Month: December 2022

Deloitte isn’t alone in partnering with an entertainment property for advertising. Alcohol brand The Sexton Single Malt and nonprofit animal rights organization PETA also capitalized on the opportunity with “The Walking Dead” with launches of promotional and social campaigns in time for the series finale. Marketers see an opportunity to reach more people by working with entertainment properties like AMC with popular franchises that have a loyal fanbase, even if many people aren’t watching live shows as much anymore.

Deloitte CMO Suzanne Kounkel reported that the ad that debuted during “The Walking Dead” resulted in 46,000 visits to they company’s website and a higher-than-usual 64% engagement rate. “We wanted to show the world that we could be playful around as we do very serious work, but we don’t have to take ourselves too seriously,” said Kounkel. She added that the popularity of “The Walking Dead” is still strong on social media, which gave Deloitte the opportunity to introduce the company to Gen Z and millennial viewers, who are not only fans of the show but also job seekers.

“So we saw the series finale as a great way to meet an audience that we were very interested in where they were, rather than asking them to come to us, and we just saw it as a playful way to participate in a cultural conversation that people might not expect to for Deloitte to be interested in,” said Kounkel.

As streaming and video on demand viewing grow, fewer people are watching live TV, which raises the question of whether advertising on streaming platforms (the ones with ads) would be more effective at reaching more viewers. The final episode of “The Walking Dead” also aired at the same time on the streaming platform AMC+. Earlier episodes in the season were available on the AMC+ streaming service a week prior to the cable airing.

“With a long-running series like ‘The Walking Dead,’ fans have a huge amount of emotional investment,” said Emily Farrugia, creative strategist at full-service independent agency FUSE Create. “Not only are they unlikely to miss it for fear of spoilers alongside overall excitement, but may be more receptive to heart-tugging ads, due to their emotions already running high.”

PETA’s PSA to millennials and Gen Z

PETA made its national television debut on AMC during the final episode of “The Walking Dead” to compel viewers to consider the suffering behind every wool item and to shop vegan this holiday season and beyond. The group’s ad features a family visiting a supposedly ethical shearing operation, but things go wrong after the shearer pulls out a pair of bloody shears and a needle to sew up the sheep “when she gets cut” — a frequent incident in wool production. The ad was also posted on PETA’s Facebook and Instagram accounts.

PETA’s strategy behind working with AMC to distribute the ad is to reach as many people as possible, particularly younger millennial and Gen Z consumers who may also be animal activists, with its message that even a small change can have a significant impact on animals, as PETA has demonstrated in its investigations into abusive practices in shearing sheds. “People are beginning to understand that animals are individuals, not merchandise, and PETA is determined to influence brands and shoppers alike to ditch all animal-derived materials, including sheep’s wool,” said PETA’s evp Tracy Reiman, who added that the violence on “The Walking Dead” is akin to the violence animals face.

Statista data shows that “The Walking Dead” has an average audience of nearly 2.9 million cable viewers as of 2022. As for social media, PETA has a following of more than 5 million on Facebook, so the group did not spend to garner views of the video on social media. According to Pathmatics data, PETA spent over $1.4 million on advertising efforts this year.

“Advertising on long-running TV series can be a smart idea, because long shows have loyal audiences that are almost sure to be exposed to an ad,” said Erifili Gounari, founder and CEO of The Z Link, a Gen Z-lead social media agency. “If combined with smart targeting, it can prove quite effective.”

The Sexton Single Malt

In 2021, The Sexton Single Malt partnered with “The Walking Dead,” with efforts including co-branded TV ads, social content, limited edition digital content, retail programs and cocktails. Although the financial agreement has not been disclosed, the brand’s partnership with “The Walking Dead” has boosted awareness of the brand, getting eyeballs on the product and driving sales, according to Lander Otegui, CMO at Proximo Spirits, the parent company of The Sexton Single Malt. 

“The Sexton Single Malt encourages consumers to celebrate the now and live in the moment, while ‘The Walking Dead’ transports us to a world where one must live in the moment to survive,” said Otegui. “Paid social promotions have contributed to The Sexton success with campaigns delivering over 65 million impressions and reaching over 18 million consumers across paid search, paid social, programmatic and site partner execution.”

