Month: January 2023

“January is really when we see our seasonality hit,” Sabeena Ladha, founder of Deux, a direct-to-consumer vegan and gluten free cookie brand, said about why the brand is taking to OOH advertising during the month of January. “As a brand offering good-for-you snacks, many look to us as a healthy indulgence in their day without having to sacrifice. So having our campaign launch during this time made the most sense to us.”

Deux is one on a roster of health food brands that are trying to build awareness in January and take advantage of the buzz surrounding New Year’s resolutions. For example, Caulipower, a food company that offers vegetable-forward alternatives such as cauliflower pizza, cauliflower tortillas, chicken tenders, and more, is looking to build consumer awareness and increase customer loyalty with highly targeted marketing tactics, and driving conversion in stores at the point of purchase.

The brand is spending $2 million on media in the effort to stand out, according to founder Gail Becker. As part of the effort, Caulipower launched a streaming ad earlier this month that highlights its line of products for every dietary lifestyle with targeted digital ads, retailer-specific shopper marketing and in-store signage in 5,000 stores across the country.

“We devoted nearly 50% of our campaign budget towards targeted CTV and digital ads, building mass awareness and driving consideration with new, persuadable consumers,” said Becker. “About 35% of our spend is going towards retailer-specific shopper marketing programs and in-store couponing to drive conversion directly at the point of purchase.”

Caulipower shared its ad spot across Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, with the goal of bringing the campaign to life on social media using different content that feels authentic to the platforms. “Over the course of Q1, you’ll see all types of content from recipes to funny memes and even giveaways being shared on Caulipower’s channels,” said Becker.

Caulipower’s new campaign demonstrates the growing demand for healthier food choices. After the holidays, consumers look to make healthier choices for the new year.

“The new Caulipower campaign is the right idea for the new year when we’re all trying to make good on our promises to eat better,” said Bryan Black, founder and Chief Creative Officer at creative agency Mister Black.

Meanwhile, overseas in the U.K., Future Farm, a Brazilian-founded plant-based protein brand that launched in 2019, is leveraging the ongoing feud between Prince Harry and Prince William with a digital billboard in an effort to stand out during Veganuary, in which consumers are encouraged to eat more plant-based proteins during the month of January.

The aim of Future Farm’s ad is to drive earned media coverage and get people talking about and noticing Future Farm in a new way. With the brand jumping on the royal brothers’ feud, Future Farm was placed in stories around Prince Harry’s interview in the national press. As a result, the brand appeared outside of its usual food and product pages on national news pages.

“Aligning your brand with a moment in culture, allows you to play outside of your category,” said Jimmy Mechanic, U.K. brand manager for Future Farm. He added that the brand’s billboard poking fun at the royal family feud not only helps get people to pay attention to the brand but also gives Future Farm the opportunity to show off its brand personality.

Ariadna Navarro, Chief Strategy and Growth Officer at brand agency VSA Partners said that advertising early in the year allows brands to take part in the conversation about a commitment to health and show up when consumers are trying to make life changes. “The beginning of the year is a time of renewal for many that comes from a period of reflection and ending the year thinking about past goals and accomplishments and starting it with new goals and desires,” said Navarro. “Showing up early also positions you as a partner in their journey, rather than as a guilty conscience later on.”

Deux, Caulipower, Future Farm and other brands focusing their marketing efforts around the new year aren’t necessarily to change people’s habits altogether, but rather to gain awareness while people are thinking of making changes.

Future Farm, for example, wants to engage in Veganuary, just as Tito’s Handmade Vodka recently tapped into the cultural phenomenon of Dry January.

“Veganuary is the most important time of year for Future Farm as a brand and we like to go big on it every year,” said Mechanic. “For us it’s not about exclusively pushing people towards a vegan lifestyle, but using the opportunity to encourage people to think about experimenting with meat alternatives and flexitarianism.”

There are several factors that influence people’s decision to make health-related New Year’s resolutions during the month of January, and many of those factors are related to inspiration, ideas and their well being. As a result, health brands typically see a spike in demand in January due to the strong interest in health and wellness, according to a study conducted by McKinsey and Company.

