an average of 7.5 million views per episode, according to Agnes Chu, president of Condé Nast Entertainment — the spinoff will give viewers the opportunity to purchase the decor and furniture featured in the episodes.

AD is also launching an original shoppable show called “Room Refresh” this year. And Bon Appétit is releasing a new show called “Through the Grapevine” that allows viewers to buy wine featured in the show. 

Live shopping is also something that Vice Media’s Refinery29 is diving headfirst into this year, starting on YouTube Live, and will focus on using in-house talent and influencers to drive the narratives of that programming, Haik said. 

“Imagine a variety show meets QVC. I like to call it experiential service journalism,” she said. 

According to Lundy, access to a celebrity host or being a part of a special tentpole event, or even proof of having an audience with high likelihood of purchase will help close a deal, “otherwise clients are going to go with the partner that they either have a commitment with or have the best rates with.” — Kayleigh Barber

What we’ve heard

“If you start a 15-second video that’s [about] the perfect eyeliner, but we don’t show you the eyeliner [in the beginning] you’re not likely to make it to the 15-second mark.”

— BDG svp of marketing and audience development Wesley Bonner

Goodbye to embedded podcast ads

While dynamically-inserted ads have accounted for the majority of podcast advertising for a few years now, the adoption of the more automated ad placement process is continuing to accelerate as advertisers see the benefits of better targeting capabilities and flexibility, according to discussions during the first two days of Interactive Advertising Bureau’s three-day Podcast Upfront this week.

IAB’s U.S. Podcast Advertising Revenue study, which came out on Monday, found the share of ad revenue served via dynamic ad insertion (DAI) — i.e. ads inserted at the time a podcast is downloaded or streamed, versus “burned-in” or “baked-in” ads, which are embedded in the podcast file and part of the episode’s content — has almost doubled in two years to 84%. In 2019, it was closer to a 50/50 split.

With the industry quickly shifting to DAI, more advertisers are moving into the podcast medium because they can use the same data they have to target their desired audiences on social and connected TV, for example, and apply that to their audio strategy, said André Swanston, svp of the media and entertainment vertical at credit reporting agency TransUnion, during a panel conversation on Wednesday’s event (as opposed to an embedded ad, where every listener hears the same ad regardless of who or where they are). It’s worth pointing out here that TransUnion is a provider of that data.

DAI has also helped to open up podcast advertising to more categories, said Eric John, vp of the IAB Media Center, on Tuesday. When looking at podcast ad revenue share by industry category in IAB’s latest report, the “other” category — which includes advertiser categories such as energy, government, tech and pets — has tripled its share in two years, from 8% in 2019 to 28% in 2021. In the same panel with Swanston, Ken Lagana, evp of digital sales at audio company Audacy, said the flexibility of being able to “put [dynamically-inserted ads] up and take them down in periods that are important” has opened up the podcast medium to advertisers in categories like automotive and for those promoting TV shows or selling tickets (the arts, entertainment & media category in IAB’s report grew from 9% to 11% year over year — auto grew from 2% to 4%). 

But, not everyone is behind the rapid adoption of dynamically inserted ads.

During Wednesday’s panel, Gary Coichy, founder and CEO at multicultural podcast network Pod Digital Media, argued embedded ads allow hosts to share their personal connection to the advertiser’s brand, which has led to high brand lift in studies conducted by his company in the past year.

“I personally am really not a fan of the dynamically inserted ads being dropped into podcasts. I’m not there yet, but maybe I’ll get there at some point,” Coichy said. 

“You’ll get there,” Lagana responded. — Sara Guaglione

Numbers to know

~11 million: Number of views that Politico’s Roe v. Wade scoop had received by the end of last week. (dumb question likely, but what does ‘~’ represent?)

$60,000: Minimum salary that the BuzzFeed News Union secured for members in its five-year contract with the publisher.

-3%: Year-over-year percentage decline in Dotdash Meredith’s digital revenue in the first quarter of 2022.

118,000: Number of digital subscribers that Gannett added in the first quarter of 2022.

>3 million: Number of digital-only subscriptions that The Wall Street Journal averaged in the first quarter of 2022.

What we’ve covered

WTF is dunning?:

• Dunning is an important term for publishers looking to avoid losing subscribers to payment lapses.
• Passive churn accounts for anywhere from 20% to 60% of a publisher’s total churn base, on average.

