Month: December 2022

“They can’t deliver. They don’t have enough inventory to deliver. So they’re literally giving the money back,” said one of the agency executives.

Netflix structured its initial ad deals on a “pay on delivery” basis, in which advertisers would end up only paying for the viewers they actually reached and Netflix would release any unspent ad dollars at the end of the quarter, per the agency executives. That contrasts with the traditional TV ad commitment that has TV networks keeping committed ad dollars on the books and owing advertisers so-called “make-goods” — or future ad inventory — to satisfy viewership guarantees.

The agency executives credited Netflix for allowing advertisers to take back their money and said that not all advertisers have done so. 

Those advertisers that have taken back their money have generally been advertisers that were running marketing pushes specifically timed to the fourth quarter and the holiday shopping season, and they asked to get their money back to reallocate it elsewhere before the year is up.

“Pacing was well below expectations, so some advertisers pushed for money back now so we could spend it in the critical holiday time period, and they deserve credit that, in the vain of partnership, [they] have agreed,” said a second agency executive.

“Clients with shorter flights in particular are having a hard time delivering to goal,” said a third agency executive.

Other advertisers have asked instead to move their ad dollars to the first quarter of 2023 or later in the year because they believe Netflix’s ad-supported audience will continue to grow and the service will be able to deliver on its guarantees then.

“There have been several ways they have approached missing delivery targets, and clients want resolution in different ways. Not everyone wants cash back at the end of a fiscal year,” said a fourth agency executive.

The viewership shortfall isn’t a great look for Netflix’s fledgling advertising business, but the agency executives said they see it as symptomatic of how quickly the company launched that business rather than signal of Netflix’s long-term prospects. 

“I think we knew there was going to be a supply issue and they can only accommodate so much money,” said a fifth agency executive.

During a company earnings call in April, Netflix co-CEO Reed Hastings said that adding an ad-supported tier was “something we’re looking at now, we’re trying to figure out over the next year or two.” Seven months later, the ad-supported tier debuted.

Additionally, Netflix began pitching advertisers and agencies before the company brought on former Snap and Amazon ad sales exec Jeremi Gorman as its advertising chief and NBCUniversal, Hulu and Snap sales veteran Peter Naylor as her top lieutenant. The agency executives also faulted Netflix not making a big marketing push of its own to promote the ad-supported tier and attract subscribers.

While Netflix has struggled to deliver on its sales pitch to advertisers so far, the streaming service is still seeking ad deals for 2023, according to agency executives. And Netflix seems to feel it’s still in a position of strength if its ad pricing is any indication. The company had originally sought advertisers to pay $65 per thousand impressions, which exceeds the $50 CPM that Disney sought for Disney+ and makes Netflix the priciest of the major ad-supported streaming services. Netflix has since lowered its price, but it is still asking advertisers to pay a $55 CPM, though ad buyers will likely use the slow start to haggle for a further price drop.

“It feels to many people like the world is stumbling from one crisis to another, and when you look at things like inflation and the supply of energy, people are sort of existentially worried about where the world is going,” said Mark Curtis, head of innovation at Accenture Song.

“They’re beginning to internalize how to adapt, and they’re looking for ways in which they can exercise some sort of degree of control over their lives,” Curtis said.

When it comes to how that affects brand loyalty, the report noted that people are increasingly seeking out new places online to feel a greater sense of belonging. This is where brands will need to focus on engaging their consumer base, and these behaviors may reshape loyalty programs that focus on “community-first, product-later models” that connect people with a brand, the report also found. This could lead to more adoption of non-fungible tokens, artificial intelligence-generated art and even digital wallets in the future.

Especially as major social media platforms become more filtered with algorithms deprioritizing friends’ posts, the platforms that thrive will focus on interests and activities that connect people. Some of these include Reddit, Discord and Twitch, where “it’s easy to find their tribe of people who will actively listen, engage in,” according to the “Life Trends” report, as it’s called.

The majority of Accenture’s study participants said they tried a new hobby or joined a new community in the past six to nine months. And as Digiday previously reported, there is a social media trend shifting to more about communities rather than personas. Some online groups can even spawn from people collecting digital goods or reacting to moments in sports or news.

“Passion points and niche interests are the ties that bind on digital,” said Cristina Lawrence, evp of consumer and content experience at Razorfish. “Interest-targeting is the key to creating radically relevant messages and creative experiences that mean something to real people.”

