Less BS, More Facts, Some Opinions
Disney bumped up its annual Tech & Data Showcase to January this year to prove it has what it takes to compete for streaming dollars during the upfronts with an
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A probabilistic and iterative model like the digital twin of the customer (DToC) may be more useful during uncertain times, when customer behavior becomes harder to predict based on historical
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This week’s Media Briefing looks at the state of churn in publishers’ subscription businesses in light of the economic climate putting pressure on readers’ wallets.
The key hits:
With this latest economic downturn threatening to turn into a recession, consumers are now being faced with another exhausting task of budgeting in light of inflation, putting a big question mark next to recurring monthly costs, like subscriptions.
Luckily for publishers, early data shows that their subscription businesses have been spared from being hit as hard by the economic downturn as other businesses, like advertising. Average churn rates in 2022, however, were slightly higher than they were in 2021, particularly for consumer publications. But as subscription businesses mature, publishers are combating those churn rates with better retention tactics, pricing strategies and registration walls that they hope convince subscribers that publisher content is still worth paying for.
Churn has “certainly been elevated in 2022, relative to 2021,” according to Justin Eisenband, managing director of the Telecom, Media & Technology industry group at FTI Consulting, which works with clients like national newspapers and digital publishers. For most of the publisher clients he works with, average churn rates in 2022 sat between 4-5% versus 3-4% in 2021.
Eisenband said that his clients attributed the reasoning to “a good chunk [is due to] share of wallet issues. I’ve noticed a slight uptick in the non-payment due to credit card failure, which could still be economically based [if] their credit cards don’t go through.”
But the situation is more nuanced than that.
Subscription businesses are growing at a slower clip year over year on average and have been since that spike in 2020, according to Piano benchmark data. [Editor’s note: Piano is a contracted vendor with Digiday.] Active subscription growth during 2021 ended up being about 36.1%, while November 2022 ended at 14.2% growth year over year (Piano hadn’t released its December 2022 data by time of publication).
“We saw this huge surge in subscription acquisition in 2020, especially in the first four months of the pandemic,” said Michael Silberman, Piano’s evp of strategy and social. And because of that surge, average active subscription growth in 2020 was up over 60% year over year, he said.
As a result, 2021 and 2022 could be considered as more a return to normality for publishers, and decreases in growth are not necessarily due to the economy but are generally more in line with what growth looked like pre-pandemic.
Looking further into the subscriber churn trends, 2022 and 2021 were rather in line with each other when compared to 2020’s subscriber churn rates, according to Piano data, which divides subscribers up by those who subscribed through a trial offer (think a promotion like paying $1 per month for the first three months before being raised to full price) versus those who paid full price from the get go.
Silberman said that it is more likely that 2020’s retention rates will be better compared to subsequent years because readers were more willing to buy a subscription and keep it longer thanks to the 2020 news cycle versus the present economic climate having a harsher impact on retention rates in 2022, forcing readers to decrease their spending on monthly costs.
In 2020, “those users who might have needed a bit more convincing to become subscribers were all willing to pay and so you saw that retention curve lift compared with then the following two years when things settled back down to normal,” said Silberman. And that occurred “even more so with a paid trial than with a full price offer non-trial, because those are targeting those more marginal users in the first place,” he said.
“We’re coming off a Q4 that was up [about] 30% in direct [advertising revenue], which was epic. And I think whatever bug [our competitors] had in Q4 caught up with us in Q1. We’re down right now by as much as 20 to 25% in our forecast for Q1.”
– Anonymous media executive
While reporting on publishers’ Twitter referral traffic declining in 2022, a head of audience at a large regional news publisher told Digiday that they blamed the dip in referral traffic partly on the sharp decline of its Twitter followers in November.
“We saw quite a huge dip in the number of followers we have. But that’s also because Twitter got rid of a bunch of bots. But we also think that a lot of our following left the platform,” they said.
Data from social analytics companies Social Blade and Tubular Labs revealed that this was not an isolated experience for the publisher. The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Vice News and Yahoo News also lost Twitter followers in November.
However, in December these publishers started to pick up followers again, according to Social Blade data:
Despite the declines, these publishers ended 2022 with roughly as many Twitter followers as they had when the year began.