“This makes people stop and explore the products, and is relatable and shareable,” said Olga Andrienko, vp of brand marketing at Semrush, an online visibility management software-as-a-service platform. “These tactics tell the audience that the products are about them and shows that the companies speaks their language and has a sense of humor.”

“It’s about making moderation normal, useful and cool,” said Borja Manso, Heineken USA’s vp of marketing, adding that when the brand launched in the U.S. in 2019 the “non-alcoholic beer category was and is still so small. It’s about educating consumers and creating a category.” 

That Heineken is using the Super Bowl to make sure its non-alcoholic offering is front and center during one of the few events where consumers are paying attention to the ads is likely a sign that competition is heating up in the non-alcoholic space. Alcohol brands like Samuel Adams, Tito’s Handmade Vodka and more have been rolling out ads and products around Dry January to stay relevant despite the rising trend of restricted alcohol consumption for the month. At the same time, upstarts like Bare Zero Proof and Free AF are aiming to be category leaders when it comes to non-alcoholic cocktails.

The heightened push to be the breakout non-alcoholic brand makes sense considering consumption of non-alcoholic beer alternatives is up significantly. Per restaurant food and beverage research firm CGA’s data, consumption of non-alcoholic beer in January 2022 was 29%, up from just 5% in 2019. Meanwhile, mocktails accounted for 7% of consumption in January 2019 and were 23% in 2022. 

“With our recent win for Just the Haze as the best non-alcoholic beer in the country at the Great American Beer Festival, we were excited to continue showing drinkers and beer lovers alike that we have a great non-alcoholic option that doesn’t sacrifice on taste,” said Lauren Price, director of marketing at Samuel Adams, when asked about the beermaker’s push to grow its non-alcoholic brand this month. 

Price continued: “It’s a big focus for us this year as we listen to drinkers’ evolving preferences and continue to see category growth with the rise of sober curiosity and pacing.” 

Marketers and agency execs expect the category to continue to grow as younger generations are more and more focused on wellness. With that being the case, marketers will aim to appeal to the shifting nature of the generation’s preferences, offering mocktails, non-alcoholic beers and spirits as well as potentially encouraging non-alcoholic parties, noted Lori Golden, director of national accounts for creative shop The Marketing Arm. 

“Wellness-focused Gen Zs have been leading the ‘sober-curious’ movement for the last several years, prioritizing refreshed mornings over drunken, late nights,” said Amanda Shapiro, Deutsch LA svp, group strategy. “The category is full of celebrity-backed entrants like Bella Hadid’s Kin, and Katy Perry’s De Soi. And now big brands are catching up in a big way, mainstreaming this movement for 2023.”

Even as more marketers are seeing the value in non-alcoholic options, there’s yet to be a category leader, noted Shapiro, which may be why there’s increased marketing efforts among brands during Dry January this year. 

“It’s anyone’s game,” said Shapiro. “It doesn’t take a zero-proof positioned brand to capitalize on this trend. It creates an opportunity for other non-alcoholic brands to fill the void booze is leaving behind.”

Only two publishers in the sample set — The New York Post and Fox News — saw their traffic increase while People’s website traffic declined by 46%. In most cases, changes were sharper than publishers saw between November and December 2021, when most publishers in the sample set saw traffic increase rather than decrease.

Publishers Digiday spoke with mostly blamed the removal of Twitter Moments in December as the reason for this drop. As a result, they are investing in other social platforms, like LinkedIn and Facebook, and in formats like newsletters as their advertisers request to stay off the platform.

Data shows publishers’ Twitter referral traffic declines

Web publishing tech provider Automattic analyzed a random set of 21 large and small publishers and found that the sites’ traffic from Twitter in the fourth quarter fell, on average by, 13%. Of that data set, 71% of publishers saw their traffic decline. That Q4 data includes traffic from before Musk took ownership of Twitter in late October.

Todd Blackmon, who oversees Automattic’s global marketing agency partnerships — which acquired Parse.ly in 2021 — said the declines could be from a number of factors. For example, it could have dropped if publishers decreased ad spend or from people using Twitter less and therefore tweeting out fewer links to news articles. [Editor’s note: Parse.ly is a contracted vendor with Digiday Media].