Read more about dunning here.

With the return of travel, Condé Nast Traveler puts its new global team to the test:

• The travel publication’s global editorial director Divia Thani and deputy global editorial director Jesse Ashlock were the guests for this week’s Digiday Podcast episode.
• The pair discussed how an international reorg has expanded the publication’s editorial strategy.

Listen to the latest Digiday Podcast here.

How creators have become strategy consultants for publishers on TikTok:

• Publishers including BDG, Gallery Media Group and Team Whistle have grown their TikTok followings by turning to creators for guidance.
• BDG has 100 creators in its BDG Creators Network.

Read more about publishers’ TikTok consultants here.

TV networks, streamers concentrate on content categories on NewFronts Day 4:

• On the final day of NewFronts, TV networks, streaming services and digital video publishers pitched new ad-supported programming and streaming properties.
• A pair of measurement providers also took the stage, with one looking to sell more than measurement.

Read more about NewFronts Day 4 here.

Media companies and social platforms tout their connections to diverse communities on NewFronts Day 3:

• Social platforms and Black-owned publishers took the stage to urge ad buyers to spend more money to reach diverse audiences.
• TikTok announced its first ad revenue share program for creators.

Read more about NewFronts Day 3 here.

What we’re reading

Meta’s latest news publisher pivot:
Meta may reduce the money it pays to news publishers, as click counts on news articles on the platform have dipped and the company considers pivoting its news focus to videos instead of articles, according to The Information. Meta executive Campbell Brown warned publishers years ago about depending on the platform.

The Guardian’s newsletter strategy:
The Guardian’s collection of 50 email newsletters has amassed more than 1 million unique subscribers, and now the publisher is looking to push away from roundup-style newsletters to ones with original reporting, according to Press Gazette.

G/O Media’s expansion plan:
2021 marked G/O Media’s first profitable year in its three-year history, and now the publisher of Gizmodo, The Root and, most recently, Quartz is plotting more acquisitions in the travel, health/wellness and fashion verticals, according to Adweek.

By having an internal team that works with agency buying specialists, King believes the company can “clearly pass the baton between the programmatic lead at Colgate and the agency programmatic lead who will execute the strategy for us.” In doing so, the company is able to have more control over the strategy without getting into the complexities of going fully in-house. 

In recent years, some marketers have moved away from the all-or-nothing approach to in-housing or working with an agency. Instead, they’ve sought a middle ground with a hybrid model using some internal team members as well as an agency to handle media buying and planning. 

Aside from the move to a more hybrid approach to media planning and buying, Colgate has also worked to rebalance its media mix to focus more on digital and less on linear TV. Two years ago, the company spent roughly 40% of its media dollars on digital; it has now upped that spend to around 60% or so for its brands.

Per Kantar, Colgate spent $99.8 million on media for its brands in 2021, down from $137.4 million in 2020. Those figures exclude what was spent on social media channels as Kantar doesn’t track social spending. 

While Colgate’s move to a hybrid approach is more focused on media strategy, the company also has content studios in-house for its divisions. That way the company can “balance what we need done by an agency versus what we can do in-house,” noted King, adding that “content studios can feed the beast” of social media channels like Instagram and TikTok. 

Colgate’s hybrid approach has likely become the norm for brands as going fully in-house can be costly, time-consuming and complicated. At the same time, privacy changes have marketers leaning on their agencies more and more. 

The hybrid structure has become the “most common structure of in-house media we see,” per Jay Pattisall, principal analyst at Forrester. “A common structure is the client’s own strategy because it is a discrete function that requires a handful of specialists, while the agency handles execution, including the buying and operations.”

Pattisall isn’t alone in recognizing marketers’ move to hybrid. “I believe it is becoming more and more of the norm,” said Nancy Hill, founder of The Media Sherpa and former 4A’s president. “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.”

Hill continued: “There are some things that make sense to be in-house (data-driven analysis and product-driven strategies, eg), but other pieces make more sense residing in an agency. Given the talent crunch that everyone is facing, it will be better, in the long run, to figure out a hybrid model that allows for both internal focus and external POV and expertise.”