– Sara Guaglione
<$1 billion: The amount of money Vice Media is expected to sell for as the digital media company restarts its sale process at a lower price point. The company was once valued at $5.7 billion in 2017 and was pricing itself between $1 billion and $1.5 billion in 2022, which proved too high for prospective buyers.
80%: The decrease in the number of new podcasts launched between 2020 and 2022.
20: The number of journalists The Washington Post laid off this week. Another 30 open job postings will not be filled for the time being.
7%: The percentage of staffers — approximately 130 people — at Vox Media, which owns The Verge, SB Nation and New York magazine, who will be laid off. The company is said to have already reduced its spending and has frozen new hiring.
54%: The percentage of 70 publisher professionals who said the number of advertising products their companies offered increased in 2022.
Confessions of a media executive: ‘As an Apple user, I love what they’re doing’:
Read the conversation here.
Semafor sells Verizon on sponsoring its text message interview series:
Read about the franchise sponsorship here.
News publishers are flocking to TikTok as they continue to search for new audiences:
Read more about news publishers’ on TikTok here.
Axios Pro generated $2 million in 2022 with more than 3K paid subscribers:
Read more about Pro’s first year here.
Vox Media wants to raise $200 million:
Vox Media’s CEO Jim Bankoff wants to raise around $200 million to acquire new assets, according to Insider. Private equity giants CVC Capital and Group Black have both expressed interest in acquiring the digital media company, while Bankoff is reported to have considered selling off some of the company’s digital properties versus the entire company.
Murdoch won’t merge his media companies after all:
Rupert Murdoch paused his plans to recombine News Corp and Fox Corporation after 10 years, deciding that it was not an optimal move for shareholders at present, according to The New York Times. Later in the week, Insider reported that News Corp sold its property Realtor.com for $3 billion to commercial real estate firm CoStar Corp.
Plagiarism is plaguing CNET’s AI-written articles:
Tech news site CNET is having even more problems with its AI journalist, according to Futurism. After it was reported that the site’s AI-written articles were published with factual errors last week, this week it seems that the AI is now plagiarizing human-written content and passing it off as its own.
Bezos is in The Washington Post building:
Billionaire Jeff Bezos visited his newspaper’s headquarters last week, setting off a wave of uneasiness in the building, reported Puck. Evidently he was listening in to the company’s all-hands meeting after tensions escalated between leadership thanks to a down economy’s impacts to the bottom line.
Gannett’s cost cutting hit a student newspaper:
Florida State University’s newspaper, owned by newspaper conglomerate Gannett, recently laid off at least three paid positions and had the number of its print pages cut from 12 to eight, according to Poynter. The cuts occurred during the company’s round of 200 journalist layoffs and hundreds furloughs last month, which evidently included student journalists.
Rest assured, Mars Wrigley’s beloved M&M characters are still the chocolate brand’s official spokescandies, according to a recent news release. What was expected to be an “indefinite pause” and replacement of the candies was a marketing stunt building up to its debut in the Super Bowl.
Earlier this week, the chocolate brand dropped the news that the spokescandies would retire and real-life actress Maya Rudolph would be the new spokesperson. The unexpected changes came after backlash from far right conservative pundits, like Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who condemned the new “woke M&M’s” and its new inclusivity campaign.
By Wednesday, the chocolate brand announced even more changes to the spokescandies, including Yellow finding a new home with Snickers and Orange launching a meditative Spotify playlist.
“All of America can watch the storyline resolve with our appearance in the Super Bowl — with the characters right where they belong, at the heart of the brand,” said a brand spokesperson via a news release.
At best, the response to conservative criticism has sparked conversations about brand purpose and values. At worst, the pre-Super Bowl marketing stunt has left marketers with mixed feelings and questions about the value of viral, stunt marketing as well as questions about when to engage with cultural conversations as brands.
“In both cases, it lays bare that when brands participate in cultural and political conversations, it is theater,” said Rachael Kay Albers, creative director and brand strategist at RKA Ink, a branding and marketing agency. Meaning stunt or not, the move comes off as inauthentic, she added.
In an emailed statement to Digiday, a spokesperson for the brand said the chocolate brand will share more on the M&M’s next steps over the next few weeks. Since then, both the yellow and orange characters have made new ventures. The changes raised eyebrows across the industry with some critiquing it as a play to go viral ahead of Mars’ upcoming spot in the Super Bowl. And marketers are once again questioning the value in brands being edgy.
