Month: March 2023

Where previously an agency’s KPIs might have emphasized return on ad spend or click-through rates, now firms are exploring other kinds of metrics with their clients. Amy Lanzi, COO of Publicis Commerce, explained that there has been a recent shift from measuring return on ad spend or investment to looking at new-to-brand and lifetime value of a customer.

“Early days it was very much about ROAS … something we need to really move beyond,” Lanzi told Digiday. “Because if you think about how much the general world has changed in the role of consumers, some people are buying things on digital shelves and [then some are] actually buying something in a physical store.”

Moving beyond ROI

This doesn’t mean ROI isn’t important anymore, but it is about going beyond that to understand “total sales and however your client wants to talk about that,” Lanzi added. “But I would say that in the last month, there has been a definite tempo change from our clients, particularly around the metric of new-to-brand.”

Especially when it comes to a digital marketplace such as Amazon or Instacart, clients want to know if investing in a virtual shelf will bring new customers. New customers mean “new pathways to get a new sale,” Lanzi said. Within retail media, this is where her agency is focusing on new-to-brand and incrementality as KPIs, which tell clients that they might get a new consumer that only buys through that marketplace.

Within commerce, Publicis is also expanding data on multi-touch attributes, said Paul Williams, head of commerce product strategy at Publicis. Williams said the agency is partnering with Amazon’s ad tech team to build a joint product with the aim to measure multi-touch attribution, which has ebbed and flowed in interest over recent years, but again seems to be gaining client interest.

“[Clients] started thinking more holistically about investing in different channels and how to media-mix and model out how commerce plays a role against some of these other markets, familiar channels that they’ve been running media against,” Williams said. “There’s a lot of the original kind of performance marketing lanes of social search and programmatic that are starting to leak into the commerce space.”

For example, Amazon by default gives all the credit to the last touchpoint from a user, so a sponsored product ad gets 100% of the attribution. But Amazon and Publicis are now “infusing different data sets” (such as from Amazon Marketing Cloud), to split the sale credit across multiple touchpoints, Williams explained. This means marketers can ultimately get a better sense of upper- versus lower-funnel performance.

“So kind of just one example of how we’re really trying to dial into some of the more advanced KPIs we’re getting asked from clients,” Williams said.

Lanzi added, “I think we’re seeing more pressure from clients related to retail media — big players asking for more and more dollars, who don’t have more and more dollars to spend. So they’re very much interrogating what this looks like from a measurement standpoint.”

Bringing together new and old data

Michael Solomon, COO of PHD USA, part of Omnicom Media Group, also said he sees retail media influencing the KPIs that clients seek. Solomon agreed that there is a desire to move beyond ROAS and media mix modeling (or MMM) data. There are more advanced tools and a plethora of data available, which enhance the way agencies can collect and report measurement.

The KPI evolution also varies based on how a client uses data in their organization. “There’s a lot of clients or a lot of different kinds of journeys in the sense of how they use data inside of their organization. But you are seeing some of those walls and some of those silos [break down],” Solomon added.

There is a move toward this holistic data, including marketing and performance analytics and other consumer data in other parts of an organization, that together paint a richer picture of the business outcomes. As Solomon noted, “It’s all data that’s existed, but you now have the stitching of it starting to really come together.”

David Matathia, head of strategy at independent media agency Fitzco, noted that recent years have also brought about a shift from focusing on performance metrics during the pandemic to reprioritizing some previous metrics, such as brand awareness and attributes.

“In 2023, everyone that spent the last couple of years really rotating towards performance marketing, this need to drive demand coming out of the pandemic between isolation and supply chain issues and business drying up,” Matathia said. “Everyone just went after the next most efficient buyer and shopper I can find.”

Matathia said recently Fitzco has seen more refocusing on top-of-funnel measurement, with client discussions going back to measuring brand awareness metrics.

“How are just good old-fashioned awareness metrics moving?” Matathia said. “It’s not necessarily that the metrics are new. I just think it’s a refocus and a reprioritization on some of the more traditional brand metrics that people have lost sight of, in a time when they were so focused on the bottom part of the funnel.”