Just like the world it emulates, the metaverse is constantly changing, meaning Epic Games has to continuously provide relevant and exciting activations within Fortnite if it wants to compete with other platforms like Roblox. It’ll likely only invest more in what it can offer advertisers as the concept of the metaverse grows and pushes more creators and brands to get involved.

So far, brands have activated in the metaverse around major cultural moments, from Coachella to the release of the next big Marvel movie, and new product launches, from building a recreation of the O2 Arena to Coca-Cola’s Pixel Point Fortnite experience, in ways that help cement Fortnite as a cornerstone of the metaverse.

While the number of agencies and independent creators working within Fortnite Creative is growing, Epic Games’ own internal teams still dominate much of the branded space. To handle this influx of projects, the developer has partnered with a number of independent creators, including Alliance and Zen Studios.

A network of creators

Fortnite Creative aims to make these activations more accessible to both brands and users. It’s a workshop mode in which players can design their own experiences, similar to Roblox or Minecraft. The program is accessible to anyone, which gives brands the ability to create activations without working with Epic Games at all.

The most prominent brand activations in Fortnite take place inside the game’s incredibly popular “battle royale” mode, but there is only so much space, time and manpower for brand activations of that type.

“Fortnite Creative creators are like small game studios. We have to pick up all our specialities — marketing, making trailers, graphic design — as well as contributing to level design,” said Fortnite Creative agency Zen Creative co-founder R-leeo Maoate. “There are not a lot of professional teams, but there are a lot of clients.”

Agencies, including Alliance, Zen Studios, Team PWR and others — whose members all began as hobbyist Fortnite Creative designers — have teams that work full-time to design levels for dozens of brands, including Crystal Dynamics, NVIDIA and TSM. Fortnite Creative, which launched in late 2018, has been used by all of these advertisers.

Fortnite brand activations have ranged from the small — inserting imagery onto pre-existing maps that already have an active player base — to the big — building out a multiple-map campaign over the course of four months. The rates studios charge for each project vary depending on the project’s scope and level of complexity, with some starting in the tens of thousands and others exceeding hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“There’s definitely a ton of demand. The thing we’re working on is staying true to what we want to do when so many are reaching out,” said Team PWR’s Boomer Gurney. “We haven’t actually had to approach a brand with a pitch — but once brands reach out to us, they know we are the experts.”

How the sausage is made

So far, brands seem to be relying on informed agencies to pave the way into the metaverse. An agency like Alliance, for example, has grown around the idea of working with brands on activations built inside Fortnite Creative. That has often meant answering a lot of questions, like how long to keep activations live and how to avoid turning off gamers, for marketers who have little knowledge of these experiences are built.

Alliance counts itself as one of the few full-service marketing agencies that design Fortnite Creative experiences from concept to launch, sometimes complete with their own graphic design and in-game trailers. It has built Nike “deathrun” maps that reward players with a new in-game skin, a charity activation for Susan G. Komen and a delivery driver experience for Grubhub, in which players embodied delivery drivers and competed to reach customers and complete missions efficiently.

A large part of that success is built around talent: the organization is overseen, in part, by Mackenzie Jackson, who built out the first-ever Fortnite Creative creator-led brand activation (for esports org 100 Thieves) in early 2019, before Alliance’s creation.

“We don’t normally have to sell [our services],” Jackson said. “We get more players on our maps than some AAA games, and that’s because of how massive Fortnite is.”

Brands usually approach Alliance, and other agencies, with campaigns that they’ve seen before as places to start.

“Fortnite is immediately recognizable by a huge number of people, and many times since its release, it has been the center of the cultural zeitgeist,” said Michael Ruffolo, a consultant with The Huxley Group who worked with Grubhub and the marketing agency Outloud Group to create the Grubhub Delivery Run. “Then, layer on the fact that it’s a rich toolset that you can make or create just about anything. It really allows you to do some wild things no other game allows for.”

Brand benefits

Watching how games with speed runs and obstacle courses took off in popularity in Fortnite helped inform Grubhub’s activation, Ruffolo said. “[It] created an opportunity to put the player in the role of the delivery driver and make deliveries to their favorite creators,” he added.

Fortnite Creative agencies believe creating a map is just the beginning; they want every map to have a healthy player base so that the brand’s message reaches as many players as possible.

