Month: September 2022

Last month, Squarespace debuted a new “Creator Hub” where creators can spend more time learning about creating a business. Along with a new website with tools and templates, Squarespace has been rolling out a new ad campaign themed around helping individuals make their own “empires.”

“If you don’t create more than an ad, you’re going to give people a dead end,” said Gui Borchert, senior director of creative at Squarespace. “And dead ends are no good.”

To cater to a variety of creators, Squarespace created archetypes — including fashion, food and wellness — that resemble various interests, Borchert said, adding that the company didn’t want to create ads that only appeal to creators on one platform.

The company is also relying on user-generated content by encouraging creators to post about their progress across various industries to “tell that progression story,” said Kevin Nabipour, Squarespace’s senior director of brand strategy, content and partnership.

“It starts to tell a secondary story [by] nodding to realities that exist within the creator economy,” Nabipour said. “Any humble step that someone takes… What can they make next?”

Creator economy investment

Squarespace is just one of several companies looking to invest in the creator economy. This summer, Shopify announced new integrations with Twitter and YouTube that let creators link to their Shopify websites. HubSpot is giving money to creators and helping them create podcasts and MailChimp integrated with the creator economy platform Koji earlier this year.

As the social commerce boom continues, some see more of a need for companies to help creators educate themselves on how to make money off their audiences. Aaron DeBevoise, CEO and founder of Spotter — a company that has invested more than $600 million in YouTube creators — said it’s smart for Squarespace to be providing new tools for creators to help them make businesses. That’s especially important when someone is just starting out, he said, adding that the big question will be whether Squarespace will do more than just help someone make a website.

“The hardest part about a creator’s life is they’re actually creators,” DeBevoise said. “They need to spend a lot of time creating content. YouTubers or bloggers or whoever have so many jobs. When you start a company, you wear a lot of hats, but there’s not typically one person in the room.”

Squarespace wouldn’t disclose how much it’s spending to promote the new campaign. However, data from the ad-tracker Pathmatics shows that Squarespace’s 2022 ad spending includes $5.6 million on Facebook ads, $1.3 million on Instagram, $1.1 million on TikTok, $950,000 on YouTube, $844,000 on Twitch and $10,000 on Twitter. (For comparison, Squarespace spent $12.3 million on Facebook ads in 2021, $3.4 million on Instagram, $1.8 million on YouTube, but nothing on TikTok.) Despite the new focus on creators, Squarespace has spent far more on desktop display ads, where it has spent $19.2 million this year.

Companies that market specifically to creators have a chance to build out new customer segments, according to Robert Hetu, VP analyst for Gartner’s IT practice. However, even if opportunities already exist, he said using creators to scale new verticals might still be years away—especially when it comes to for large retailers.

“From a retail perspective we see the creator economy as the pinnacle of the retail capabilities pyramid,” Hetu said. “This is where the customer will be able to engage with retail in a co-creative environment.”

The new focus on creators is in some ways different from other Squarespace campaigns over the years that often feature major celebrities talking about their side hustles. The company has worked with celebrities like Zendaya, Keanu Reeves to Leon Bridges. However, other recent ads without celebrities have faced criticism for promoting hustle culture during the pandemic.

Reaching the creator economy could also help with slowing subscriber growth. According to Squarespace’s financial disclosures, it had 4.2 million unique subscriptions in the first quarter — a 10% increase year-over-year — but that number was still at 4.2 million in the second quarter. (There were 3 million unique subscriptions in 2019, 3.7 million in 2020 and 4.1 million last in 2021.)

Even though the new ads are about creators, Gui said the campaign’s “of-the-internet language” is meant to appeal to a broader audience. He added that campaigns for broadcast or digital shouldn’t “turn off a huge chunk of the audience.”

“If you’re not a creator and just an entrepreneur, the spots are not completely irrelevant,” Gui said. “If I’m selling candles, I can teach classes about candle-making or I can make videos. Yes, this works well for creators to expand opportunities. If you can go from creator to entrepreneur, you can also go from entrepreneur to entrepreneur-creator.”

When Wohl said that publishers “have a lot to make up for” in cookieless browsers, he wasn’t exaggerating. During one of the event’s closed-door sessions — in which publishing executives were granted anonymity for candor — multiple publishing executives lamented seeing ad prices for impressions on cookieless browsers like Safari be half the rate of third-party cookie-enabled impressions.

“You’re going to see a 50% delta in CPMs between [cookie-enabled and cookieless impressions] for the same ad unit,” said one publishing executive.

The publishers also pointed out how this Safari inventory, in particular, can be especially valuable, if only advertisers did not weigh the inability to track and measure site visitors via third-party cookies so heavily in their appraisals of these cookieless impressions.

“It requires the bidders and the marketers to put a value on what we’re considering non-addressable. It just doesn’t translate. And it’s crazy because some of the highest-value opportunities are probably the ones that reside in Safari. Yet we see half the yield,” said a second publishing executive.

So what are publishers to do? In short, they need to supply more information about the quality of their cookieless ad inventory, according to Wohl. Called bid enrichment, this practice has publishers adding data points — such as an impression’s estimated viewability score, the geolocation of the visitor’s device and the corresponding web page’s content category — to the impressions they put up for auction in programmatic marketplaces, especially the open ones.

“If you have inventory that you’re putting into the open market that has no bid enrichments at all, if your inventory looks like what it does today, it’s not enough,” Wohl said.

However, a challenge to this approach is advertisers trusting the information enriching a publisher’s bid request. If a publisher can claim a given estimated viewability score or content category without substantiating that claim with the actual impression, then advertisers will be likely to question, if not outright dismiss, the validity of any other publisher making similar claims. In other words, there need to be bid enrichment standards.

Enter the IAB Tech Lab’s seller-defined audiences specification. This cohort-based ad targeting method — which has publishers segment their audiences based on categories like demographics, interests and purchase intents — is one form of bid enrichment that incorporates standardization via IAB Tech Lab’s Audience Taxonomy standard.

Of course, seller-defined audiences still face skepticism among ad buyers and only provide certain information about an impression. Nonetheless, it’s a start at a time when publishers are reaching their wit’s end with cookieless environments.

“Open market can’t stay the way it is. We have to start putting in minimum standards for that inventory that lets buyers trust the open market again,” said Wohl.