DMG Media, the publisher of Mail Online and Thisismoney.co.uk, will aim to grow its revenue streams with Outbrain, becoming its exclusive recommendation partner. The multi-year deal, which begins in the final week of September, will see web recommendation platform Outbrain provide a discovery feed for organic and paid content across its various international online platforms….
Inside the Ryan Reynolds-Wrapped Aviation Gin Distillery in Portland
“You just missed Timber Joey sawing the sign!” Yes, I had just missed Joey Webber. That’s the extremely human mascot of Major League Soccer’s Portland Timbers, who saws a round of Douglas fir off of a log after each goal. Webber had just taken a chainsaw to the middle of the wooden sign outside the…
Dentsu Names Retail Veteran Karin Zimmermann as CEO For Germany and DACH
Agency network Dentsu has named Madeleine Fashion Group’s chief executive Karin Zimmermann as its new CEO for the German and DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) markets, succeeding Ulrike Handel who left Dentsu International. Zimmermann, who will take on the role from January 2023, will join the EMEA Executive Team as well as the Board of…
Introducing Advertising Logistics – A New Approach For A More Observable Programmatic Ecosystem
As technology and industry self-regulation converge to make supply and demand path optimization more seamless and efficient, we need a better name to describe optimization across the advertising ecosystem, writes Stephen Johnston, CTO of PubWise. “I’d like to submit for your consideration a new term: advertising logistics.”
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Why Podcasters Buy In-Game Reward Ads; Come To TV, Ye Programmatic Powers That Be
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Podded Plants Podcasters have a new trick for juicing downloads, Bloomberg reports. The idea is to serve mobile in-game reward ads that players click to collect some virtual loot. In exchange, the user downloads a podcast episode in the background. It’s a win-win-win for… Continue reading »
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M&M’s Introduces a New Mascot All About Inclusivity
Earlier this year, M&M’s updated its cast of candy characters to better fit with the times. The brand stopped using the prefixes “Mr.” and “Ms.” to place more focus on the mascots’ unique traits, instead of their gender. Green traded in knee-high boots for casual sneakers. Brown transitioned from high stilettos to low block heels….
Why a DTC jewelry company is placing its bets on organic growth via TikTok
The Clear Cut, a direct-to-consumer jewelry company, is making more organic TikTok content with influencers, including educational videos to boost brand awareness to capture more of Gen Z’s attention.
“We would like to put some more spend there. But we’ve just been having such phenomenal success organically. We have just been focused on that,” said Kyle Simon, co-founder and COO of The Clear Cut. He added that the TikTok growth has helped boost sales and brand awareness, but did not provide specific figures.
This year, The Clear Cut is spending less than 3% of revenue on paid media, he said, which has increased slightly as the brand added more channels to its media mix, including TikTok. The Clear Cut’s media mix is made up of paid search, Facebook and Instagram, and Pinterest; Simon did not provide further specifics around the brand’s media spend.
According to Pathmatics, The Clear Cut spent $15,300 on Facebook and Instagram so far this year, significantly down from the $31,000 spent on those channels in 2021.
The four-year-old, NYC-based startup isn’t the only one placing its bet on TikTok hoping for a viral moment driving brand awareness without a large spend. It’s seemingly a trend as industry experts say rising ad prices, slumping organic reach and shifting formats have pushed brands and advertisers to diversify their ad budgets, according to previous Digiday reporting.
“We’re very disciplined with spend because again, we’ve seen a lot of DTC businesses struggle. But we also haven’t raised a significant amount of capital,” Simon said. “So all this growth has been pretty much bootstrapped.”
TikTok content creation is done in-house, said Olivia Landau, co-founder and CEO of The Clear Cut.
Over the last two years, TikTok has increasingly become a line item in media mixes and marketing strategies as the short-form video app continues to grow in popularity. As the creator economy swells, TikTok offers a level of creator ownership, via its creator tools, that Facebook and Instagram are catching up to, said Brandy Alexander, senior director of e-commerce strategy for Icon Commerce, a DTC commerce agency. “TikTok is always inventing new ways to engage their audience, and marketers are benefiting,” Alexander said via email.
The agency’s TikTok strategy revolves around using influencers, repurposed content and educational videos to its 74,000 followers. It’s a similar strategy to what The Clear Cut did on Instagram, which prioritized organic content and organic growth before spending on paid ads, “which is why we’re still not addicted to paid ads on Instagram,” said Landau.
With talk of an economic recession looming, The Clear Cut’s budget is a conservative one, said Simon, without disclosing any specific figures that could eventually see more dollars spent on TikTok.
“This year, we’ve seen TikTok rapidly overtake Pinterest,” Simon said. “I would predict if this trend continues, it will overtake Instagram, in terms of inbound leads and conversions for us.”