“Not every brand needs to have a point-of-view on a polarizing issue,” said Brianne Fleming, University of Florida communications instructor and Making the Brand podcast host, in an email to Digiday. “It’s OK to keep things status quo, and in this case, to let candy be candy.”
Seeking to go viral online by participating in cultural trends isn’t new. Brands have long since been pushing the envelope with edgy content to try and become the next trending hashtag and stand out in increasingly crowded digital markets. (Think Wendy’s Twitter clapbacks or Scrub Daddy’s edgy TikTok presence.) But when flying close to the sun, there’s always a chance you’ll get burned, experts say.
“If you do a stunt, it should be fairly well calculated, what the potential risks and rewards are,” said Deb Gabor, founder and CEO of Sol Marketing, a brand strategy consultancy.
A communications crisis, whether self-inflicted or accidental, can be costly. Volkswagen lost nearly 25% of its market value after owning up to its diesel emissions scandal back in 2015, according to Bloomberg. Meanwhile, United Airlines suffered a nearly $1 billion loss after a video of a passenger being mistreated went viral in 2017.
The recipe for a successful viral marketing campaign is authentic humor that aligns with the brand. Marketers point to examples like Planter’s Baby Nut Super Bowl commercial in 2020, Oreo’s celebrated Dunk in the Dark tweet or IHOP’s temporary name change to iHob in 2018.
Playing up controversy, tapping into politics or traumatic events, however, could leave brands with backlash and soured relationships with consumers, experts say. The tactic could be touchy even if it’s meant in good faith. (Remember Pepsi’s ad with Kendall Jenner?)
“When it is inauthentic and an attempt to manipulate the audience by the brand, it typically fails,” said Ronnie Goodstein, associate professor of marketing at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. “People do not want to feel manipulated by a brand.”
For example, language app Duolingo is known for its irreverent online presence. But last summer, the company found itself in hot water after weighing in on the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s defamation trial. Another example was this time last year in which Pabst Blue Ribbon beer brand went viral for its tweeted-and-deleted stance on Dry January.
In today’s increasingly polarized world, Moshe Isaacian, a freelance brand strategist, doesn’t suspect stunt marketing and divisiveness is a tactic brands will take up this year.
“I don’t think anyone is trying to do that right now. Especially in such a fickle market and everyone’s already nervous to buy stuff,” he said. “Right now, it’s a time of safety and reinforcing what the brands are about rather than doing crazy stunts.”
Interested in sharing your perspectives on the media and marketing industries? Join the Digiday research panel.
It’s been a bit of a bumpy road into 2023 for publishers. Revenues grew less than they expected last year, fewer added to their full-time staff as the economic clouds gathered and overall optimism in the media industry took a hit.
Digiday+ Research surveyed 71 publisher professionals to find out how these attitudes affect how publishers feel about the different parts of their businesses, specifically when it comes to ad revenue, subscriptions and e-commerce.
Overall, Digiday’s survey found that publishers are not feeling great about advertising revenue as 2023 kicks off. More specifically, respondents who said they agree that their companies’ advertising revenue will grow this year came in at fewer than half (43%) — a huge drop from the 75% who agreed they expected ad revenue to grow last year.
Meanwhile, the percentage of publisher pros who told Digiday they disagree that their ad revenue will grow this year saw a significant bump to 22%, up from 12% last year. And more than a third of publishers (35%) aren’t prepared to make a judgment one way or the other, saying they neither agree nor disagree that their companies’ ad revenue will grow in 2023.
Breaking down the data further, it turns out that the big drop-off for publishers between last year and this year happened among those who expressed strong confidence in their ad revenue. Last year, more than a third of respondents to Digiday’s survey (37%) said they strongly agreed that their companies’ ad revenue would grow in 2022. This year, that percentage fell to just 11%.
On the other side of the scale, the percentage of publishers who disagree somewhat (rather than strongly) that their ad revenue will grow this year saw a meaningful increase. Specifically, 16% of respondents said they somewhat disagree that their companies’ ad revenue will grow this year, up from 9% last year.
Interestingly, publishers’ attitudes toward subscription revenue saw much less of a change from last year compared with their attitudes toward ad revenue — mostly because publishers weren’t terribly confident in that part of their businesses to begin with.