Executives at two publishers who agreed to share their own data on the condition of anonymity saw Twitter referral traffic cut in half.

A head of social at a large millennial-focused digital publisher said they saw a 36% decrease in referral traffic from Twitter from Q3 2022 to Q4 2022 across their sites. Some of its titles with a smaller audience and Twitter follower count saw up to a 99% decline in Twitter referral traffic. The company experienced a 42% drop in Twitter traffic from Q2 to Q4. Twitter accounted for an average of between 3% and 5% of the company’s total traffic, which was cut in half when Twitter Moments stopped getting picked up in October.

Another head of social at a large regional news publisher said that while they have seen traffic from Twitter decline all year, traffic halved from October to December from about 5% to about 3% of overall traffic.

Impact of Twitter Moments removal

Both publishing executives blamed the removal of the Twitter Moments feature — which allowed publishers to curate and highlight content around a large news event — as the main reason for the traffic dip.

“[We] had a really strong strategy around Twitter Moments… that was a huge traffic source. We saw an immediate dip in traffic and referrals,” said the regional news publisher exec, who said Twitter was the company’s second largest referral source after Google but is now in sixth place. “It used to be that we could flood Twitter and even the worst story would get a respectable amount of views. And now a larger portion of our coverage is not really finding any audience whatsoever.”

As a result, the social team has “pivoted to purely promotional, sexy, spicy tweets to get people to read our articles,” the exec said.

“The biggest change is the disappearance of Twitter Moments,” added the exec at the millennial-focused digital publisher. “We’re still actively publishing robustly on the platform and seeing that standard traffic come in from what I would call the baseline, normal traffic. But most of our heavy traffic — and definitely our spikes and virality — all came from Twitter Moments.”

But how much does Twitter traffic matter?

Despite these sobering numbers, the impact of the decline in Twitter referral traffic isn’t significant, at least to three publishers Digiday spoke with for this story.

Guardian U.S. editor Betsy Reed told Digiday that Twitter is a “very minor” traffic referrer. “It’s never been a major part of the strategy so we’re not really vulnerable to what’s going on,” Reed said. 

For the whole of 2022, referral traffic from Twitter dipped by 20% year over year, according to data from publisher analytics firm Chartbeat which includes 1,200 sites that are Chartbeat customers in the News and Media category.

At the regional news organization, the head of social said Twitter “has been unreliable for over a year now” as a traffic referral source. The publisher’s social team was preparing for this decline by upping its distribution and experimentation on other platforms like LinkedIn, Pinterest and newsletters.

“The big, scary, existential question is, will social media continue to be a traffic source for a news organization? Or will it become just a storytelling platform or just a marketing platform?” the news publisher exec said.

The head of social at the millennial-focused digital publisher said the traffic going away is “not something that is deemed business critical for us.” While they are not necessarily shifting away from Twitter, the executive said the social team “probably would’ve committed more resources to Twitter if we had continued to see growth all through 2022.” The executive said they’ve seen more stable referral traffic from Facebook since pivoting to publishing more short-form vertical video over the summer on the platform.

Advertisers tell publishers: no Twitter

Not only is Twitter not sending as much traffic to publishers, but the platform isn’t really helping their dealings with advertisers either. The regional news exec said one advertiser asked not to be tagged in sponsored content shared on Twitter, because they are no longer advertising on the platform.

“Most of our clients are currently not interested in advertising on Twitter,” added the millennial-focused digital publisher exec. Twitter has the ability to sell ads against the publisher’s video content through the Amplify program. The publisher was “always running something with them… But we really haven’t had any programs in the last few months from Twitter,” they said.

The exec said advertiser clients have told him they “don’t need to see Twitter on the plan” in sales pitches.

Twitter’s future with publishers is an unfinished story

​​The future role of Twitter when it comes to news distribution is still left to be seen. However, when The American Press Institute recently surveyed people from nearly 50 newsrooms, 67% said they don’t plan to pay in order to retain or add verified Twitter accounts, 28.3% said they’re not sure and just 4.3% said they would pay. When asked if they’ll continue to use Twitter as a distribution platform, 59% said they’d use it about the same, 20.5% said they plan to use it less. Others said they would use it sparingly, more, would stop using it or plan on “taking it day by day.”