Publishers test personalizing newsletters with varying degrees of success
As companies like The New York Times and The Washington Post experiment with personalizing their homepages to get readers to consume more articles, publishers are also tweaking newsletters to serve readers’ specific interests and behaviors — but to varying degrees of success.
Publishers like The Telegraph and Reach plc are personalizing newsletters to improve open rates, click-through rates and page visits. In The Telegraph’s case, it’s also a key part of the company’s subscription strategy.
But other publishers are finding their newsletter personalization efforts aren’t resonating with readers and that many simply want a newsletter to highlight the most important or best stories from that publication.
Email personalization can drive readers to websites
Last year, The Telegraph launched its Headlines newsletter, which uses an algorithm to send personalized, vertical-specific content recommendation emails three times a week. The recommendations are based on an individuals’ browsing history; for example, the newsletter doesn’t include articles a reader has already read. The newsletters are centered around culture, news, politics and soccer.
The newsletters have become “good tools” for driving readers to The Telegraph and getting them to register on the site, putting them on the conversion path to subscribe, said Michelle Brister, The Telegraph’s head of newsletters. The Telegraph has a goal to hit 1 million subscribers by 2023.
The Telegraph is seeing higher click-through rates, page views per click and time spent on site from readers coming from Headlines newsletters compared to its other newsletters, which do not tailor content to individual readers, Brister said. Headlines are also supporting the Telegraph’s retention and acquisition strategy. “We were surprised at how well they did both,” Brister said. Brister did not provide stats to show how Headlines performed compared to The Telegraph’s other newsletters before publishing time.
Reach plc, on the other hand, does not have a paywall and its business is based on ad revenue. The main goal for the personalization efforts at Reach plc — which owns over 200 U.K. publications and websites like Daily Mirror and OK! Magazine — is to get people to spend more time on site and consume more pages per session to ultimately get them to register and become known users, said Reach plc’s chief product and customer officer Jean-Paul Camelbeek. Then, with machine learning, Reach plc can build models based on reader signals, which has resulted in creating “hundreds of cohorts,” Camelbeek said.
In newsletters, Reach plc breaks down cohorts into smaller groups to serve them different sets of content to see what performs well and then distributes that content to a larger cohort. For example, Reach plc saw a group in its larger lifestyle cohort reading articles on the Mirror and the Daily Star about the TV show “I’m a Celebrity” and created a newsletter specifically around this content.
Newsletter personalization is “part of our roadmap,” Camelbeek said, but it’s still “early days.” If someone has subscribed to the “Royals” newsletter, for example, Reach plc can determine which articles the reader is clicking through and serve them additional links to those types of stories to get them to return to the website. Reach plc is also testing sending a cohort of readers different subject lines to see what versions drive better engagement, Camelbeek said.
However, newsletters are ultimately a vehicle to get people to click through to the site and then personalize recommendations from there, he said.
Overall, these efforts have led to a growth in newsletter subscribers, according to Camelbeek. He declined to share how much subscribers have grown due to personalization.
“Is the juice worth the squeeze? The answer is yes,” he said.
But readers might not want tailored newsletters
But that’s not the case for some other publishers. The Toronto Star launched a dedicated newsletter for personalized recommendations in 2020 and shut it down this May, said David Topping, newsroom director, newsletters at Toronto Star’s owner Torstar. The newsletter’s content was selected by a recommendation engine from LiftIgniter, a machine learning platform. It used a logged-in reader’s browsing history to update their preferences and generate a list of stories to go in the newsletter.
Most newsletter subscribers “seem pretty happy getting what everyone else got,” Topping said. The personalized newsletter drove engagement for a “niche audience” who wanted tailored recommendations but it wasn’t “necessarily something that’s going to move the needle,” he added.
“I would rather the work involved that goes into newsletters at The Star go towards making the best possible email offering for the greatest number of people,” Topping said. For example, Torstar’s food newsletter could personalize restaurant recommendations based on food articles a reader consumed on the site, but Topping said a better strategy is to “just do a really, really good job every week picking the right five places that we think most people will be excited about.”
A publishing executive who spoke during a closed-door session at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Key Biscayne, Fla., last week said they tested personalized newsletters for a few months but also found email subscribers didn’t “want anything super custom” in the form of a personalized briefing.
Topping mused about incorporating tailored recommendations into existing newsletters, rather than having a fully personalized newsletter, but noted it’s “not especially high on the list right now.”
Another challenge for publishers looking to tinker with their newsletters? The investment in tech it requires to even be able to offer personalization. Key to Reach plc’s efforts is a customer data platform the company has adopted in the past year, Camelbeek said.