For the final episode, Ross Marquand, one of the most beloved cast members of “The Walking Dead,” curated The Sexton ambassador’s cocktail courier kit. This kit includes The Sexton’s Walking Dead-inspired limited-edition bottle, and the spirits brand promoted this on Instagram, Reddit, Twitter and Facebook. Additionally, The Sexton Single Malt had a huge presence during the finale event that took place in Los Angeles, with fans getting the chance to try the cocktail for the first time. 

According to Otegui, 70% of the brand’s ad spend went to digital programming. “We identified the platforms with the highest audience crossover and broke it down across each including Twitter (52%), Instagram and Facebook (43%), and Reddit (5%),” said Otegui, when asked how the ad spend was split. According to Pathmatics data, the brand spent a little over $1 million so far in advertising efforts in 2022.

TV advertising gets harder

As TV advertising becomes harder for many brands because of the growing number of “cord cutters” in the TV exodus and subscribers to video on demand platforms, more brands look to advertise on on streaming platforms. According to Nielsen data, “The Walking Dead” drew 3.1 million total viewers in its finale, the show’s largest audience in almost two years. Mongoose Media CEO Lauren Petrullo commented that brands should consider long-running series when making the decision to connect with audiences through a linear TV commercial, since that’s become a new niche in digital marketing.

“Advertising around a long running series is a chance for the brand to leverage the loyalty the show has in their viewers that are committed to watching it on TV,” said Petrullo. “These ads are live and in real-time, and viewers can connect with a brand in a way that YouTube subscribers won’t.”

For a fuller breakdown of pod bidding, check out the video below.

So far, she said there’s been an increase in media investment with BIPOC-owned properties, upwards of 40% across Digitas’ clients. (She did not offer further details.)

“We are realizing that [diversity, equity and inclusion] cannot be in a separate bucket. It cannot just sit with HR,” Lomax said, adding that diversity reaches well beyond employee or business resource groups. “You actually do need dollars tied to this to be effective and that’s where the clients come in.”

It’s a conversation she started having with Digitas executives back in 2019, which in 2020 led to the establishment of the Multicultural Center of Excellence, otherwise known as McCoe or the agency’s internal DE&I consultancy. Lomax describes it as a “small and nimble team” of about 25 or so volunteers (depending on the project and volunteer availability) that work across Digitas’ media, strategy, billings and operations teams. 

“We understand the business need. When we do put on our Multicultural Center of Excellence hat, we can effectively have conversations because we know where the business is going,” she said. 

Simply put, instead of one seat at one table, it’s many seats at many tables to ensure inclusivity during each step of the marketing process, reminding clients how to identify and classify communities as well as create long term relationships with them.

Prior to Lomax’s arrival, Digitas’ inclusivity strategy was on an as-needed basis, meaning that it was prioritized when the client asked for it, instead of being an integral part of the the agency’s work, said Lisa Torres, president of multicultural practice at Publicis Media, the agency’s holding company. 

“She was extremely intelligent, curious, open and wanted to find ways to be more inclusive,” Torres said. “Digitas at the time had nothing.” 

That’s not to say the agency was intentionally non-inclusive. Lomax herself said a lot of the groundwork for the McCoe was laid in Digitas’ employee and business resource groups. From an employee retention perspective, it worked. But like so many other agencies prior to 2020, there was no dedicated, client-facing DE&I practice. It was prioritized only when the client asked about it, per Torres. It took some convincing of higher ups, but the summer of 2020’s push to inclusivity lended their efforts some momentum. 

“The last two years have changed the trajectory of cultural marketing for everyone,” Torres said. “It became more on the front-end than the back-end, less bolted on more integrated to the business at hand.” 

Some of the biggest work to come out of Lomax’s efforts was Sephora’s Beauty of Blackness campaign and documentary. Even before partnering with Digitas’ McCoe, diversity was already an initiative at the beauty brand as it was one of the first major companies to commit to the 15 Percent Pledge, in which 15% of its inventory would be dedicated to products from Black-owned businesses. Partnering with Digitas and the McCoe practice only strengthened those efforts and showcased its evolution toward becoming a home to more inclusive, clean products. 