Twitter has still largely been used as a broadcast platform for publishers compared to other ways of having two-way connections with audiences such as newsletters, according to Elite Truong, vice president of product strategy at the American Press Institute.

“Twitter in the last few years kept evolving to try to keep people in the ecosystem, with Spaces, trying to make the verification or blue check more valuable,” Truong said. “News organizations were able to find viral things to report on more easily than other platforms. But Twitter was only one of many evolving platforms that news orgs had to navigate to reach an audience, and had to play along with product updates to get content featured and elevated above the noise.”

The key hits:

• To join TikTok’s Pulse program, creators must agree to grant TikTok the ability to sub-license their content without receiving royalties.
• The terms are likely a defensive move by TikTok to protect itself against potential legal claims.
• Some creators are opting against joining the revenue-sharing program because of TikTok’s terms.

TikTok has been inviting more creators to join its revenue-sharing program Pulse in recent months, but some creators who have received invites are questioning whether agreeing to the program’s terms is worth the money they may receive. Two of the creators Digiday spoke to said they have decided not to accept the invites because of TikTok’s terms.

To participate in TikTok’s revenue-sharing program, creators must agree to grant TikTok the “irrevocable” ability to sub-license creators’ content and any pre-existing materials contained in the videos — including “notes, records, drawings, designs, products, services… original works of authorship” — without paying royalties to creators, according to copies of the “TikTok Pulse Program – Creative Partner Terms” and “TikTok Creator Marketplace Terms of Service for the U.S.” that were reviewed by Digiday (screenshots below). 

“I read that, and some alarms went off,” said one creator who was invited to join the Pulse program but has decided to refrain until the terms change.

So what’s the big deal with this legalese? Well, it basically means that — while participating creators retain ownership rights to their content — TikTok can take participating Pulse creators’ videos and strike licensing deals, such as selling them for use in TV shows or ads, and not have to pay a cut to creators.

“This is the broadest license you can get,” said John Neclerio, chair of law firm Duane Morris’s technology, transactions, licensing and commercial contracts group.

In an emailed statement, a TikTok spokesperson said, “In regards to TikTok Pulse, we have no plans or intentions to sublicense creators content. In our TikTok Creator Marketplace terms, which creators need to accept as Pulse payments are run through TTCM, there is language that mentions content will only be licensed on an as-needed-basis to parties other than Tiktok, such as advertisers, in connection with campaigns. If you review the terms, you will find these are limited licensing terms and not a license to use their content broadly. Creators still retain ownership of their defined TTCM ‘Content.’”

To be clear, the language seems to be primarily a defensive measure by TikTok to protect itself against potential legal claims. While the terms do give TikTok the option to sublicense creators’ content, the company’s aim is more likely to limit its legal exposure if creators’ videos includes content from a third party that may look to sue TikTok for directly profiting off that third-party content by selling ads against a video containing the content through the Pulse program.

“This license is really just shoring up their rights with regard to pre-existing materials because [TikTok is likely] thinking ‘We may be subject to a third-party claim, and we really want to show not only do we have the rights to the content, which is the creative assets, [but] we also had the rights to anything that was included in it, that the creative person used because that creative person told us that they had the right to it,’” said Neclerio, referring to a stipulation in the terms that creators notify TikTok in writing ahead of time of pre-existing materials being included in a video.

Nonetheless, the language gives the platform wide enough latitude with creators’ content to unnerve prospective Pulse participants. 

“I think they’re just trying to cover their bases. But technically by that contract, they could sell your videos out from underneath you and not pay you squat. The rest of [the Pulse program’s terms] was fine. It’s just basically the sub-licensing,” said a second creator. They added, “I don’t want my viral videos sold to other people.”

A third creator shared these misgivings about the TikTok Pulse terms but, despite that, said they planned to agree to them and join the program. “I don’t put my best content on TikTok anyway,” they said.

What we’ve heard

“There’s a [Facebook] Group now that Facebook’s got for some creators. It’s supposed to help provide some support for larger creators. But it’s mostly canned responses.”

— Creator

FAST focus

YouTube has picked a fine time to reportedly toe the water of the free, ad-supported streaming TV market, which continues to emerge as streaming’s heir to traditional cable TV.