While a full three-quarters of respondents to Digiday’s survey last year said they agreed that their companies’ ad revenue would grow, fewer than half (47%) said the same of their subscription revenue. And that was before the industry encountered the economic troubles publishers are working through now. This year, slightly more than a third of publisher pros (35%) said they agree that their companies’ subscription revenue will grow in 2023 — not a drop in confidence to the same degree as ad revenue, but still a significant decrease.
Similar to the data on ad revenue, though, publishers’ attitude shifts toward subscription revenues did happen in the same categories when we look at the data more closely.
The percentage of publishers who strongly agreed that their companies’ subscription revenue would grow last year was 21%, which fell to just 7% this year. Meanwhile, the percentage of those who disagree somewhat rose from 6% last year to 17% this year.
At the end of the day, though, it is worth noting that from last year to this year, publishers didn’t express very strong feelings about subscriptions either way. In 2022, the respondents who said they neither agreed nor disagreed that their companies’ subscription revenue would grow accounted for the largest group at 41%, which was the same case this year when 45% of respondents said the same.
The story for e-commerce revenue is similar to that of subscriptions. Publishers did see a drop in confidence in e-commerce between last year and this year, but largely they don’t necessarily know what to think exactly about that aspect of their business.
The percentage of respondents to Digiday’s survey who said they agree that their companies’ e-commerce revenue will grow saw a slightly larger drop than subscriptions — from 46% last year to 31% this year. Meanwhile, those who said they disagree rose from 13% last year to 20% this year — representing the same difference seen in the subscription category.
Digging into the data, e-commerce saw similar shifts to ad revenue and subscriptions: The respondents who said they strongly agree and somewhat disagree that their companies’ e-commerce revenue will grow this year saw the biggest changes.
Among the publishers who said they strongly agree that their e-commerce revenue will grow, the percentage of respondents in this group fell from 20% last year to 7% this year. And those who said they somewhat disagree saw a less significant but still noteworthy increase of 6 percentage points, from 7% last year to 13% this year.
In the e-commerce category, the greatest percentage of respondents to Digiday’s survey said they neither agree nor disagree that their companies’ e-commerce revenue will grow in the coming year both last year and this year, indicating that many publishers don’t know what to expect from their e-commerce business.
In fact, it’s worth noting that respondents in the neither agree nor disagree group increased in all three revenue categories: from 13% last year to 35% this year for ad revenue, from 41% last year to 45% this year for subscriptions, and from 40% last year to 49% this year for e-commerce.
This is potentially an indicator that, at this point, publishers are potentially holding off their judgment on their revenue predictions for the different parts of their businesses until they can actually get a feel for how 2023 will unfold.
The economic downturn has made its mark on publishers’ advertising businesses in more ways than one. A less-than active Q4 2022 caused some ad leads to scramble for last minute, in-quarter campaigns, while other publishers decided to push back their event timelines in 2023 in hopes that giving sponsors more time will lead to more revenue.
But the economy’s effect on subscription revenue is still unclear as subscribers and media companies alike evaluate what subscriptions they can afford in 2023.
The strain will put pressure on media companies balancing their own bottom lines as inflation rises and puts more scrutiny on what their main subscribers — companies and individuals who expense the high-priced subscriptions — are willing to pay for business reporting.
The price point of these premium subscriptions, often aimed at businesses and corporate customers, runs the gamut:
So far, Axios Pro, Bloomberg and Politico Pro are not seeing a direct decline on their subscription retention rates due to the economic downturn, according to company insiders from each publication. But the economic climate has focused their subscription teams on improving average subscription revenue over total subscription volume. To do that, they’re soliciting feedback directly from subscribers.
Axios Pro just passed its first anniversary and is working through renewals for the first time.
While Axios won’t say how many of its 3,000 paid subscribers have reached their renewal point, publisher Nick Johnston said that so far, there haven’t been any cancellations due to the economic downturn. Moreover, based on the subscribers who’ve already renewed (and some at an increased price point to either receive an all-access membership or to accommodate more employees on a corporate subscription), Axios is projecting that Pro revenue will increase 20% year over year from $2 million in 2022 to $2.4 million in 2023, not counting new subscriptions sold this year.
Johnston’s primary tactic for renewing existing clients at a higher price point in 2023 is through follow up phone calls with subscribers, asking them for feedback including on what they like and what Axios Pro products are lacking. He declined to share how many of these calls per week he takes, but added that it’s become a significant part of his role and has been conducting them since September 2021.
