Month: December 2022

As a reminder, Adelaide’s AU attention metric measures an ad’s likelihood of attention and subsequent impact using a machine learning algorithm trained to proxy outcomes. The algorithm evaluates hundreds of media quality signals, eye-tracking data and outcome data to generate what Adelaide and other attention metrics firms say is a precise but nuanced quality score for each placement. 

As Jeff Giacchetti, programmatic lead for Colgate Palmolive North America, noted, having attention metrics on the sell-side of the buy-sell equation enables brands to now look left and right, proverbially, along the supply-path optimization trail. 

“Over the last couple of years we’ve seen an encouraging relationship between attention metrics and positive qualitative outcomes, from the demand side of programmatic activation, so this was an exciting opportunity to observe attention metrics within inventory across the supply side,” said Giacchetti, who is working to incorporate attention metrics into the brand’s use of inventory accessed via Pubmatic. 

“We know that path optimization is critical to performance and realizing our ambition of maximizing consumer brand experience,” he added. “Seeing this metric at both sides of the transaction allows me to understand the full potential of attention metrics.”

Pubmatic’s vp of addressability, Peter Barry, sees the advance as a step toward building “supply chain 2.0,” as he put it. “When you push metrics like this to a DSP [demand-side platform], the issue you have is there are plenty of buyers who don’t use that particular DSP, so you’re limiting your reach and scope and maybe leaving money on the table,” said Barry. “The value prop of our company is that we work with 150-plus DSPs, so by pushing it to the supply side, you can allow any buyer to access that.”

Marc Guldimann, Adelaide’s founder and CEO, sees this is as a key step to better curation of inventory. “This is the beginning of the sell side platforms adopting and trying to figure out the best way to apply attention metrics to programmatic,” he said. “This is the application of attention metrics to what SSPs are good at, which is curation and creating marketplaces that have been customized to the needs of an advertiser or set of advertisers.”

On the buy side, the use of attention metrics has been about filtering inventory to bid on the most effective ads, said Guldimann. And Pubmatic’s Barry added that having it on both sides of the supply path ultimately can lead to better efficiency for brand spend. 

“It’s very complementary to other kinds of KPIs that they might have like cost per acquisition,” said Barry. “This would essentially drive their costs down because it’s more effective and gets a better return on investment.”

Looking at it from the brand side, Giacchetti said it’s too early to tell the impact of attention metrics on SSPs. He said he plans in the coming months to generate a case study on the effects of applying attention, once it’s been in market long enough. 

“TikTok allows us to express a different dimension of our brand voice, become a part of culture while driving brand awareness and rewards creativity by delivering content to an uncapped audience, making it a key community growth driver for us in a way that other social platforms do not,” Melissa Shum, senior director of consumer marketing at Spindrift, said of the brand’s choice of TikTok as its primary social platform.

By utilizing its TikTok page, Spindrift engages with its fans and gives them access to behind-the-scenes content, cooking classes, virtual events, in-person events, merchandise and, of course, the product itself. Shum said that 95% of the brand’s ad spend went to social media and 5% went to paid search for its overall ad spend. With that said, it is unclear how much of Spindrift’s advertising budget is allocated to TikTok in particular, as Shum declined to share overall budget specifics. According to Pathmatics data, the brand spent a little over $747,000 so far on advertising efforts in 2022.

By using a more organic approach to social media, Shum said Spindrift believes it is engaging in more community-based marketing through that channel. “Word-of-mouth is core to our marketing strategy and our social campaigns are our strongest vehicle that we believe helps inspire advocacy via a warm referral of Spindrift to a friend,” said Shum.

Word-of-mouth is a powerful tool for Spindrift — a survey of the brand’s community revealed that the majority of its customers learned about the brand from friends who had already tried its products, Shum said. “We believe we can continue to spread brand awareness by building a community of engaged brand advocates who love the brand so much they will tell everyone about Spindrift on our behalf,” Shum added, commenting on how the approach has been working so far. 

“Word-of-mouth is core to our marketing strategy and our social campaigns are our strongest vehicle that we believe helps inspire advocacy via a warm referral of Spindrift to a friend,” said Shum.

Related to Spindrift’s word-of-mouth efforts, the brand also has a sales team dedicated to making sure its retail displays are appealing for shoppers who encounter them in U.S. grocery stores.

During Thanksgiving week, Spindrift partnered with influencers @Traderjoelist (Natasha Fischer) and actress Kat Dennings to introduce the brand’s spiced apple cider flavor through short-form TikTok videos. Although the financial agreement was not disclosed, the brand partnered with @Traderjoelist due to the account’s growing and engaged community on TikTok (124,000 followers, to be exact) that represents Spindrift’s core audience. Kat Dennings, who, it turns out, authentically loves Spindrift, is one of the brand’s newer partners. 