While FAST services like Paramount’s Pluto TV and Roku’s The Roku Channel will only receive 17% of the ad dollars spent on traditional TV and streaming in 2023, that share is projected to reach 42% by 2027, according to a report released last week by consulting firm TVRev.

Meanwhile, the amount of time people in the U.K. spent streaming FAST channels in 2022 increased by 51%, according to TV and streaming technology provider Amagi, which powers FAST channels for companies including Fuse Media and Crackle Plus.

FAST channels have been around for several years, but they continue to gain in popularity thanks to the sweet spot they serve in the market. In addition to being free at a time when subscription-based streamers keep raising their rates (see HBO Max), they provide the streaming equivalent of the passive, wallpaper programming that has been the bailiwick of cable TV (see Warner Bros. Discovery’s TV network lineup).

One prominent cable TV executive — FX Networks chairman John Landgraf — cited the market void that FAST channels are filling in a recent interview with Vulture. “And I think that, right now, there’s this interesting bifurcation in that linear channels are extremely good at [providing passive entertainment] and streaming platforms are not as good at that. There’s this thing in between the two called the FAST channel, which is a free, ad-supported TV channel. Because FAST channels are channels, they’re sort of linear playlists or whatever,” Landgraf said.

Numbers to know

$15.99: New monthly subscription price for HBO Max’s ad-free tier in the U.S.

63%: Percentage share of internet-connected U.S. households that own a smart TV.

$13.1 billion: How much money people in the U.S. spent on sports streaming subscriptions in 2022.

2024: Year when Netflix will start live-streaming the Screen Actors Guild Awards on its service.

599: Number of original scripted shows that aired across traditional TV and streaming in 2022.

-2%: Percentage decline year over year in NFL viewership for the most recent regular season.

$2.3 billion: How much money DAZN lost in 2021, largely because of soccer rights costs.

What we’ve covered

Why BMW is cutting ties with esports in 2023:

• Since 2020, the auto maker had spent millions of dollars with esports organizations and events.
• BMW’s marketing focus is shifting from esports to other gaming-related fields, like the metaverse.

Read more about BMW’s esports exit here.

Creators face their ‘worst nightmare’ with possible TikTok ban:

• Creators are worried that the U.S. government will ban the short-form video platform.
• They are concerned about being able to duplicate their TikTok followings on other platforms.

Read more about creators’ TikTok fears here.

This sexual wellness brand is doubling (actually, tripling) down on CTV:

• Adam and Eve has tripled its investment in streaming ads over the past year.
• The brand is using streaming to build an audience and then retarget them with display ads online.

Read more about Adam and Eve’s CTV strategy here.

What we’re reading

Apple’s TV ad sales exec search:
Apple is in the market for a TV ad sales executive as the company preps a larger push into the streaming ad market, according to Insider.

YouTube’s FAST play:
YouTube has started testing adding free, ad-supported streaming TV channels to its video platform and may officially launch the Pluto TV rival later this year, according to The Wall Street Journal.

TV advertising’s multi-currency mess:
The move away from a single measurement currency provider in Nielsen to multiple currency options has been far from straightforward, and industry executives shared with Deloitte some of the top reasons complicating the transition, according to Ad Age.

John Landgraf’s outlook:
The FX chief spoke with Vulture about how FX’s hub inside Hulu has boosted viewership of the cable TV network’s shows, how profitability pressures are likely to lead to consolidation in the streaming market and how audiences spend the majority of time watching passive programming.

This telling phrase, whereby auditors couldn’t account for 15% of advertisers’ spend, sparked concerns among CMOs with media execs on either side of the Atlantic known to have subsequently ordered transparency crackdowns in its wake.

The ISBA Programmatic Supply Chain Transparency Study was conducted along with the IAB U.K. and the Association of Online Publishers (AOP) with auditors informing Digiday that the adoption of its Programmatic Financial Audit Toolkit has streamlined reporting.

For example, the latest study took nine months to produce, as opposed to more than 18 months for the earlier iteration, with the implementation of more standardized reporting meaning auditors were better able to compare ad impressions between buy- and sell-side platforms.