As far as how communities apply to Web3, a decentralized concept of the internet, Accenture points to the importance of brands being open to experimentation. For example, Starbucks has been testing a tokenized loyalty program called Odyssey. Brands that can focus on providing rewards and engaging customers will see greater success than ones that focus too much on the technology itself.

“For universal success, the technology needs to recede into the background and the benefit needs to come to the foreground,” Curtis told Digiday.

There have been other examples of businesses trying to create Web3 communities in the mainstream. Twitter and Instagram introduced features for NFT user profile pictures, and Reddit launched an NFT marketplace for people to buy blockchain profile pictures at a fixed rate, in addition to offering digital avatars for its site and mobile app.

Holding giant Dentsu earlier this year also partnered with Microsoft to create a metaverse learning space to guide clients in Web3 efforts. As Val Vacante, vp of solutions and innovation at Dentsu, explained, its metaverse initiative is aimed at figuring out how to actually support clients interested in Web3 programs.

“We encourage this as a test and learn for all brands,” Vacante previously told Digiday. “There are brands who just throw a ton of money into whatever is new, right? But in reality, a lot of brands don’t have that opportunity.”

The industry advertising investment will total $713.6 billion by the end of this year, down by .7% from the previous July 2022 forecast of 8.7% growth. Some of the challenges impacting 2022 include rising inflation, higher interest rates, market recessions and political uncertainty that impacts business and consumer spending, according to the report.

“2022 has proven to be another strong year of growth for the ad industry, despite the political and economic uncertainty that surfaced,” Peter Huijboom, global CEO of media and global clients at Dentsu International, said in a statement. “It is clear from our report and forecast the effect of this is being felt into 2023 too, and we need to be realistic on how this will impact the industry, the inventory, and the returns we should expect from available budgets.”

But Dentsu expects the numbers to look stronger going into 2024 and 2025, with ad spending expected to increase 4.8% to reach $776.9 billion in 2024 and then increase 4.5% to reach $811.6 billion in 2025.

Additionally, digital spending continues to lead the way, accounting for a share of 55.3% of ad spending in 2022 and 58.2% in 2024. Newer categories within digital, such as retail media and CTV, are also showing the biggest increases in investment.

The Dentsu outlook seems to track with the other holding company analysts GroupM and Magna from earlier this month. Both firms adjusted their forecasts and said 2023 will deliver some strong results but clarifying that the rate of growth will slow. They also pointed to CTV and retail media as drivers, with an optimistic view on OOH in particular.

“Key sectors are increasingly investing more dollars — in particular, political spending in out-of-home hit record highs,” Anna Bager, Out-of-Home Advertising Association of America president/CEO, previously told Digiday.

More from the report:

• Across the regions in 2023, there will be modest growth in 51 out of 58 markets analyzed – with APAC in the lead at 4% growth expected and EMEA following with 3.8% growth.
• Growth is expected in almost all other channels, including television ad spending increasing by .2% to hit $182.7 million, with Out-of-Home increasing 2% and cinema increasing 6.1%. Audio is also expected to grow by 2%.
• Digital spending is still growing on pace, particularly with CTV growing faster than traditional TV spending that was flat in 2022. CTV is expected to increase by double digits, up 23.7% in 2022 and 20.2% in 2023. New Netflix and Disney+ ad-supported models may draw more subscribers and will play a larger role in the market, per Dentsu.
• More than 70% of digital spending will be transacted programmatically across various platforms, including online, CTV, digital audio and digital OOH. This is leading to more options and flexible choices for campaigns, making it easier to plan and automate.
• We will keep talking about attention metrics. The added pressure on budgets could lead to more focus on these measurements to “ensure [they] work as hard as possible,” the report noted. Dentsu’s attention economy research program has been observing 10,000 participants across more than 300,000 ads since 2017.

The Athletic launched its advertising business right in time for many sporting tentpoles, including the World Cup, posing a real opportunity for The New York Times-owned sports brand to compete for ad dollars.

But what Sebastian Tomich, chief commercial officer of The Athletic, found was that many top spenders around marquee events like the World Cup had already pre-planned those budgets years before the Times even made a motion to purchase the sports brand. While there were some remaining dollars to campaign for, he said the real benefit to his sales team was being able to get the ball rolling on large campaigns tied to tentpoles next year, like the Super Bowl and Women’s World Cup, and even the World Cup in 2026.