Email service providers have “limited profiling and segmentation capability,” which is a hurdle to collecting data from readers, such as email open rates, Camelbeek said. A CDP helps collect data on a reader’s “opens, clicks, consumption behavior, what they’re interested in — you’re able to then effectively do better personalization,” he said.
Newsletter personalization “usually requires a level of sophistication [and] an investment on the tech side that most newsrooms can’t deliver on,” said Dan Oshinky, who runs email consultancy Inbox Collective.
Kayleigh Barber contributed to this report.
Inside the NFL’s youth-focused social strategy
The National Football League wants to be the most youth-focused, community-driven league in the world. To reach that goal, it’s counting on its social media marketing strategy.
From splashy announcements about the Super Bowl halftime show (the NFL cheekily temporarily rebranded its Twitter bio to “National Fenty League” as a nod to Rihanna’s anticipated performance this year) to working with influencers, the sports league is doing the most to stay trendy.
To engage with fans in constantly innovative ways, the league is turning to creators as part of its so-called NFL Content Creator Network which it launched in 2017.
The program is wide-ranging and is intended to reach a broad audience: creators are targeted in strategic verticals such as fashion, gaming, wellness and music, and by platform including TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, and Instagram with channels focusing on humor, food, art, animals or football-related content.
The league’s strategy comes as more brands have focused on investing in its influencer strategy — oftentimes turning to creators with long-term contracts to speak authentically to their audiences.
For its part, the NFL wanted a “helmets off” strategy, said Ian Trombetta, NFL svp of social influence and influencer marketing, so fans would get a better understanding of the personal interests of players off the field, whether it be video games, fashion, or other hobbies. It’s all designed to connect fans with their favorite players beyond the weekly games.
“It’s not just football highlights all the time, it’s a diversification of content that we’re pushing across the board, which is really important to our strategy as a whole,” said Trombetta.
Of course, nothing gives a boost to a marketing strategy quite like an Instagram account with 136 million followers.
To announce her Super Bowl LVII Halftime Show performance, Rhianna posted a photo on her Instagram account on Sept. 25 showing her hand holding an NFL football with her signature wrist tattoo.
“The now iconic image from Rihanna truly went viral across nearly every major platform and trended globally,” said Trombetta as he reacted to the memes. “Needless to say, fans around the world are incredibly excited to see her perform on the biggest stage in Super Bowl LVII.”
And nearly as quickly as the post was published, brands like Popeyes, Beatbox, and Dairy Queen created memes based on the picture.
The NFL’s social strategy was revamped during the pandemic as it forced the team to innovate, according to Trombetta. The NFL explored and experimented with new formats, Instagram live sessions, Snapchat, Twitter spaces and TikTok. Experimenting with these channels, fans were able to gain access to the players, despite not being able to be in the stadiums, and get inside information on what the players were doing.
The strategy seems to be working so far. The NFL reached 91% more Instagram this year’s kickoff compared to Kickoff Sunday last year, Trombetta said, citing internal figures without providing specifics.
The NFL’s Twitter account is also setting a regular season weekly record for video views, up 47% according to Trombetta, Snapchat’s Sunday Highlight Edition drove 38% more unique viewers than last year’s week one edition with 70% of the audience for these highlights being 24 and under. Its TikTok account setting a regular season weekly record for video views, up 258%. The NFL declined to share other, previous stats from 2021.
Trombetta also said that TikTok is the NFL’s fastest growing platform as the the league centers its programing strategy with hype videos featuring TikTok influencers such as entrepreneur Josh Richards and its own players. “It’s all about building community,” said Trombetta. “Not only are you getting the news that you need, we are the 24/7 hour newsroom where you’re getting real time updates as to what’s going on with your favorite team and your favorite players.”
It is unclear how much of the NFL’s advertising budget is allocated to social media marketing, as Trombetta would not share overall budget specifics. According to Pathmatics data, the NFL spent a little over $31 million so far this year on advertising efforts which includes social media. Trombetta also declined to comment on how the advertising budget was split between the platforms and social media influencers.
The league’s marketing machine works to engage its large fan base, which the NFL cultivates carefully and collects data on extensively. Brands are doing their best to capitalize on the hype surrounding the NFL season which started earlier this month by finding creative ways to keep football fans engaged. Recent initiatives to engage fans include Shimmy’s partnership with Gillette Stadium, PepsiCo’s Instacart campaign, Dr. Squatch, and ESPN’s fantasy football campaign.
“If you look at [the] current NFL focus, it’s primarily around TV/broadcast. This has been the model since the beginning and it’s stayed relatively stable,” said Dan Goman, CEO of Ateliere creative technologies, a cloud-native digital media supply chain and distribution platform. “However, the NFL is not immune to the changes happening with the content industry as a whole as their fans are migrating to online viewing.”