“Our job is not just to create a virtual place for companies to be represented in the metaverse, it’s about creating a unique experience [for] players to enjoy so that company’s brand can spread with an organic message,” said Team Unite owner Hannes Van der Haege. Team Unite worked with Gillette to create the Gillette Bed Battles map that let players fight within a gigantic arena. The map saw 200,000 unique players jump on within the first two days of launch.

“When measuring success of sponsored streams or branded integrations on Twitch, most metrics brands consider include viewership, quality of the audience, share of voice, and more,” Gillette Global vice president Jaweria Ali said. “With the Gillette Bed Battles Fortnite map, we are able to gain the added layer of data around the number of unique players, average playtime per player and daily retention rate.”

Changes on the horizon

Independent organizations like Alliance and Zen Creative can’t create their own skins or import their own assets and are limited by the specific toolset that Fortnite Creative provides. Companies looking to have their own characters, properties or brands inserted as assets within Fortnite must work with Epic directly.

“There are obviously limitations in Fortnite Creative,” Jackson said. “But it has grown immensely over the past three years. We tell our brands that there are some limitations, but we can still create a really cool experience that’s going to pop off.”

Fortnite Creative is changing just as fast as Fortnite is, with every update bringing new gameplay mechanics that can be used to design different kinds of branded experiences. These changes, along with the upcoming release of Fortnite Creative 2.0, will give agencies more control over how they can build brand activations within virtual space. 

Fortnite Creative 2.0 will utilize Unreal Engine 5, meaning creators will effectively be able to modify the game using their own code. No firm release date has been given for the new iteration of Creative, but Epic Games CEO Time Sweeney recently tweeted that Epic games is already working on the second and third versions of the Fortnite creator economy and that players should “expect some big changes” in 2022.

This new iteration of Fortnite Creative could expand the types of game genres that these agencies can access. It is one of many signs that Epic Games is serious about the future of the metaverse. The company recently announced that it raised $2 billion in funding to “advance the company’s vision to build the metaverse,” and Fortnite Creative and its future iterations will play a key role in that vision by helping more brands and creators wield a deeper toolset to create more complex experiences.

“Every brand that we’ve worked with has asked about 2.0,” said Alliance art director Simon Bell. “Brands are going to explode again once it launches. They are interested in what possible expansions will be included in 2.0.”

The service is scheduled to launch later this year and substitute Google’s existing “About this ad” feature; it will also offer users more control over what kind of ads they’ll see by choosing the topics and brands they want to see more (or fewer) of.

In particular, My Ad Center will let users customize their ad experiences around “sensitive” ad topics, such as alcohol, gambling, pregnancy and parenting, or dating, or even turn off all forms of personalization.

Additionally, the pending update will also let Google users manage their demographic data such as age, relationship status, or education levels, block specific ads altogether or even request more ads from a brand.

Google previewed My Ad Center as part of its flagship Developer I/O conference, hosted in Mountainview, California, earlier this week amid a host of consumer-facing announcements such as the latest version of its Android OS.

Speaking with journalists, David Temkin, director of product management, ads privacy and user trust, Google, demonstrated My Ad Center and further explained how it will also let users report an ad, identify what party paid for ad placement as well as better understand why they were served a specific ad.

“It is designed to give users a whole new level of control, agency, [and] value in what they see in personalized ads on Google websites and Google Apps,” he said. “We’re giving the user control very granular control over what they see on those Google sites and apps.”

Temkin characterized the launch of My Ad Center as “not about [privacy] compliance or checking a box” adding that “we’re actually building something for users… this is not about control over targeting categories, it’s something completely new.”

He further added, “We are giving users control over the contents of the ads you can have a targeting category that might relate to interest into a certain category of products, but that doesn’t mean that when you turn it off, you’re not going to be getting ads about those products. This is specifically about products and brands.”

Upon launch, the preferences a user indicates in My Ad Center won’t impact the types of ads they’ll be served via the Google Display Network, but Temkin noted how it does intend to expand the service to all of its own and operated properties eventually.

Commenting on the announcement, sources told Digiday My Ad Center is likely Google’s attempt to maintain ad performance on its network while also complying with the growing legal requirements on how it can share data with advertisers.

Michael Oulette, svp, marketer, agency & tech strategy, Prohaska Consulting, noted how the pending launch of the service is an updated iteration of earlier efforts to give users more control over the types of ads they’ll see.