The Athletic’s ad revenue is not relying solely on future campaigns, however, especially during an economic downturn. Instead, Tomich’s team is continuing to pursue as many prospective advertisers as possible, while also turning on the programmatic spigot — something he was hesitant to use back when advertising first appeared on The Athletic’s website. 

“Never say never, particularly when it comes to open market programmatic. It’s not on the cards now, but if we do make that move to open market programmatic it will be because we need to,” Tomich told Digiday in September. 

Now with a 12-person-strong sales team, programmatic revenue trickling in and the Times’ advertising division behind him, Tomich said The Athletic is still on track to achieve profitability by 2025. 

As the France-Morocco World Cup match played out on Wednesday, Tomich agreed to miss the first 20 minutes of the game to sit down with Digiday to discuss how the brand’s advertising business is faring after nearly a full quarter of experience. “Good for business if France wins. [A head-to-head of] Mbappé and Messi is a good final for any newsroom covering the World Cup,” said Tomich. 

The following conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity and readability. 

How has the timing of the World Cup helped with the launch of your advertising business? 

We launched advertising at the end of September [and] the World Cup is such a great beacon to hitch your launch to, so it was kind of two-fold. We’re launching advertising and we have this giant [amount of] World Cup cover[age]. It’s a good pitch [and] it helped us a lot in conversations with clients. In some cases, the conversation started with the World Cup and ended up in other places à la our big partnership with Google that we announced around women’s sports.

We had very directly relevant World Cup sponsors come in like Emirates and Paramount+, and then because [it’s a] big moment that everybody’s paying attention to all at once, we had other big brands join us like Chanel, who was our launch partner, join us again for the World Cup, as well as Applebee’s.  

Which types of advertisers have you been targeting with your ad business? From the few you mentioned, they don’t appear to be very endemic to sports. 

I segment it in three ways. We look for brands that already have pre-existing sports relationships. So team and league [sponsors and] official sponsors of the World Cup, like Visa Hyundai, McDonald’s, Coke — we will 100% go after all of them.

Then you have brands that are interested in reaching affluent audiences, predominantly males. That leads you to all the golf tournaments, all the men’s lifestyle publishers, all the brands that show up there like big watches, cars and apparel. They might not sponsor a team, but they want to be around it. 

And then third is advertisers who just want to be around sports. Their number-one target might not necessarily be affluent males, but they love the sports environment. A good example of that is Paramount+, right? They’re not an official team sponsor. They target everybody, but they love being around sports.

How has it been pitching The Athletic to advertisers right around the same time that a lot of tentpole sporting events are happening? 

It’s 100% outbounds now because you’ve got to remember that The Athletic didn’t have advertising before. We’re not on any RFP lists. We have to go build our own awareness in the market. And it [goes] back to those three guideposts. We have all of those broken out and then we have research behind them that shows all of the top spenders in those spaces. And we’re holding ourselves accountable to making sure we get to every one of them. It’s a long list. There’s so many people to call on but we’ve been fortunate enough to have the resources to do that.

How large is your sales team? 

We will try to finish the year with 12 [salespeople]. And then, of course, we have the Times sales team that we’re still working through how the two teams work together. [There’s] a lot of partnership there. 

The goal is by the end of next year, [we] won’t be 100% outbound [dependent]. We’ll be on those RFP lists.

How has this set you up for next year in conversations with advertisers, particularly around the several marquee sporting events that are happening all within the first half of 2023? 

One interesting thing is just how far in advance brands plan for these things. I mean, some of the mega sponsors of the World Cup will have their plans baked two to three years prior to the tournament. In many cases, we were going to brands and they were like, “Well we can talk about things that are leftover, but we’ve been planning [for the World Cup]. Let’s talk about the Women’s World Cup next year or [the World Cup in] 2026.”

[Now] it’s all hands on deck for the entire sports calendar for next year. We’ve got a dual strategy right now. We’ve got those three buckets of partners we’re chasing, and then second, we’ve got a really exciting sports calendar [that we’re using] to launch new editorial products that can stand out [to advertisers].

