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Why Google Just Can’t Quit Ad Tech; Paneling For Gold
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For Seller-Defined Audiences To Work, Publishers Need Better Classification
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Marketers continue to chase ‘authenticity,’ but what is it?
These days, you can’t have a conversation about social media platforms without the word “authentic” coming up.
Whether you’re trying to go after the masses on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat or YouTube — to name a few — the common theme is that for ads to do well on the platform, they must be “authentic.”
And this isn’t a new conversation either. It’s been a consideration since the dawn of time, or at least since 2013, when Digiday previously questioned what marketers meant with this buzzword.
Now nine years on, marketers are still trying to grasp: what exactly does “authentic” even mean?
Being ‘authentic’ on TikTok
Take TikTok for example.
Marketers are scrambling to figure out what works or doesn’t on the platform to appear “authentic.” Get it right, goes the thinking, and the lucrative but illusive Gen Z is more likely to become a fan of the brand. Knowing what that authenticity entails is another question entirely. And as the algorithm has shown — it’s not as simple as turning out a comedy-style skit or dance challenge. It could be someone sharing a personal story, or even a straightforward “Day in the Life” style video.
“The main thing is that it shouldn’t feel out of place on the For You page, it should fit seamlessly into the type of content your audience is already consuming,” said Joanna Hughston, head of marketing at Fanbytes by Brainlabs.
While the agency accepts that not every brand will get this straight away, its execs advise clients to push the boundaries of what they think their brand(s) can and should be doing wherever possible.
“We advise brands to 1) Define what their brand stands for and 2) Look at what their desired audience is engaging with,” said Hughston. “Then find the correlation between the two to help construct a brand personality that fits with TikTok but doesn’t compromise their values.”
That being said, could the likes of Gucci or Prada get away with ad videos of models rolling out of bed with last night’s makeup on and still maintain their premium brand images? Probably not. And more than likely, the marketers there wouldn’t want to.
Yet, Burberry and Porsche have somehow managed to tap into this “authenticity” to create successful ads for the Gen Z crowd. They have sought to reach niche internet subcultures, combining that with the Gen Z nostalgia of toys one minute, and their concern for nature another — all broadcasting it on a global stage.
Successful as these campaigns were, it’s debatable as to whether the authenticity they presented was actually real.
What is authenticity?
Timothy Armoo, co-founder of FanBytes, doesn’t believe there will ever be an authentic social media app. “Snapchat, TikTok and now BeReal… every app is positioning itself as authentic social media,” he posted on LinkedIn. “The truth is… this will never happen. As long as people are watching there will never be an authentic self on social media… it’s all performative.”
In other words, human beings ultimately want to look good.
“If you have a bunch of people who can see what you’re doing, you want to put on the best show for them. That’s really what social media is,” Amroo told Digiday.
And he’s not wrong.
It’s safe to say the advent of the creator economy has shifted the digital world more than anyone likely could predict five, or even 10 years ago. The prospect of being authentic has by default, had to become more multi-dimensional as more and more stakeholders have become involved. Being authentic is usually always far easier when money and big contracts and several brands or investors aren’t involved or need to present a certain image.
Speaking about creating content per platform, Evan Horowitz, co-founder and CEO of Movers+Shakers believes marketers have to be focused on creating content that’s native for each platform, because that’s where the team sees a huge difference in performance.
Translation: native, branded content is the content that matches the look, feel and function of the media format where they sit. They don’t stick out, they fit “natively” and seamlessly on the app. Crafting that distinct look and feel, of course, is easier said than done — as has proven time and again on social media.
Creators’ authenticity
On Instagram, creators started by using in-app filters. Over time, they turned to taking shots offline using high spec DSLRs and subsequently released their own filter presets. These products, which undoubtedly formed another revenue stream for those influencers, gave everyday people the same tools to produce their own aesthetically pleasing, polished pictures.
And while it makes sense that people do naturally get better at creating on these platforms over time, surely there comes a point where authenticity simply no longer exists?
Come to think of it, it’s more likely the definition of it changes. It happened on YouTube: when it launched, being authentic was about influencers’ honest opinions of products they reviewed. Nowadays, that’s shifted so influencers must be able to be honest about a brand, but also genuinely like or trust the brand too.
Facebook started life as a platform to stay in touch with friends and keep them up-to-date through status updates. It’s the same with Instagram: initially it was about showcasing nights out with your friendship circle, nowadays it’s shifted to become an aspirational platform where influencers show the luxury holiday destinations, top notch recipes and so on.
In short, being authentic becomes a catch-all term for the best, most engaging content.
“Anytime a new platform launches, people run to it and say this is the place to be authentic now,” said Jess Phillips, founder & CEO of The Social Standard.