Politico’s approach to surveying subscribers has changed in the past few months to include more in-person visits with paid readers, after the company hired a new head of its professional subscriptions business, Rachel Loeffler, in October.
Each member of the Politico Pro subscriptions team has a goal assigned to their job description for the number of in-person meetings they have with so-called subscription clients, according to someone direct knowledge of the company.
“Cost cutting comes when a subscription is actually seen as a cost as opposed to a value creator,” said the source, who Digiday offered anonymity to in order for them to speak more candidly. “When you sell to a big corporation, you have the people who are actually using the product, and then [you have] the people who are paying for it. And they’re not always the same people. The people who are paying for it, their job is to cut costs,” said the Politico insider, who added that negotiation strategies around pricing on the product mixes can help in those conversations with the group responsible for signing the checks.
The total number of visits and the titles of the clients they see vary by role, but each meeting has to be backed up with meeting notes. “You can’t just check a box,” the person familiar with Politico’s subscription business said. Coupled with quantitative surveys conducted on Politico’s platform, the subscriptions team hopes to be able to pinpoint exactly what each client wants.
“Because we’re such close partners with our clients, we will always match the value we’re bringing to what they can pay. We’re fairly flexible and agile,” according to the source. So far, the team has not seen an increase in churn rate or a decrease in average price point per subscription as a result of the economy, according to the insider. A company spokesperson declined to comment on average subscription price as well as churn rate.
Johnston is not pricing Axios Pro lower based on the economic downturn — even when Pro loses business from the price point being too high. While there are some promotional rates for new product launches, like $100 off for the first year, Johnston said he favors the average revenue potential more than pure subscriber volume.
“If someone gets to the bottom of the funnel and clicks ‘no,’ we do a lot of surveys on why and very often the reason people click ‘no’ is because of how much money it costs,” said Johnston.
Bloomberg reached 450,000 subscribers in 2022, representing a growth rate of about 20% year-over-year, which is down slightly from what Bloomberg Media CEO Scott Havens called the pandemic craze, but he added that subscriptions are projected to have the same growth rate in 2023 as the year prior.
“It’s not a game of how many subscribers you have as much as how big is the business going to grow? You can play tricks with [offering the first] six months for free, and ultimately, many of those people don’t stick around,” said Havens, who added that his team is focused on moving people to annual subscriptions this year to further improve retention numbers. He did not say how many subscribers were monthly versus annual.
One of the major strategies to convert monthly subscribers to annual ones is by reducing free trials and implementing a registration wall to start building the relationship with the reader before “slamming them into a paywall,” Havens said. That’s equated to the publisher getting several hundred or thousands of registrations per month.
“We firmly believe it will pay off in the long run to the tune that subscribers will stick around longer,” Havens said, but did not have data available to share yet.
Prioritizing average subscriber revenue over total subscriber volume is a popular strategy that Michael Silberman, Piano’s evp of strategy and social, said he’s seeing more clients focus on in 2023. [Editor’s note: Piano is a contracted vendor with Digiday.]
This means, instead of offering free trials or having long windows of introductory prices, publishers are more focused on quality acquisition — meaning finding subscribers willing to pay full price, or close to it, off the bat — which improves retention overall, Silberman added.
“A key way that shifts the focus to revenue would [be] focusing on annual versus monthly subscriptions and creating incentives for people to pick annual,” Silberman said. “A classic discount is around 15% [off of an annual subscription giving subscribers] 12 months for the price of 10. You can discount it 30% or 40% and then the annual is still worth way more than the monthly because of the higher retention rates [that annual subscribers have on average].”
TikTok first, TikTok this, TikTok that. With continued emphasis on the short-form video app, news publishers have turned to talented TikTok specialists to get a grip on what works.
The reason – as ever – with TikTok comes down to its audience.
Like advertisers, publishers want to get in front of the younger demographics that can’t see to get enough of the short-form video app. There are many different theories within this approach, but they all share the same assumptions.
Vice is a case in point. The publication runs several TikTok teams, each with three to four staff, within the Vice brand portfolio. And each of those teams, dubbed “pods”, is embedded in a larger editorial team that reports to an editor in chief.
“They always include a producer, a social editor, a video editor and a senior-level multiplatform editor whose expertise spans both journalism (news gathering, storytelling) and social,” explained Katie Drummond, senior vp global news & global editor in chief at Vice. “The senior-level editor reports to an editor-in-chief, who approves pitches and reviews final scripts and cuts.”