We want to end the year with three to five multi-year, very integrated partnerships [with] many millions attached and want to be able to have a roster by sport of the top sports sponsors all working with us in ways that are similar to stadium rights, where they can own a piece of coverage or be the official partner of our Major League Baseball coverage or NHL coverage, things like that.

Some publishers have said the fourth quarter this year was particularly strong for programmatic advertising because it allowed advertisers to act quickly on any remaining budgets they had this year. You told Digiday this September that open market programmatic advertising wasn’t a part of the launch plans. Have you since added it into the fold? 

We definitely focused on direct-sold ads at launch, particularly because we were introducing ads to a platform that was ad-free since its inception. So we wanted to be deliberate [because] ad quality is something [that is] super important to us. We’re testing some stuff in programmatic with some pretty tight quality controls. I don’t see it becoming a big part of our strategy, but I see it becoming a component of the way we make money.

The Times provides a good framework for this, like how to balance the high quality, direct-sold ads with programmatic. I see us more closely mirroring the Times’ strategy and then [if] we do a really good job and we sell out everything from the direct side, we won’t be doing a lot of programmatic. And I’m hoping that’s the case.

Are you testing both open marketplace and private marketplaces? 

All the above. We do some open market stuff, but [with] some really tight controls. Obviously it makes it harder to do stuff at scale there. [I’m also] super interested in PMP as well.

What we’ve heard

“The Google outage that happened a couple of days ago hurt some publishers. That wasn’t ideal, but I do think they fixed it quickly and they were communicative about it.”

— a media executive who spoke to Digiday on the condition of anonymity  

Twitter referrals trend down

All the hoopla going on at Twitter since Elon Musk took over at the end of October begs the question: How have these changes impacted the traffic referred to publishers’ sites from the social media platform?

Not as much as you might think. According to Chartbeat data shared with Digiday, Twitter’s referral traffic to publishers has fallen since Musk’s takeover — down 12.8% year-over-year in November — but not to the extent that it has been dropping since the start of the year.

Image description –

Image courtesy of Chartbeat

Twitter’s November referral traffic drop happens to be its smallest fall all year. The largest difference was in January, when Twitter referral traffic was down 31.9%. Referral traffic from Twitter has been down in the double digits every month this year, with an overall decrease of 20.4% year-over-year. For comparison, Facebook’s referral traffic to publishers’ sites was down 28.8% in November year-over-year, the largest dip this year and a smaller change than what Chartbeat has tracked at Twitter. The data comes from 1,200 sites, all of which are Chartbeat customers that fall in the category of news and media.

For the most part, traffic coming from Twitter to publishers’ websites hasn’t been substantial enough to make a lasting mark on business so far. This referral channel has hovered around an average of 2% for years. Spokespeople from NPR and another large news organization that asked not to be named in this story told Digiday this week that they have not experienced significant changes to their respective Twitter referral traffic.

Five news publishers Digiday contacted said they had not updated their social media policies or strategies since the changes to the Twitter platform. (Quite different from the way advertisers are treating the platform. Many have pulled back spending.)

However, one head of audience at a large regional news publisher that spoke on the condition of anonymity said that while they have seen traffic from Twitter decline all year, that traffic halved in the past two months, from about 5% to now about 3% of overall traffic. This was mostly due to a decline in the publisher’s Twitter followers and in organic referrals from users sharing their content, as well as the removal of the Moments feature last week, which allowed publishers to curate and highlight news events, they said. – Sara Guaglione

Numbers to know

30%: The amount that Semafor’s events business will contribute to the company’s total revenue in its first year.

$1.6 billion: The amount of money Dominion Voting Systems is suing the Murdoch-owned Fox Corp for after the cable news station repeatedly claimed the company rigged its voting machines during the 2020 presidential election.

533: The number of journalists who are currently being detained worldwide, according to a new report from Reporters Without Borders (RSF). This is a new record.

What we’ve covered

iHeartMedia to cut U.S. real estate footprint in half:

• iHeartMedia is cutting its office square footage by half across the U.S. 
• The company does not plan to close offices in any of the 160 markets where it has a presence.

Read more about iHeartMedia’s cost-cutting strategy here.