The key hits: 

• About half of The Guardian’s readership is based in North America but only 15% of its revenue comes from that market.
• The Independent has been investing further into video content and editorial packages to create more ad inventory for U.S. advertisers. 
• To improve brand awareness in the U.S., the Financial Times is offering its lowest priced subscription product yet.

The British invasion of the U.S. media market is not new. Over the past few weeks, however, it seems that the intentions of U.K.-based publishers are echoing a bit louder from across the pond.

While some publishers are choosing to tap American leadership or establish NYC-based headquarters to make their presences known, others are investing further in the audiences they’ve convened thus far in the U.S. with new editorial products and subscription offerings and staffing up their ad operations. 

Adding up advertising

Despite about half The Guardian’s 87 million global monthly uniques coming from North America in 2022, only 15% of the company’s total revenue is earned from its North American business, according to Steve Sachs, managing director of Guardian U.S. who joined the company in October. From fiscal years 2019 to 2022, that share has increased from bringing in 10% of the company’s total annual revenue to 15%, he added, representing about $45.6 million of the company’s $307.5 million total in 2022.

When asked why there was such a large discrepancy between the audience ratio and the revenue ratio between North America and the U.K., Sachs said, “That’s part of why I’m here. I looked at that also [and thought] what a great opportunity to have this audience, we’ve built out the beginnings of monetizing [this audience] from a revenue point of view, but there’s so much opportunity to go to the next level.” 

In 2022, more than half of the revenue from North America came from readers in the form of contributions and donations, with advertising being the second largest contributor and philanthropy bringing in between 5-9% of the company’s total revenue. Sachs did not provide exact figures.

The Guardian’s growth strategy in 2023 is focused on advertising, specifically increasing its direct-sold advertising business, and the plan is to hire more sales and operations roles, to grow its headcount by a double-digit percentage, though Sachs wouldn’t share exact numbers because the annual budget isn’t finalized yet (the company’s fiscal year begins on April 1). At the end of this fiscal year, direct-sold advertising in the U.S. is projected to have grown by 40% year over year, he added, without providing exact figures.

The Independent U.S. had 27 million unique visitors in January 2023 which was up 16% year over year, according to Blair Tapper, svp of The Independent U.S., who cited Comscore data. This represents about 32% of The Independent’s total global audience — or 67.6 million unique visitors in January, per Adobe Analytics.

Tapper wouldn’t disclose exact figures for how the publication’s U.S. revenue compares to the U.K.’s, however she said it was similar to what The Guardian reported, adding that “we’re still obviously fighting to break through a new business.”

A lot of The Independent’s continued growth in the U.S. this year will come from growing the audience around video and feature-length productions, hosted under its video vertical Independent TV, as well as creating more content packages around tentpole events. But the revenue growth is expected to come from improving the advertising revenue sold against both of those products.

“Two key focuses would be increasing our direct partnerships — whether that be through video or branded content deals — and then also looking at the efficiencies of our programmatic setup,” Tapper said. “We’ve done a lot of work on the site in terms of the [user experience] and a lot of that has caused us to pause and reprioritize the partnerships that we’ve had with programmatic partners, and really take a hard look to make sure that the CPMs are as high as as they should be.” She did not disclose what ideal CPMs would be.

Taking risks in a new market

The Financial Times has been in the U.S. for over 25 years, but the most recent push began in 2018, when Matt Fottrell took on the role of vp of FT U.S. In the past year, the U.S. business has grown to make up about 30% of FT’s total advertising revenue, after ad revenue increased in the U.S. by 12% year over year, he said. On the subscriptions side of the business, 20% of the FT’s nearly 1.3 million global paid readership is based in the U.S., he added, a 15% increase year over year.

Subscriptions make up the lion’s share of FT’s global revenue, with three-quarters of those subscribers coming through its B2B business in the form of corporate subscriptions, which it introduced globally in 2008. Fottrell would not disclose hard numbers, but acknowledged that the FT’s standard price of $375 per year (or a premium price of over $600 per year) has been challenging to sell consumer readers.