“We’ve definitely seen this before, but I don’t think we’ve seen anyone succeed where we’ve seen consumers want to do what Google is trying to get them to do which is provide these deep preferences on how they want to be advertised to,” he said. “They’re enriching their own ad ecosystem through zero-party data by getting people to give them this information.”

Ana Milicevic, co-founder and principal at Sparrow Digital Holdings, noted that while any attempt to give consumers more agency over how their personal information is accessed by the ad industry is to be welcomed, there is an element of déjà vu to the announcement.

“While this is, seemingly, an improvement for consumers, it’s also a nice way of doing a few things,” she said. “One is, Google is saying, ‘Look, consumers have choice’ and the other is, ‘Look, consumers can clearly demonstrate their consent.’”

So: what is a data clean room today, and what should it deliver for marketers?

This is where things get hazy. There’s a smorgasbord of data clean rooms, and knowing which one does what, how they store data and manage the flow of it between different systems and even different data clean rooms needs addressing. Unsurprisingly, Markey turned to his colleagues at the data sciences division of Boots to help make sense of it all. 

Together, they decided that Markey needed the clean room to have a specific function that provided a secure, privacy-complaint way to see how his customers overlapped with a given publisher’s audience. That meant a solution that wasn’t owned by one single media owner. This way they wouldn’t be limited to only accessing user-level data from a particular media owner in an environment that’s owned by them.

What Markey wanted was a safe space where two companies could come together with their first-party data in a way that mitigates any concern that their data will get leaked to the other party. Another easier said than done part of Boots’ search for a data clean room. Not least because it’s relatively straightforward to create connections between different data sets. The tricky part is doing so without exposing that information.

“We needed a partner that was going to offer us strong matchable data and quick integrations through collaborations with media owners — all while being happy that the data on both sides was going to remain secure,” said Markey.

Markey thought: this is going to be a longer arduous process. Later it occurred to him that maybe that was the whole point. 

“The starting point for this whole process was how we can use our first-party data to drive what we call ‘mass personalization’ for our customers in environments that they enjoy being in,” said Markey. 

What that actually means — at least for now — is being able to target members of the Boots Advantage loyalty card scheme with specific messaging while they’re watching their favorite soap opera on a streaming service owned by one of the mainstream TV networks like ITV or Channel 4 in the U.K. “This hyper targeting may be expensive, but in many ways it’s worth it if it delivers that extra reach,” said Markey. “In many ways, it offsets some of the wastage that’s inherently built into broadcast advertising.”

Eventually, Boots settled on the data clean room from InfoSum. Not only did it offer the necessary assurances around how the data would and wouldn’t be managed, it also had the backing of some of the largest media owners in the U.K. (ITV, Channel 4, Reach Global to name a few) — a crucial factor for an advertiser with big ambitions to use more of its own data to power its advertising. As Markey explained: “A few years ago 7% of all our media was bought using first-party data, now it’s around 30%, although some campaigns are closer to 40%.”

For now, the data clean room is essentially being used to facilitate privacy-centric targeting. Looking ahead, Markey hopes to use the insights gleaned from the clean room to inform bespoke creative for different audiences. “I’d love to get to a point where if i knew one viewer was a fan of one brand and someone else another then I’d be able to show them a bespoke piece of creative with a targeted offer. We do bits of that today, of course, but it’s not at a point where we’re able to facilitate mass personalization.”

It goes to show how complicated data clean rooms are to navigate. They’re not a panacea to every marketer’s data woes. Nor are they something they can afford to sleep on. In order to navigate the landscape effectively, it is important to understand your current media mix and to clearly define what you want to know.

“This can lead you to which platforms are best poised to answer those strategic questions,” said Jenifer Jones, senior data insights director at Jellyfish. “This decision will be unique to the business based on their needs and which data clean room is most suitable for what they are trying to understand.  It also means that within the current systems the technology is integrated to provide for enhanced measurement and ensure that the owned conversion data is strong at its foundation.”

Over the past decade, creators have increasingly struck deals with companies like retailers to license their likenesses for new product lines. They have even formed their own commerce businesses pedaling everything from cosmetics to clothes to coffee. More recently, companies like Jellysmack and Spotter have emerged offering to pay creators millions of dollars in some cases to license their video back catalogs. Meanwhile, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) provide the next potential opportunity for creators to spin off new revenue sources from the content they have created and audiences they have accumulated.