Here are the 2022 global media rankings by ad spend: 

• The winds of the global economic slowdown have started to chill even the buoyant digital advertising market, albeit digital spending is on course to hit $567.49 billion this year, up from $522.5 billion in 2021, according to Insider Intelligence.
• Google and Facebook remain dominant while Alibaba and ByteDance are in the mix.

Read more about 2022’s media ad spending here.

How The Wall Street Journal hopes to reach young news consumers on TikTok:

• With its recently introduced TikTok channel, The Wall Street Journal has joined a number of other legacy publishers working to reach Gen Z and young millennial audiences on the platform.
• Since launching its TikTok channel on Oct. 3, it has accrued over 37,000 followers and 600,000 likes.

Learn more about the publisher’s TikTok strategy here. 

Publishers prime their YouTube Shorts strategies ahead of next year’s revenue-sharing program:

• YouTube Shorts has yet to turn on the revenue spigot for creators and publishers to directly profit from the short-form vertical videos they post to the platform, but some publishers are preparing for the ad revenue-sharing program’s debut next February by building up their audiences now.
• As the revenue-share model will be based on viewership, building up stamina on the platform will be critical once the revenue tap is turned on next year. 

Read more about publishers’ YouTube Shorts strategy here.

What we’re reading

Layoffs loom for The Washington Post: 

The Washington Post will conduct layoffs in the new year in an effort to reorient itself for the future and reinvest in other areas, publisher Fred Ryan said during a town hall on Wednesday, CNN reported. 

Outage of Google Ad Manager costs publishers’ ad sales:

Google Ad Manager, which is used by many websites to sell and display ads, was down for about three hours last Thursday, preventing publishers from earning revenue during the crucial holiday period, reported Reuters.

News publishers are up against a political lobbyists after JCPA is killed:

The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act was a bill designed to provide a safe harbor for some news organizations to collectively bargain with platforms for payments. Targeting behemoths like Google and Meta, the bill was dead within 48-hours, indicating that strong bi-partisan and well-funded lobbying will be up against local news publishers for the foreseeable future, writes The Columbia Journalism Review.

Crypto publishers are feeling the boom and bust of crypto more than most:

The declining adoption and waning trust in crypto has led to a steep downturn in marketing spend, causing endemic publishers like CoinDesk, Decrypt and The Block to adapt to a far less hospitable economic landscape, reports Adweek. The third quarter 2022 saw an 80% decline  in ad spend from the top cryptocurrency advertisers compared to the first quarter, according to MediaRadar.

Spotify is cutting back on live audio show programming:

The company is ending the production of several live audio shows including “Deux Me After Dark” and “Doughboys: Snack Pack,” reported Bloomberg.

Since it was a collaborative effort, Harden was very receptive to a holiday concept that was different from the typical athlete fitness concept, according to John Solomon, Therabody’s CMO. “Both our team and his wanted to integrate James’ persona and passions into the storytelling approach, so we worked together to ensure that every element was a reflection of both James and Therabody, from the wardrobe to the music to the script and beyond,” said Solomon.

The brand launched a spot on connected TV along with YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok on December 5th and will run until the end of the year. With this ad, the brand is targeting millennials and Gen Z who may be in pain as its products and content are designed to make movement easier. Therabody wants to be a resource that provides simple wellness solutions people can do at home, according to Solomon.

It is unclear how much of Therabody’s advertising budget is allocated to this campaign as Solomon declined to share overall budget specifics. According to Pathmatics data, the brand spent a little over $5 million so far on advertising in 2022 in which the majority of the spend was for OTT (86%) and the least for mobile display (10%). Solomon also said that the ad spend for this campaign was 100% focused on digital.

“Therabody’s ad does a great job of including all of the elements of an engaging holiday campaign that gets the message of the product to the targeted shopper across, without pushing the product too much in the consumer’s face as the perfect gift for the holiday season,” said James Moore, managing partner at KME Ventures, a digital strategy marketing firm.

The goal is to attract customers in an entertaining, fun way, with the intention of engaging with them while they are scrolling, whether they are on the couch or waiting in line at a point of sale.

“At the highest level, we want people to know that Therabody exists to inspire all people to keep their minds and bodies moving,” said Solomon. “In this spot, we want people to know that while we are the experts in tech wellness, we like to have fun, too.”

Therabody is not the only brand to go out of its way for holiday marketing as it is back in full force this year with the purpose to gain visibility among shoppers online. A variety of brands are taking advantage of the holiday season, including Lowe’s, Foot Locker, and Ocean Spray.