“You come into this marketplace — one of the most competitive media marketplaces in the world — with some of the greatest journalism in the world, and it’s $1 a week or it’s $1 a month. That’s really challenging,” said Fottrell. But it does change the threshold of “risk taking,” he added.

A recent tactic to approach new B2C subscribers is the FT Edit app, which was soft launched in the U.S. in October and gives readers eight articles per day, hand-picked by a newly appointed editor, that spans all of the publication’s coverage. Priced at $4.99 per month, this is the cheapest subscription product that FT offers, but Fottrell said the hope is that after getting a taste, those subscribers will want to upgrade to the standard, $375/year subscription. To date, the app has had more than 100,000 downloads, he said, but did not disclose the number of active, paid users.

Fottrell’s goal is to double the number of engaged users it had in 2019 — a proprietary value calculated for each user based on how recently they’ve been to the FT’s site, their frequency of engaging with FT and the volume of content they consume — by 2025.

Setting down roots

These U.S. ambitions are persisting across much of the media landscape, logistically with staffers in America and online.

The Financial Times’ owner Nikkei Inc., a Japanese media company that has been particularly bullish on the push into the U.S., increased the budget to keep FT on the ground and experimenting in the U.S. through at least 2025.

Meanwhile, Future tapped American digital media exec Jon Steinberg as its new CEO, who will take the reins from current chief executive Zillah Byng-Thorne at the beginning of April. For the U.K.-based publisher, this move represents the company’s continued interest in becoming a dominant player in the U.S., as Steinberg has previous experience leading the North American iteration of Mail Online, also a U.K.-based media brand, and prior to that served as BuzzFeed’s president and COO. 

Just a hop, skip and a jump from the U.K., Berlin-based Axel Springer is reportedly slimming down its corporate structure in Germany to focus more on its U.S. publications, according to The Wall Street Journal. In addition to building a new headquarters in New York City, Axel Springer is looking at restructuring its team in Germany, phasing out the print iterations of its publications in favor of becoming digital-only and further developing its U.S. titles, including Politico U.S., Insider and Morning Brew. 

The ultimate goal, per Axel Springer’s CEO Mathias Döpfner, is to grow Politico to the point that it surpasses both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal in readership and advertising revenue, the WSJ reported.

What we’ve heard

“We’ve definitely seen movement and momentum. But without question, I think that they have fallen very short from the promises that they’ve made. And even this year, with all the talk about the recession and with all of the cuts, I think even their desire to deliver on those commitments are even smaller.”

— – Detavio Samuels, CEO of Revolt on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.

How newsrooms are using generative AI – with human intervention

The Associated Press hosted a webinar on Wednesday afternoon to explain how generative AI technology – which powers ChatGPT and DALL-E – can be used in newsrooms.

About 67% of an undisclosed number of people surveyed by the AP before the webinar said they have used generative AI, but 65% of respondents said they did not use it regularly for work. However, 64% believe the technology creates opportunities for journalists.

Panelist Nicholas Diakopoulos, a computational journalism professor at Northwestern University, said that generative AI can assist with “back office” newsroom tasks such as document analysis, text summarization and ideating news angles, reducing the number of repetitive tasks that journalists need to do.

Hank Sims, editor at Lost Coast Communications Inc., said their local California newsroom is using generative AI to download, parse through and summarize the agendas of local public meetings, for example.

Using AI for more “public facing” tasks — such as writing social media posts and articles and handling comment moderation — can “get a little dicey” due to accuracy, copyright and plagiarism issues, Diakopoulos said. He found during his evaluation of Bing’s search chatbot that almost half of the responses had some accuracy issue. Because of this, human oversight before publication is crucial, he added. This was a shared sentiment amongst the panelists.

Miranda Marcus, head of BBC News Labs, said they are experimenting with semi-automating the definitions of technical terms in explainer articles, but editorial staff must vet the information before the articles are published.

Yifan Hu, a tech designer at Norwegian media company Schibsted, said their lab experimented with GPT3 to generate shorter versions of news articles to create summaries for Snapchat — with a 90% accuracy rate.