The goal of partnering with influencers is for Spindrift to reach a new audience outside of the food and beverage category. “These are all influencers we’ve developed an authentic relationship with over time and consist of micro-tier all the way to celebrity,” said Shum. “They are all super fans of the brand and considered the biggest advocates from our community, who are always the first to try and receive the new flavor ahead of the launch announcement.”

According to Shum, Spindrift’s TikTok announcement for the spiced apple cider flavor was its best-performing announcement on the platform outside of Spiked (the brand’s alcoholic offering). As a result, Spindrift sold through nearly 50% of its inventory on the first day of the flavor’s launch, and it sold out entirely within 10 days. “Seventy-four percent of visitors to our site were new visitors with sparkling spiced apple cider bringing existing and future Spindrift drinkers curious about our new seasonal flavor to our site,” said Shum.

“Spindrift’s content strategy for teasing the new product flavors has been really fun to watch,” said Cassie Petrey, CEO and co-founder of social media marketing and music management firm Crowd Surf. “The campaign provided an adequate amount of time to anticipate the product and it’s the perfect amount of time to tease a new product’s arrival.”

“Spindrift is taking the best of Pepsi vs. Coke and Red Bull’s Guerilla advertising with [user-generated content] to make a baby of diverse, authentic and hilarious content,” added Lauren Petrullo, CEO and founder of digital marketing agency Mongoose Media. “This is a gold mine of content showcasing real humans trying a real product and their content is speaking to entertaining trends that ends up also being educational.”

Digiday’s survey found that most brand and retail pros are utilizing influencers. To be exact, 89% of respondents said they have used influencers as part of their marketing so far this year, making the channel a vital part of many brands’ and retailers’ marketing strategies.

On top of that, nearly half of brand and retail pros (45%) said influencers will become even more important to their marketing plans for the holiday season. Meanwhile, more than a third (39%) said influencers’ importance will at least stay the same to their marketing plans through the holidays. All in all, 84% of brands and retailers expect influencer marketing’s importance to grow or stay the same through the end of the year.

Only 16% of respondents to Digiday’s survey said influencers will be less important to their holiday marketing this year.

Influencers’ growth in importance to brands’ and retailers’ holiday marketing plans corresponds to the types of marketing tactics brand and retail pros said they expect to employ during the holidays this year, Digiday’s survey found.

For instance, 56% of respondents said they’ll use gift guides in their holiday marketing, making the tactic the most popular among brands and retailers through the end of the year. Influencers will likely play an important part in brands’ and retailers’ gift guide marketing plans, either by posting the gift guide content on their own channels or promoting the items that brands and retailers include in their guides.

Meanwhile, 40% of brand and retail pros told Digiday they expect to use unboxing videos as part of their holiday marketing strategies this year, putting this tactic in third place among survey respondents (behind brand experiences, which 51% brands and retailers expect to employ). Influencers are clearly key to the brands and retailers deploying this marketing tactic, since they’re the ones who will likely do the actual unboxing.

Interested in sharing your perspectives on the media and marketing industries? Join the Digiday research panel.

As Influencer Danielle Gilbert (@danigmakeup), who accumulated 574.5K and 187K followers on TikTok and Instagram respectively, pointed out, she often sees comments on social media from people saying they’d love to be an influencer, as influencers have it so easy and earn loads of money. “A lot of sacrifices go into it and it’s actually the opposite of what people think,” she said.

With that in mind, Digiday wanted to get to the bottom of what it really takes to be a creator in today’s world, and specifically all those hidden costs that no one ever speaks about. So we spoke to eight creators, some of whom are managed by X1 management, to ask them just that.

So what are those hidden costs?

Equipment & subscriptions

Streamers need a powerful computer because as Twitch streamer Scott Freear (@TCFreer) – who has 17.8K Twitch followers – pointed out, a gaming PC and a streaming PC are not the same thing. 

To achieve a state of the art setup, Freear recently worked with fellow streamer Greg Storey (@Mrgregles), who has 59.1K Twitch followers and is proficient in audio and visual engineering. “We spent about £1300 just to get it how I wanted it,” Freear said. 

But before splashing cash on fancy computers, creators need to figure out the type of streaming they want to do. For YouTube, for example, a capture card for game play could potentially make or break a creator’s performance, while those who want to be on video themselves will need a high quality camera or webcam.

That said, “Around 90% of the time, people aren’t engaging on Twitch, they’re listening to Twitch,” Freear explained. “It’s more about going live on time, being entertaining and providing the best audio experience you can.”

And he’s not wrong. Saqib Ali Zahid (@Lirik), who is arguably one of the more popular Twitch streamers with 2.9 million followers, doesn’t have a camera, yet still does remarkably well. 

So it’s all about audio for some creators. Brandon Stennis (@IAmBrandon), who dabbles in Twitch (41.9K followers) and TikTok (27.8K followers) pointed out some headsets come with microphones, but they only work for creators who are just trying to get their feet wet.