“I’ve definitely seen the opportunities increasingly arise for our clients,” said Mahzad Babayan, digital talent agent at talent agency UTA where she has worked with creator clients to create standalone commerce businesses based on their content channels.

“The opportunity for creators to monetize their audience has never been bigger,” said Reza Izad, co-founder and partner of talent management firm Underscore Talent, which represents creators.

One reason for the explosion in IP monetization opportunities for creators is the explosion of the so-called “creator economy.” While creator-centric companies like talent management firms and multi-channel networks existed a decade ago, in recent years companies with more concentrated focuses — like commerce or content licensing — have sprouted to widen the spectrum of creators able to derive new revenue from their content and followings. Creator economy companies of this sort in the U.S. have raised more than $6 billion in funding since the start of 2021, according to The Information.

“The creator economy is the democratization of that IP flywheel that Disney has perfected and has put it in the hands of individual creators,” said Andrew Cohen, manager at strategic advisory firm RockWater.

“Through the money [being invested into creators], it shows us that there’s a value in content, that there’s a value in IP,” said Jake Webb, founder and president of talent management firm Slash Management.

Cases in point: Jellysmack and Spotter plan to spend $500 million and $670 million, respectively, in the coming years to license creators’ video back catalogs. “We’re doing deals for as little as $10,000, and we’re willing to do up to $50 million-plus,” said Spotter founder and CEO Aaron DeBevoise. Meanwhile, over the past 10 years, digital studio and content rights management firm Collab has paid more than $200 million to creators in content royalties, according to chief strategy officer Eric Jacks. Additionally, Fanjoy, which works with creators to develop and sell merchandise, has paid out more than $50 million to creators since 2014, according to its founder and CEO Chris Vaccarino.

However, these companies are not limiting themselves to the top 1% of creators with mass followings. Instead, they’re supporting a wider spectrum of creators. For example, while Jellysmack has done deals with creators who have tens of millions of subscribers on YouTube, it has also signed ones with creators who have as relatively few as 50,000 subscribers, said Jellysmack president Sean Atkins.

The extension of IP monetization opportunities to mid- and smaller-sized creators evinces not only the expansion of the creator economy but also the growing recognition of creators’ influences on their audiences. That is especially apparent when it comes to commerce-related opportunities, such as creators licensing their own brands to other companies or forming their own companies.

“We’re starting to see a lot of these ‘mid-level’ — I say that in air quotes — creators really pop into having a heavier hand in their own brands or even just more so of a collaboration aspect with their favorite brands,” said Evegail Andal, founder and CEO of talent management firm Matter Media Group.

These brand licensing opportunities largely originated with so-called capsule collections that creators would work on with established brands, in which the brands would license a creator’s likeness to attach to a product line, said Ali Grant, founder and CEO of influencer marketing agency Be Social. The addition of links to Instagram Stories helped to open these opportunities to more creators because the links’ performances provided evidence to prospective brands of whether a creator was able to motivate their followers to visit a product page and make a purchase, she said.

Fanjoy uses a similar exercise when evaluating creators for merchandise deals. It runs a test for creators to send their audiences from Instagram to a pop-up page on Fanjoy’s site to provide their email addresses or phone numbers prior to launching merchandise with a creator. “The [creators] who can drive a thousand initial emails or phone numbers give a sense of who can sell product,” said Vaccarino.

For as many opportunities as there are today for creators to monetize their IP, the number is only likely to grow. The back catalog licensing deals to date have largely focused on syndicating creators’ YouTube videos to other social platforms like Facebook and Snapchat, but the surge of streaming services provide an even wider array of outlets. “There are opportunities out there [in streaming], and those will come to light in the next six to 12 months,” said Babayan.

Looking even further out, there is the opportunity for creators to monetize their IP in the form of NFTs. To be clear, this is already underway, with creators like the Nelk Boys raising $23 million from an NFT collection in January 2022.

“The technology is there, and it all adds up to why we’ve been having this conversation. It all adds up to rights management,” said Webb. He added that NFTs offer “a lot of opportunity for creators and changes even the conversation of long-term rights management, long-term copyright.”