It’s a repetitive cycle, when any new platform arrives. What is clear is the industry loves a buzzword, and unfortunately while they might be key at the time, their overuse can cause them to become somewhat meaningless, or to have to evolve depending on who and what the conversation is at any given time.
What marketers need to decide is what platforms are truly worth their time (and ad spend), before jumping on every “authentic” bandwagon going.
Trading paid media for social-first: Inside Riot Games and We Are Social’s ‘Wild Rift’ campaign
With an audience as native to social media as mobile gamers, who needs to pay for ads?
This is the driving philosophy behind Riot Games’ ongoing campaign to promote the second anniversary of its popular mobile game “League of Legends: Wild Rift.” The result of a collaboration between Riot and creative agency We Are Social, the campaign began in September and will run until roughly Nov. 17, when the next patch of the game is released.
Notably, the social-first campaign is entirely devoid of paid media, the usual backbone of traditional digital marketing.
“With ‘Wild Rift‘ specifically being a mobile game, it does lend itself well to social platforms, particularly Twitter and Instagram,” said Nicole Kim, a brand manager at Riot Games who worked on the campaign. “For us, the focus on social media has also been part of our ongoing initiative to build a strong community; with this social-first approach, we wanted to focus a bit more on our players and the channels that they often frequent.”
While the campaign is primarily rooted in Twitter and Instagram, it also incorporates content across a variety of other social media channels, including YouTube, Facebook, TikTok and Chinese social platforms such as Bilibili and Weibo. The content specifically created for social ranges from Wild Tweets, an activation highlighting past and present tweets from regular “Wild Rift” fans, to Instagram photo shoots with “Wild Rift” cosplayers.
The “Wild Rift” campaign is Riot’s first experiment with an entirely organic, non-paid social campaign to promote one of its games. Although the numbers haven’t come in yet, both Riot and We Are Social are confident that the campaign has already been a success based on the warm feedback they have received from online “Wild Rift” fans.
“The way the comments played out in there, I almost felt like I was writing them myself,” said We Are Social associate creative director Erik Donham. “I promise, I wasn’t.”
Anecdotal evidence aside, We Are Social and Riot’s social-first campaign strategy is borne out by some relevant statistics. In the first half of 2022, Twitter users posted a record 1.5 billion tweets about gaming, representing a 36 percent year-over-year increase in gaming activity on the platform, according to data released by Twitter Gaming. As activity continues to rise on many social media channels, gamers are leading the charge.
This is not much of a surprise. After all, gamers are a digital-native audience accustomed to spending time on their phones.
“These are the people that are leading the conversation online, but they’re also maybe more everyday players; they’re not necessarily the people that are out there winning the world championship,” Donham said. “So while they’re well-known to all the fans out there, they don’t typically get direct recognition from the game developers themselves.”
There’s also a financial incentive for Riot to pursue a social-first strategy. Building campaigns around user-generated content is much cheaper than paying for traditional media placement. With a potential recession on the horizon and gaming and esports businesses like Riot reporting revenue declines, less pricey social campaigns could be one appealing way to help right the ship.
As the “Wild Rift” anniversary campaign rolls out, Riot is keeping a close eye on its performance to gauge the effectiveness of its social-first strategy for future campaigns. Riot is mostly interested in tracking engagement metrics and sentiment, according to Kim, who said her focus was “making sure that our marketing campaign passes our average views and social conversations compared to some of our previous campaigns.”
If the warm reception to the campaign on social media has been any indication, social-first, organic strategies could represent the future of gaming and esports marketing.
Are chief digital officers leapfrogging the rest of the C-suite to the corner office? Just maybe
Five years ago, chief digital officers at companies across the business spectrum were change agents, charged mostly with trying to push their analog business practices into a digital-first approach. Then the pandemic hit — and what was a push became a torrent of demand to keep up with consumers trapped in their homes, connecting with the world through smartphones, computers and smart TVs.
Today, the role of the chief digital officer (CDO) is as vital a role as the CMO, if not even more so, thanks to the fact that digital transformation became necessary for survival, generating credibility across the C-suite, according to a deep-diving study by MMA Global, a trade association at the intersection of marketing, martech and media. Responsibilities for CDOs have also spread horizontally across most businesses, charged with improving business performance as much as transforming business practices.
And the role could very well provide a faster path to the corner office, even as it overlaps with (and sometimes steps on the toes of) other C-suite positions in the top hierarchy. They’ve in essence become the chief experience officers, because they’re closer to the customer than even heads of marketing.
“CDOs have moved from sideshow to center stage, and they’re most likely to be in the best position to move into the CEO suite somewhere,” said Greg Stuart, MMA CEO. “Almost all of them run a P&L [profit and loss line of revenue control]. One of CDO board members said to me when I asked if he’s in line to become CEO, responded ‘Well, if the board was looking for somebody who could see into the future, define transformational business dynamics, and then marshal the company in that direction, then yeah, maybe.’”