“Danisha was one of the voices who helped us understand how important this brand is to the Black community, to Black culture and to the beauty industry overall, and brainstorm with us how he could tell that story in a way that was totally new and different,” said Abigail Jacobs, svp of brand and integrated marketing at Sephora.

Across the advertising industry, the need for inclusivity went from a conversational talking point to a business priority in 2020, during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement and calls for social justice. Agencies, brands and corporations alike denounced racial bias, promising to do better by investing ad dollars in Black media, hiring people of color and creating more inclusive campaigns. (Read more on that here and here.)

“Today, agencies are establishing internal multicultural creative advisory groups that address and provide assurance of inclusivity within the work,” Tahlisha Williams, evp of talent, equity and learning solutions at the 4A’s, said in an emailed statement to Digiday. For example, some of those efforts include incorporating DE&I leadership into briefings and creative reviews, designing and implementing a culturally specific assessment tool, launching framework for DE&I expectations or establishing internal multicultural creative advisory groups, like how Digitas has done with the McCoe. 

The challenge however, Williams added, is maintaining said groups without over-indexing individuals from certain demographic communities due to the lack of representation within an agency. “This has led agencies to seeing the impact of the lack of representation which further highlights talent diversity concerns,” she added. 

Unfortunately, the industry’s good hasn’t been good enough with some agencies releasing updates to their diversity data with mediocre results. Black creatives have said progress in the industry is stalling and conversations around DE&I are fizzling out, per previous Digiday reporting. 

“At that point, you have to figure out a different way of doing marketing,” Torres said, speaking on the industry’s current efforts. “That’s what people like myself and Danisha come in and say, ‘This is what you need. This is a business imperative for you. But it’s also a business imperative you have to do the right way, and in a respectful way.”

It’s one of the challenges Lomax said her and her team will continue to face going forward, constantly reminding clients of their commitments. “That repetition is still a little bit of a challenge: Reminding teams that briefs need to come in and that don’t just say general market,” she said. “Some of those challenges, just because of the nature of the industry, they’re so baked in, are things that we’re still working through today.” 

That being said, there’s still a lot of work to be done. But Lomax is hopeful with plans already in place for 2023. (She did not disclose further details.) As a mom of two, she has to be hopeful, she said. 

“I really want them to be able to live in a future that looks different,” she said. “I want them to see their mom helping reimagine the future.”

“If we can take advantage and build scale and build importance in that algorithm, then we might be at a competitive advantage when they do turn on monetization,” said David Spiegel, CRO of Betches Media.

When the YouTube Shorts revenue-sharing program launches, YouTube will share 45% of its Shorts ad revenue with eligible creators and publishers, which is less than the 55% of ad revenue that YoTube shares for traditional, long-form videos. That revenue will be allocated on a monthly basis, and the amount of money that individual creators and publishers receive will be in proportion to their videos’ share of total Shorts views, according to YouTube’s blog post announcing the revenue-sharing program.

Experimentation time

Creators across YouTube are experimenting more with Shorts. In the last 90 days, the number of YouTube videos posted to the platform with “#Shorts” was up 51% compared to the 90-day period before that, based on a study of 1.6 million YouTube Videos from more than 11,000 YouTube accounts, according to Conviva Social Insights.

NowThis’s Shorts strategy is to post the same or similar content to what it posts on TikTok on YouTube Shorts, with a slight variance in cadence, according to a spokesperson from the brand’s parent company Vox Media. The strategy seems to have worked well for the publisher. The main driver of NowThis’’ viewership and subscriber growth on YouTube this year was Shorts, the spokesperson said, adding that NowThis increased its YouTube subscriptions by 50% compared to 2021. 

Vox Media’s other brands, Eater and The Dodo, have taken a more bespoke approach to Shorts content, using the long-form videos it posts on YouTube to inform the most interesting or engaged-with moments and then creating 60-second clips from that. This strategy has yielded more than 1 million views on many of the brands’ Shorts videos, the company’s spokesperson said.