Those specialists work alongside Vice’s digital reporters, editors, TV correspondents and producers that sit within the wider editorial team.
Similarly, the BBC has had bespoke teams for social platforms for several years, most recently for Instagram. Having a dedicated team enabled the broadcaster to grow its 4 million Instagram followers back in 2019 to 24 million today, noted Naja Nielsen, digital director for BBC News. As she pointed out, publishers don’t get that kind of growth unless they actively decide to pursue it with investment.
The bulk of that investment would likely go on salaries – something the BBC does not share on job posts, including the one for the senior journalist roles on its social team. That said, the average annual salary for senior journalist roles elsewhere across the organization ranges between £37,881 ($46,880) and £61,447 ($76,044), according to Glassdoor.
To that end, BBC News recently advertised for four senior journalists to join its newly formed TikTok team, which sits within its broader social news team that is led by Nielsen and manages the broadcaster’s social platforms.
As the advert stated: Growing the BBC News TikTok account to make it the biggest and best, both globally and in the U.K., is one of News’ main priorities for 2023.
Nielsen found that having a diverse team with different experiences of social media platforms is key. “They can lean on they’re own experiences to know what may or may not work going forward,” Nielsen added.
And this fresh talent – which isn’t restricted to simply internal or external candidates – can bring new perspectives, such as knowing the intricacies of the latest new trendy features on TikTok as well as creative ways to tap into a Gen Z audience authentically on the platform.
For these new BBC journalists, an understanding of TikTok is paramount. They will be expected to understand the TikTok algorithm, be creative video storytellers and engage audiences in news when they primarily want to be entertained.
“It’s very important for us to be in that ecosystem because we think TikTok is one of the most important places for us to invest in and expand right now,” said Nielsen.
Similarly, Drummond said that Vice’s own TikTok specialists are required to have an understanding of video-based and online storytelling and familiarity with the platform. But of course, while TikTok is the priority, other platforms still fall under their remit.
Investing further, Vice has trained every journalist to participate comfortably on TikTok, beyond its core TikTok teams.
“We are rolling out additional training via two seminars, one that covers deployment-based TikTok reporting and another on doing explainers,” added Drummond. “This kind of journalism is core to what we do at Vice, so it’s still vital that everyone in the newsroom participates.”
These digital skills are key for these publishers to meet untapped Gen Z audiences where they are, and make their content accessible.
In addition to The Washington Post’s core TikTok team, which consists of senior video reporter Dave Jorgenson along with Carmella Boykin and Chris Vazquez (the latter two being associate producers), the publisher launched its Next Generation cross-company initiative in August 2021 to specifically target younger, more diverse audiences.
Brianna Tucker, deputy politics editor at The Washington Post pointed out, Next Generation is open to experimenting across platforms, but right now that’s TikTok, as it shifts to meet the culture and lower the barrier to political news in an authentic way.
“All Next Generation politics stories, whether reported in real-time or produced over days or weeks, have a primary aim to post to a main Washington Post social account,” Tucker explained. “Reporters are also encouraged to think creatively about how to share it on their own personal accounts, including TikTok.”
And this fits well the team’s ambition to build out its politics team to report on the 2024 election.
“TikTok has increasingly become a vital tool for gathering and sharing news,” added Tucker. “For example, we’re seeing politicians including Annette Taddeo announce their campaigns on TikTok. As we experiment on the platform, we increasingly see everyday users engage with our stories in honest, unfiltered and curious ways.”
British publisher LADbible’s TikTok lead Rebecca Tyrell explained that her team approaches every piece of content separately, and that includes content for TikTok.
“We are seeing an increasing amount of heavily formatted series created specifically for TikTok using the native platform tools,” she said. “Going forward, our LADstudios production business will be looking into series that originate on the platform and grow from there.
So just as we’ve seen creative agencies prioritize TikTok by way of launching their own TikTok studios, news publishers are following suit. The Washington Post is another example, as Jorgenson noted that nowadays TikToks are becoming higher in production quality.
Ultimately, there’s no one size fits all approach to having a TikTok specialist team. Some are even more broader social teams which are currently prioritizing the platform.