The MMA worked with Oxford University along with its own chief digital officer board to build out the research, which surveyed more than 100 CDOs across 20 different business segments, and conducted hourlong deep-dive interviews with 48 of them.
The three main findings of the study, according to Vas Bakopoulos, MMA svp and global head of measurement, insights and strategy:
- The role of the CDO is closely tied to business performance
- CDOs have a clear mandate from their CEOs but their execution overlaps with others in the C-suite — and a key lack of clarity is who in the C-suite owns customer experience (which prior MMA research has shown is a critical element to marketing success)
- There are two types of CDOs: those who see their role as finite once digital transformation has been achieved and those who plan to constantly keep tackling the next disruption that is seemingly always around the corner. The latter school tend to work for larger companies that are more likely to have grown consistently in the past five years.
“The CDO is a transformation, communication, integration, political, change management, and navigational role that every enterprise needs in one form or another,” said Andrew Wilson, CDO of Microsoft, as quoted in Oxford’s writeup of the study, which hasn’t been released yet but is a followup to a 2018 report on CDOs. “Whether it’s blending into the CIO role, whether it is a standalone change enablement role, it has to have a high degree of business cognizance.”
“Companies are under greater assault because changing customer expectations are coming from every sector,” added Stuart. “Our research shows that 38 percent of marketing responsibilities and capabilities do not sit under the office of the CMO. Where do they sit? If it’s martech-related or if it’s data dependent on the company … the CDO is picking it up. This is not going away — digital ate the world.”
The lack of ownership or accountability on customer experience seems to be the gap in CDOs’ armor, said Bakopoulos. “Customer centricity is nowhere near the top measurable goals CDOs have,” he said. “Given all the capabilities that CDOs own, I would expect it would run higher up in their priorities.”
Jill Speirs, president and CEO at customer engagement consultants M2 Partners, said she sees the CDO position as eclipsing CMOs because so many marketing chiefs remain stuck in the past. “Even today, marketing departments are still busy doing busyness — they don’t know why they’re doing it,” said Speirs. “And they don’t know why or how that initiative goes back to the alignment of driving revenue to a particular point in the strategic plan.”
Speirs pointed to Verizon as an example of a company bristling with marketing technology that simply wasn’t using it because a CDO wasn’t overseeing it all. “everything was actually [managed] external through several agencies — nobody had control of their data, and nobody could actually get it,” she said. “There was a conflict going on.”
The MMA plans to launch a four-part webinar series explaining the guts of their research with Oxford starting Nov. 10.
NBC News, Washington Post, SmartNews apps retool content packaging ahead of midterms
News apps and aggregators are gearing up for the U.S. midterm elections on Nov. 8 by rolling out new features to help readers, with the goal of improving the way election updates and information are packaged.
The features range from offering more personalized news to more immediate updates and visuals in app feeds. Here’s what aggregator SmartNews and publishers NBC News and The Washington Post are adding to their apps:
SmartNews: Personalized local election news
SmartNews is offering more personalized content blocks ahead of Election Day. On Oct. 6, the news aggregator app brought back its Elections channel tab for the midterms. But this year, as a user scrolls down SmartNews’ feed, they will get five to eight themed blocks of content with personalized recommendations based on data SmartNews has collected on that user, such as their location and interests they follow. For example, if a user follows reproductive rights, they will be served a content block on abortion as a key issue in the midterms, said Chuck Lee, director of product management at SmartNews.
In mid-October, SmartNews started rolling out the “unified feed block” feature in the main channel of the app to package content around key topics and events, rather than just having a feed of individual stories from different sources. And the “top story” block on SmartNews’ main channel will soon be dedicated to the midterms. Leading up to the elections, a “Midterm Elections 2022” block will show which way the Senate and House are leaning, and on Election Day this will be replaced with a results tracker showing the vote counts as they come in.
This year, SmartNews users will also have the ability to filter maps showing which states and districts are leaning right or left. Vote trackers will show results for the House, Senate and Gubernatorial races (at the national, state and district level), with seat chart visuals.
NBC News: Improved content packages
NBC News rolled out updates to its app three weeks ago to have more flexibility with the way content is packaged and surfaced around a key news topic.
Previously, NBC News’ app surfaced stories through section packages, such as “related stories” or “latest stories,” and were limited to roughly five pieces of content that could be packaged together, said Matt Grimson, assistant managing editor of platforms and social for NBC News and MSNBC. The setup made it difficult to highlight the full breadth of coverage around big news events in the app, Grimson said.