As the current NFL season progresses, the football brand is also preparing for Super Bowl week, which includes a TikTok tailgate party that they started in 2021. With the holiday season just around the corner, the NFL plans to make use of TikTok’s shoppable ads, though Trombetta was mum on details.
“We’re working through that now with our friends at TikTok, and we’re hopeful that we’ll have some news here very soon as it relates to our partnership going forward across all 32 teams,” said Trombetta. “I think everything else starts to fall in place as it relates to how we build community with our fan base and in each team of the 32 cities.”
‘Harder to dispute’: Ebiquity CEO on why advertisers are slowing spending in the Google-Facebook duopoly
The walled gardens Google and Facebook use to contain swathes of ad dollars are starting to show cracks.
That’s the view of Nick Waters, CEO of media management firm Ebiquity. And he would know. After all, a large chunk of the ad exec’s time is spent talking to CMOs at the largest advertisers about where to spend their dollars. Increasingly, that’s anywhere but Google or Facebook.
“There’s a growing realization amongst the marketing community that the effectiveness of these channels doesn’t necessarily warrant the spend,” said Waters.
To be clear, neither Google or Facebook is on the skids. Not when ad dollars continue to pour into them. They do so, however, more slowly than ever. Sounds crazy, right? Normally, the Google-Facebook duopoly has been impervious to this sort of thing. No matter what — a recession, shady business practices, even privacy regulation — they attracted more dollars. Exceptional as this dominance was, nothing is permanent — least of all advertising on platforms riddled with complaints over inflated audiences, issues with measurement and more recently political complications. Even more so in light of the pressures on both ends of those business models from regulators and newer rivals.
“Not every advertiser is willing to accept it yet, but it’s becoming harder to dispute the fact that these platforms have been oversold,” said Waters. A decline in effectiveness across both channels, but more so on Facebook, makes that abundantly clear, he continued. Advertising on the social network, especially from its app, just isn’t as accurate as it once was — or to be more specific ever since Apple throttled the data that made it accurate. Without it, it’s difficult for any marketer to make a strong business case for advertising there as much as they once did.
There was a time when most of those dollars would’ve ended up at Google. And to some degree they still do. There are also times when they don’t — moments that are only going to become more frequent. Whether it’s TikTok or Amazon, Microsoft or Apple, there are more businesses in contention for ad dollars.
This isn’t the first time Google has had to fend off companies with designs on the ad dollars it dominates. But for the first time, the rules of engagement aren’t being set by Google. If anything, the conditions suit its rivals. At least that’s the sense Waters is getting from marketers, who as much as they continue to spend money on YouTube are clearly keeping a keen eye on the emergence of TikTok. That said, the video streaming site seems safe for now despite the short-form video app’s success, Waters continued.
“The YouTube proposition is standing up pretty well to the challenge of TikTok, whereas Instagram isn’t,” he added.
That would be hard enough for these platforms if there was an abundance of ad dollars sloshing around digital advertising. Clearly, that’s not quite the case. In fact, ad dollars are starting to move out of these platforms and into streaming services and other forms of addressable TV — especially now the emergence of ad-funded versions of Netflix and Disney+ has put TV advertising back in vogue. It sounds strange, but the duopoly’s loss could be TV’s gain.
“With the broadcasters and streaming services offering more ad-funded video solutions they’re now able to offer more cost-effective reach with much-improved targeting alongside the premise it — TV advertising — is still the most effective medium at creating an emotional connection,” said Waters. “Advertisers had forgotten the fact that TV works over the long term whereas digital gives you short-term results very quickly. That’s what led to the over-allocation of dollars to digital platforms in the first place.”
It’s deja vu all over again with this sort of rhetoric. CMOs of big advertisers seem to threaten to pull money from the big platforms every couple of years. This time, though, it’s not just big brands that are apprehensive about putting more dollars into Google or Facebook. It’s the smaller ones — the ones that account for the bulk of cash spent on those ads. Moreover, there are a lot more reasons for marketers to make those calls now. Both platforms face a weak economy and new rivals.
In fairness, this is very much the beginning of the start, not the apex, of a potential problem for Google and Facebook. Both platforms are nothing but robust and have a precedent for being able to contort their ads businesses in a crunch. A lot will depend on how ad dollars hold up against what continues to be a volatile and very dysfunctional economy. For now, marketers keep spending the money, said Waters.
“We’ve not seen clients cutting either marketing budgets or indeed our own fees,” said Waters.
Ebiquity’s recent numbers back this up. Revenue for the media management firm rose 16% to £37.2 million during the first six months of the year while its operating profit jumped 117% to £5 million. There are, however, headwinds that threaten to impact advertisers and subsequently Ebiquity’s bottom line.
“The second half of the year will be a bit softer than the first,” Waters said.