A shortcut to build up non-Shorts businesses

Team Whistle has leaned into creating original content — both editorial and branded videos — by using the YouTube Shorts video editor and tools to make the content feel organic to the platform. And while the publisher is seeing a solid uptick in viewers who watch its Shorts content first, a big focus for the company is to reel those viewers in to longer-form videos on its various channels.

In 2022, 74% of Team Whistle’s views on YouTube were on Shorts, while 78% of its channel’s watch time (minutes viewed) was on its long-form videos. What’s more, 85% of total subscriptions to Team Whistle’s YouTube channel came through Shorts this year. 

“You can pull people in with Shorts but you can keep them staying longer with the long form,” said Dustin Fleischman, evp of revenue and brand strategy at Team Whistle. This gives YouTube the upper hand compared to TikTok or Instagram, where long-form content isn’t supported. 

Betches Media only has about 12,000 followers across its YouTube channels. But in an effort to build up its presence on the platform and participate in a revenue-share program, the company began posting video recordings of its popular podcast shows including “U Up?” in October. In addition to full episodes on its main YouTube channel, edited-down clips from those podcasts were posted on Shorts. Spiegel said that Shorts played a major role in bringing 6,000 new subscribers to the publisher’s “U Up?” YouTube channel. 

Nick Cicero, vp of strategy at Conviva, said podcast highlights are performing really well on Shorts because they have a high tendency to get viewers over to the full-length episodes on publishers’ main channels.

“Depending on what type of publisher you are, you’re going to start to use Shorts differently. [Some] are going to use Shorts as a marketing vehicle,” such as HBO Max or a podcast publisher, Cicero said. But many digital publishers may be in a position to benefit from this direct monetization of Shorts content depending on how much they invest in original content, he added. 

“We’re also seeing new accounts just being opened up for Shorts, specifically,” he said, adding that digital publishers who have a vertical focus and can use Shorts to dig down into recipes, sports highlights or other niche topics could be able to not only accrue viewers on Shorts, but keep them staying longer on Shorts content versus having them move over to long-form videos. 

To raise awareness about their services and how to safely use them, the esports betting company Rivalry has partnered with esports organizations such as Fnatic in the past — but with middling results. “We didn’t get our money’s worth,” said Rivalry CEO Steven Salz. 

These days, instead of relying on other brands or publications to spread the word about Rivalry, the company has pivoted to a focus on original, owned content, hiring the esports journalist and former publicist Cody Luongo as a senior manager of corporate communications. Luongo will publish journalistic articles about Rivalry on social media platforms — such as a recent LinkedIn article promoting the brand’s activation at the IEM Rio Counter-Strike Major — in addition to publishing whitepapers on esports betting and building out content platforms owned entirely by Rivalry.

“The grand vision would be to have a website and call it Rivalry Magazine,” Luongo said, adding that the site could also support other aspects of the company through features like a careers page, as well as sections educating users about safety and best practices in gambling.

Rivalry is not the only esports betting company that plans to use original content as a marketing channel, although it is perhaps the farthest along in its ambitions. Unikrn, which relaunched last week, also plans to invest significantly in original content. Education will be a significant aspect of Unikrn’s content play as well, although Unikrn CEO Justin Dellario declined to share many specifics about exactly what this content will look like.

“Teaching and giving them a platform to learn in a harm-free environment is important to us,” he said. “Content will continue to be important for us, and I would say that how Unikrn defines content will hopefully be different than some of the other companies that are out there.”

At least one company in the traditional sports betting space, Better Collective, has also invested in esports media to expand its gaming audience. The company has owned and operated the Counter-Strike news site HLTV since 2020, and it followed up on that investment by purchasing the FIFA community website FUTBIN in April 2022. 

Unlike Rivalry and Unikrn, Better Collective is approaching its media properties more as traditional journalistic businesses than marketing channels for esports betting. Still, there are similarities between the different companies’ strategic moves: For Better Collective, the hope is to use its expanding media arm to grow its audience and raise awareness about the entertainment value of esports and esports betting.

“We see esports as the driver of the train for us to move Better Collective, as a company, more toward major sports betting media,” said Better Collective svp of esports Henrik Lykkesteen. “HLTV is by far the biggest and most influential Counter-Strike site, and FUTBIN is the biggest FIFA-supporting site out there, so that’s where esports fits in for us.”