Now, NBC News can create “hero packages” to highlight the big news story of the day at the top of the app. Leading up to the midterms, the package’s headline will be “Election 2022,” with bullet points showing related stories within that block, Grimson said. On Election Day, NBC News will have content packages around House, Senate and Gubernatorial elections, as well as other key races. Stories can also now be labeled and tagged to highlight exclusives, breaking news and developing stories.
One of the packages in NBC News’ new search function on the app is called “Decision 2022,” with interactive features like NBC News’ “Plan Your Vote” tool, which provides state-by-state voting rules and information. A new menu at the top of the app now links out to a live blog on the midterm elections. An NBC News spokesperson said two-thirds of its mobile app users return to the app multiple times a day.
The Washington Post: More live, visual information
The Washington Post has been rolling out updates to its app since this summer to prepare for the midterm elections. The goal is to create an experience “that feels dynamic, live and personal” by providing faster updates and more visual integrations on the app, said The Post’s head of product Jessica Gilbert.
“Quick Posts” — or short, on-the-ground reporting or analysis from The Post’s journalists — were redesigned in early October to feature a journalist’s photo and bio in the app. The app was also upgraded last week to support more images, social posts and graphics like maps. The “Quick Posts” feed into the live blog experience on The Post’s app, which lets journalists quickly share continuous updates on big news stories, Gilbert said. Users who engage with the live blog experience read twice as many articles per month than those who do not, according to The Post.
Vertical video will also be a key part of midterms coverage for The Post and will be shared on the app. The app will contain Instagram Reels and TikToks created by Post reporters and its social team, as well as original videos ranging from interviews with candidates, election explainers and key takeaways. Support for vertical video — and auto-play functionality — were added to the app this year. The Post’s app will also host live video programming starting at 7 p.m. on Election Day, led by senior news anchor Libby Casey.
A test run for 2024
All of the media executives Digiday spoke with for this story said these latest app updates are a test to see what resonates with users in preparation for the U.S. presidential election in 2024.
“The way we’re thinking about it is: how do we test our hypotheses about what voters need for the next election? This is in many ways a little bit of our test run on some key hypotheses we have that we think are going to be super vital in the presidential [elections] coming up,” SmartNews’ Lee said.
Gilbert at The Washington Post called the latest app updates a “runway” for experimenting with new features and building upon them for the next election.
People respond better to ads across multiple platforms, study says
You would think seeing an ad everywhere is plain annoying, but new research shows people actually engage better when they see an ad on several platforms.
A study by ad sales firm Spectrum Reach and IPG’s media intelligence arm Magna Global, provided exclusively to Digiday, compared the impact of advertising across single versus multiple media screens. When testing combinations of linear television, connected television and mobile, researchers found that a multiscreen approach increases ad attention and retention and purchase intent for consumers.
While all media combinations drove awareness, CTV and linear appeared most memorable for consumers. And in particular, ads on the big screen and intentional viewing through CTV left people wanting to hear more after the ads and increased their purchase intent especially when combined with other platforms.
“What was confirmed is that linear continues to increase in significance, but to do it properly you have to start at the foundation,” Michael Guth, svp of marketing at Spectrum Reach, told Digiday. “The relative importance of linear remains strong. We were pleasantly surprised, but not shocked. It’s just another reminder that as the world continues to evolve … linear TV is a critical piece to every solution.”
Spectrum Reach and Magna Global surveyed 1,684 people based on their natural media consumption over a one-week period. The study found that upper-funnel metrics, such as ad attention and unaided brand awareness, saw double-digit increases with multiscreen campaigns compared to using one platform. Lower-funnel metrics, like purchase intent and search intent, also saw positive results in a multiscreen strategy.
Additional findings from the ad mix study include:
- Consumers were more likely to respond to ads if they saw them across different screens, with 41% of survey respondents claiming better recall when they saw the same spot across linear, CTV and mobile.
- Three forms of media appear better than one or two. Out of the viewers that saw three types of ads, 81% said the message was clearly communicated and 39% said the ads gave them new information. These numbers were slightly lower for viewers who saw one or two types of ads.
- The ad mix needs to be just right. Purchase intent rose 13% when combining CTV, linear and mobile ads. However, CTV may be a main driver, since CTV and mobile would increase purchase intent by 11% versus CTV alone, which increased intent by 10%.
- The order of screens also impacted ad effectiveness. Leading with linear on a cross-platform campaign, for instance, increased purchase intent by 25%, while streaming first resulted in a 14% uptick, and mobile first resulted in 4%. “When possible, brands should plan the order in which ads are delivered across screens with a focus on casting the widest attention net in the first exposure,” said Kara Manatt, evp and managing director of Intelligence Solutions at Magna.
- People still get ad fatigue. More than 25% of viewers said they had seen “too much” of a brand when they were exposed to multiple ads on linear and CTV. Brands trying to avoid fatigue need to diversify their platforms beyond the big screen.