Key findings included:

• Match rates were 58% compared to 12% in 2020
• Unattributable ad spend, A.K.A. “the unknown delta” has reduced to 3% on average
• The proportion of advertiser spend reaching publishers has risen by 8%

More specifically, the latest study has uncovered notable differences in the delta between
open marketplaces (3%) and private marketplaces (~1%), reflecting the benefit of
investments by advertisers, their agencies, tech vendors and publishers in well-curated
auditable private marketplaces.

PwC’s Sam Tomlinson told Digiday that auditors aimed to eventually reduce the time to produce such a report to five months, and that tech vendors were able to provide approximately 80% of the data fields requested of them by auditors.

“A lot of the tech vendors couldn’t share log-level data [in 2020] they could only give us aggregate groups of impressions, this time round all the tech vendors were giving us log-level data and that’s a mass that’s critical for impression matching,” he added.

“While 80% is not perfect, it’s pretty good… All of our impressions have broadly similar data quality. But you’re never going to be able to match all of them with the way that tech operates today.”

Tomlinson further explained how auditors can run into difficulty in matching specific impressions due to complications arising from lags between DSP and SSP data, especially when there isn’t a unique transaction ID to trace an ad impression across different platforms.

“When you get really high volumes of impressions going along a single supply path in a short space of time, you end up with multiple impressions that have an identical timestamp… It’s a rare instance of more data being unhelpful for analysis,” he said.

Steve Chester, director of media, ISBA, told Digiday that further work is required in order to improve match rates between ad impressions, which would in turn improve the accuracy of the study, and that the 2020 study prompted investigations by individual ISBA members.

“The way the industry has developed protocols for data transfer, etcetera, has not been in a way that allows it to be audited easily. So, we’re trying to develop standards to address that,” he said, adding that advertisers have increased supply-path optimization efforts since the publication of the 2020 study.

“These audits aren’t one-offs, this sort of thing is not going away, in fact, it’s becoming increasingly commonplace,” added Chester. “A lot of advertisers are looking at the results and seeing how they’re getting better from PMPs [private marketplaces] as opposed to OMPs [open marketplaces] and starting to put [more] money through them as they get better transparency.”

Commenting on the recent results, Ruben Schruers, group chief product officer at Ebiquity, added, “The fact is that most brands are still largely deprived of access to proper data from ad tech providers, preventing them from matching data easily and structurally from the buy- and sell-side.

“Working with media owners in a more direct way by actively curating PMPs with selected publishers is a way to quickly improve this situation.”

Some caveats

While the improvement in reporting was welcome by all sources approached by Digiday, some pointed toward important caveats which meant the study’s headline conclusions had to be interpreted within context.

For example, the analysis doesn’t account for ad spend within the industry’s walled gardens, and that’s approximately half of all digital ad spend, meaning auditors were unable to analyze substantial parts of spend on such platforms’ owned-and-operated properties, such as YouTube.

Multiple sources told Digiday this is because such parties often cite privacy agreements, meaning auditors are then required to take a more laborious route such as requesting data access from individual publishers.

Auditors confirmed with Digiday that Google did submit data from its ad tech wares, such as its Google Display & Video 360, for analysis, albeit, the latest analysis does not include an analysis of relevant ad server data.

Speaking separately with Digiday, Adalytics’ Dr. Krzysztof Franaszek pointed out that advertisers should further probe the methodology of any such study highlighting how they should verify whether or not log file data corresponds with relevant financial data.

Furthermore, Franaszek further claimed that it is necessary to cross-reference DSP and SSP data with publishers’ ad server log files or log files from verification vendors to more accurately gauge how their ad dollars were being spent.  

“To truly understand the flow of money in the digital media supply chain, an auditor must cross-reference both log file data and bank statements or invoices,” he added.

In an email statement shared with Digiday, Alessandra Bellini, chief customer officer, at U.K supermarket chain Tesco, claimed the latest results demonstrated a notable improvement in its traceable spend.

“As participants in the original study in 2020, we are very pleased that these results show a significant improvement in data access and quality,” it read. “We have been very impressed with how the industry has worked together to bring about positive change and look forward to further developments to improve the audit process even further.”