It’s important to advertise during the holidays for the same reasons it’s important at other times: to reach new audiences and to remain on people’s minds. VSA Partners’ executive creative director Kim Mickenberg said it’s especially crucial now as brands might be tempted to spend less on top-of-funnel advertising as we enter a recession.

“That’s why it’s nice to see Therabody using this opportunity to show a fun, whimsical ‘use case’ for their product,” said Mickenberg. “Many people will identify with Santa’s efforts to get in shape for a big event, and even more will connect with the aches and pains that come with it—and that Theragun can help treat.”

By combining their expertise and the professional networks they have developed across these disparate communities, the founders of Mana Talent Group aim to help their clients more easily experiment with new types of content and inspire cross-genre collaborations between the creators in their roster.

“Diversification is always going make the company a little stronger,” said Sarah “Sarah Lavender” Kriegh, an ASMR performer signed to Mana Talent. “I just started a Twitch channel, and I’m just dabbling in playing video games on there — but it is nice knowing that I have some professional resources to reach out to if I decide to go further with that.”

While the aforementioned creators are acting as the public face of Mana Talent Group, they are not the only investors. Their pre-existing managers — Zach Russell, Matt Phillips, Alex Fisher and Ben Deaney, Klein’s husband — are also investors and co-owners, with each taking on a C-level role in the company.

The move is the latest example of online creators leveraging their followings and experience to enter the business world. In October 2021, for example, the top Twitch streamer Imane “Pokimane” Anys announced the formation of her own talent management agency, RTS. In July, the streamer Ali “SypherPK” Hassan co-founded the content production studio Oni Studios with his wife Daniela Ali. And in September, a group of creators including the YouTuber Ludwig Ahgren founded their own creative agency, Offbrand, among other examples.

“SypherPK is an entrepreneur with three different businesses — his content business, his apparel brand Metal Umbrella and Oni Studios,” said Justin Miclat, CEO of The Kinetic Group, a talent management agency whose clients include Hassan and Nicholas “Nickmercs” Kolcheff. “It’s all about expanding the universe in a way that aligns with the things he cares about, and ultimately the things that drive his brand and business forward.”

Building an offramp from content creation

For each of Mana Talent’s creator-owners, their motivation to join forces was at least partially a desire to expand their revenue streams beyond Twitch and YouTube and create a potential offramp for themselves to escape the content creation grind.

“It’s hard to say the longevity of a content creator, because this industry has only been financially viable for 10 to 15 years,” Collins said. “Whereas, Hollywood actors, as they age, they fit in different roles and can just go until they’re done. It’s hard for me to say that, 10 to 20 years from now, I’m still going to be making YouTube videos.”

Founding a talent management agency is also a financial back-up plan for creators who must otherwise rely on relatively fickle platforms such as YouTube and TikTok for the bulk of their income. This is a particular concern for Klein, who has occasionally received pushback from prospective brand partners due to her choice of video genre.

“Now, there’s thousands and thousands of ASMR creators — but during that growth, there were definitely periods of time where everyone was getting knocked with limited monetization or complete demonetization,” she said. “Behind the scenes, someone would be like, ‘ASMR is not brand-friendly’ for a month, and then it would be fine.”

So far, business has been strong for Mana Talent Group. The company launched with hundreds of clients, and it has already announced a partnership with the merchandising firm Warren James to form a new comics publisher, Bad Egg. Kriegh told Digiday she felt more comfortable working with the creator-owned company than with its more corporate competitors due to Mana Talent’s native understanding of YouTube and content creation.

“My genre is so strange; it’s really hard to have big companies know what it is and be able to explain it to brands,” she said. “I didn’t even consider emailing any other management company at first.”

Mana Talent has been operating quietly since August, but it plans to enter the limelight with a joint charity stream featuring all three of its creator-owners on Dec. 16. As the success of creator-powered businesses such as Mana Talent Group becomes readily apparent, more YouTubers are likely to follow in the company’s footsteps.

“Creators are leaning into this type of venture because it’s just a natural extension of what they’ve been able to focus on over the course of their own careers,” Miclat said. “Now, we’re seeing more creators, whether they be livestreamers or YouTubers, being a little bolder and trying to start down that path.”