“You could spend anything from £50 ($62.16) on a cheap USB mic up to £200 ($248.66) on an XLR broadcast mic,” Freear added. “If you choose XLR, there are additional costs such as microprocessors, audio decks and so on, for them to work. That could quickly amount to £400-600 ($497.32 – $745.97) for an audio setup your audience won’t see, they’ll just hear the difference.”

Amelia Sordell, who is a highly regarded LinkedIn figure with more than 130K followers, noted her own Rode microphone cost £500 ($621.64), while camera lenses cost her more than her first car.

And how else could creators connect to their global audiences without the internet? 

Freear explained it’s not the download speed but the upload speed that needs to be considered. 

“If you’ve only got a 20MB upload speed, half the upload is taken with your stream straight away,” he said. “If you’re using more than that, your streaming will suffer in quality.” 

Since most design and editing software has become cloud-based, users now have to commit to a monthly (or annual) subscription to use them.

Twitch streamer Nikki Stout (@Camillapanda), who has 3.4K followers, noted subscriptions for these services add up; one often becomes two, which quickly becomes three or four. A yearly subscription (billed monthly) to the full suite of Adobe Creative Cloud apps for photo and video editing, for example, costs one user £78.98 ($98.20) for a rolling monthly subscription, £51.98 ($64.63) if a user signs up to an annual subscription but pays monthly, which totals £623.76 ($775.51) for 12 months, or £596.33 ($741.41) if they pay for the annual fee upfront and want to save a few dollars.

Similarly, fellow streamer Stephanie Austin (@Imfamousx1x), with 3.7K Twitch followers, highlighted additional costs of post advertising, as well as social media scheduling programs.

Getting started & building relationships

One thing that is vastly forgotten about, is how newbies break into the creator sphere. As Gilbert pointed out, income in the early days isn’t always steady, yet you have to still keep producing content.

“Being in the beauty industry myself, in order to keep up with the latest trends, I have to buy the latest products,” she explained. “I don’t always get sent them, so those costs have to come out of my own pocket. If I don’t get paid much in one month, that can start to get tricky.”

Similarly, influencer Sophie Hughes (@sophwithlove), who has 31.8K Instagram and 9847 TikTok followers respectively, agreed that as a creator, you have to invest in some of the brands you want to work with initially, in order to make any money.

“I currently have an huge ASOS parcel of clothes to use for a brand haul video for example, which cost around £400 ($497.32) so I can do a bunch of styling videos in December as it’s a quieter month,” she said. 

Added to that, the unspoken rite of passage that is unpaid work. “There are a lot of times you have to work for free or do giftings so you can build up those client relationships if there’s a big brand you want to work with,” Hughes added. “You can’t necessarily expect to receive a budget from them straight away.”

Financial & business element

One point that is often forgotten is that being a creator isn’t just about having fun – it’s a business. And with business comes the financial element.

Hughes noted she’s got an accounts team which organizes and addresses her quarterly and annual filings to ensure she doesn’t get any surprise tax bills. 

“That service costs me a fortune each year, but you need to be so careful and treat being a creator as a business,” she said. “I think less experienced content creators who don’t necessarily treat it as a business yet, could get a nasty shock at the end of the financial year.” 

Stout agrees that this would likely happen to those creators who didn’t expect their content to take off as well initially and as such haven’t paid any self-employment taxes in their respective state or country.

And just as with any industry right now, creators are also hit by the cost of living crisis. Hughes has already witnessed brands pulling back on budgets as we head into a recession, particularly on Instagram and TikTok. 

“Myself and creators I know have already received emails whereby rates that some brands have agreed to pay us for the year — those same brands are now saying they won’t be able to afford those prices and we’re going to have to reduce our pay,” she explained. “But people forget, we still have bills to pay like everyone else. So my choices are, do the same work for less money or know my worth and say no – but it’s a very fine line to tread.”

Time & boundaries

Money aside, while typical nine-to-five jobs have a set hours, creators often don’t. In fact, they’re “on” 24/7.

As Sordell pointed out, a huge cost is the ongoing investment of time, to ensure you’re posting frequently and responding to comments. “That’s on top of the content creation time – which is a cost in itself,” she said.

As the power of social media and having an online presence continues to increase, so do concerns around mental health. 

Twitch streamer Stephanie Diaz (@SakiSakura), who has 5.4K followers, noted how emotionally and mentally taxing being a creator actually is.

“You have to be able to take criticism while also making changes to your content to improve and continuously grow,” she explained. “Managing, creating and even promoting content is imperative. But it takes up a huge chunk of time. You have to be ready to handle it without burning out.”

Similarly, Stout highlighted personal space and privacy as being a top hidden cost because followers frequently test boundaries, whether it’s during live streams or via comments on content posts. “It can be as simple as continually asking if you are dating anyone or if you have kids, to trying to find out every detail they can about you,” she said. “It is uncomfortable but despite the parasocial relationship you have with them, many viewers still feel weirdly entitled to you.”

And that is a cost that takes a real toll.