But commonalities lie in the digital and video skills required, and the ability for these journalists to think outside the box in order to create engaging content that’s native to TikTok.
As Phoebe Connelly, director of Next Generation Audience Development at The Washington Post pointed out, TikTok is not just a place for us to have a branded account. It’s a reporting tool, a place readers encounter stories they want reporting on, a place for our journalists to connect with readers, she said.
Last month, General Electric took over The New York Times’ print advertising for a day throughout the news, business and arts sections of the paper amounting to 22 full-page color ads as well as five partial pages.
The newspaper ads were meant to not only get readers’ attention in print but also cultivate chatter on social media about the brand. (The Times has never had a print or digital advertising space owned by one advertiser before.) It’s not clear how much GE paid for its takeover.
GE isn’t alone in wanting to get more attention from newspaper ads recently. Other brands like Equinox and Take 5 Oil as well as agencies like TBWA New York have taken a similar approach hoping newspaper ads generate social media buzz in an ever-more cluttered digital environment. (Equinox, Take 5 Oil, and General Electric — and its agency Giant Spoon — declined to answer follow-up questions from Digiday. The New York Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
“It’s the power of doing something in print, making the statement, getting the logic right, and then knowing that it’s going to go viral,” said Rob Schwartz, chairman at TBWA New York Group, who added that creativity of a print ad is the strategy for brands to keep its readers’ attention before turning the page.
Schwartz estimated that a brand would need between $25,000 to $125,000 for the cost of running one full-page advertisement in a major newspaper, which is the same range that TBWA paid for its “Last Ad from the Last Big Ad Agency on Madison Avenue” full-page ad in The Times. The ad, which ran on Jan. 19, advertised the agency’s move to a different location in Manhattan. When it comes to print ads, Schwartz believes that it is less about money and more about making a statement.
“Sometimes it’s hard to kind of have the gravitas of the statement as a tweet,” said Schwartz, who noted readers’ affinity for taking pictures of print ads and sharing them over social media. “And if the ad itself is provocative or worth viewing, social media gives the ad a chance of widening the circulation.”
As previously reported by Digiday, marketers have been giving more traditional advertising tactics like out-of-home a second look as they seek out more tried and true methods amid the economic downturn. At the same time, the ever-growing digital ad market is getting increasingly cluttered, making it more difficult for marketers to stand out.
The favorability of the QR code can also change a print ad experience — which can be used to bring a newspaper reader to the brand’s website or app. Recent brands such as Skkn by Kim and American Express have used QR codes to connect online users to products in its physical locations.
Print ads are good for direct-response ads so readers can easily keep any phone numbers, said Sherri Rosenberg, vp of media at Blue Chip, an integrated marketing agency, as it’s much easier for people to recall the number in print as opposed to a video or digital OOH.
“The lead time is low, production costs are minimal, and CPMs are low and that makes newspapers good for time-sensitive information,” said Rosenberg. For The New York Times, the average cost for a full page ad is $47 CPM — or $3,500 for four weeks, according to its most recent pricing. “There’s greater reach when ads can be in both print and digital editions and brands can count on reaching business audiences from investors to potential partners.”
Carlos Ariza, SVP, integrated media, at the ad agency 9thWonder, echoed that sentiment, adding that part of the appeal could be the “trusted voice” of a publication.
This could change, too, with new readers’ preferences. A survey conducted by MarketingProfs in 2020 found that 92% of 18-to-23 year-olds find it easier to read printed material than digital information. Furthermore, the same study found that direct marketing campaigns are 37% more likely to generate a response than email campaigns. Compared with digital advertisements, consumers found print advertisements to be 34% more trustworthy.
According to Mat Zucker, senior partner and co-head of marketing and sales at Prophet, a growth strategy consulting firm, newspapers can also be used as corporate communications — defining your role in relation to an issue that arises in the market, also adding as a medium, it has gravitas, which may make it more appropriate for the CEO to deliver a message than say a more commercial based message.
It was also pointed out by Zucker that employees read newspapers too, so the newspapers can be purchased quickly when last-minute deadlines are approaching and are easy to navigate if there are last-minute changes or choices to be made. They also allow employers to do local targeting where the employees live.
“Full-page ads command attention and gravitas for the message,” said Zucker. “There’s no need to fill the space but the statement says we mean what we’re saying and it owns the space preventing clutter from other marketers or messages which could cloud the message or distract from it.”