“While we were testing, we caught some factual errors… This whole process helped all of us to understand the importance of having humans in the loop,” Hu said. – Sara Guaglione

Numbers to know

<1%: The amount by which Condé Nast’s total 2022 revenue fell short of its target, while its commerce business grew by 20% year over year.

$2.95 billion: Gannett’s total revenue for 2022, a 7% decrease year over year. 

0: The number of people of color left on The Washington Post’s editorial board, following the exit of Jonathan Capehart from the board, who quit after a dispute over an editorial about 2024 politics published in December.

2 million: The number of paid subscribers to Substack, representing 10% of the company’s 20 million total monthly active subscribers.

What we’ve covered

Digiday+ Research: When it comes to emerging tech, agencies and publishers only have eyes for AI:

• Agencies and publishers have always had to be on the lookout for the next big thing when it comes to emerging technology.
• More than three-quarters of both agency pros and publisher pros said that AI will have the biggest impact on their businesses over the next few years, making it the number one emerging tech to watch in both industries.

Learn more about the state of AI in the media and advertising industries here.

With Snapchat and Meta’s new tools, generative AI enters the social media space:

• With Snapchat and Meta both recently debuting new artificial intelligence capabilities, social media’s race to incorporate generative AI is gaining traction.
• Snap released a new chatbot for Snapchat called “My AI” this week, which is powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and helps generate text-based messages to answer trivia answers, write haikus, come up with recipe ideas and plan trips.

Learn more about AI in social media here.

LADbible Group expects latest shifts in the programmatic market to benefit publishers:

• The way programmatic advertising is done is changing from an open marketplace, where everyone transacts with one another, to something more controlled. 
• Publisher LADbible Group believes that moment can’t come soon enough. 

Learn more about how publishers stand to benefit in this current programmatic market here.

Publishers like ESPN and agencies are seeing more investment in women’s sports coverage: 

• The attention and investment in women’s sports coverage has increased especially over the last two years. 
• That’s thanks to new dedication to the topic — from publishers expanding the teams writing that coverage to agencies securing multimillion ad deals for the category.

Learn more about how publishers are investing in women’s sports coverage here.

What we’re reading

The legacy of Vox Media’s CEO Jim Bankoff:

After 14 years of steady expansion via acquisitions, Vox Media remains a relatively small player in the grand scheme of digital media companies, according to The Information. But under the publisher’s chief executive, Vox Media has grown to surpass both BuzzFeed and Vice Media by revenue.

What went down at the New York Times during the transgender coverage debate: 

The Times’ editorial staff has been embroiled in a debate over the line between journalistic independence and activism, according to Vanity Fair. Recent coverage of transgender people has reignited this conversation, with the argument being that the paper’s journalistic values are shifting based on journalists’ and editors’ personal beliefs.

Nancy Dubuc’s successors are named at Vice Media: 

Following Dubuc’s resignation after five years in the role, Vice Media’s chief financial officer Bruce Dixon and chief strategy officer Hozefa Lokhandwala were promoted to co-CEOs, The New York Times reported. They will lead the efforts to find prospective buyers for the company. 

BBC’s union members want to go on strike:

U.K.-based BBC journalists have voted in favor of a strike following a debate over changes to how the broadcast company is approaching its local content coverage in England, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Of the 69% of the union members who voted, 83% said they wanted to pursue the strike. 

Hearst’s new sales structure focuses on categories versus publications:

Hearst’s sales and marketing team will now focus on one of five advertising categories: fashion/luxury, beauty/wellness and retail, home and design, food and pharmaceuticals or travel, tech, finance and outdoor, according to Adweek. This move mirrors what many of its competitors have done in the past few years, moving away from a title-centric model.  

“Anytime a publisher is taking a moment to think about what is going to be the best way for consumers to experience their brand is a smart moment in time,” said Megan Jones, Digitas’ chief media officer.

It’s the first redesign of the Fox News site since 2017, according to executive vp of product and engineering John Fiedler. Since then, Fox News has expanded its crime, sports, lifestyle and entertainment coverage and launched Fox Nation, Fox News Books and its ad-supported streaming service Fox Weather.

Page views increased by double-digit percentages year over year for Fox News’ sports, lifestyle, world and auto content, according to the company. Lifestyle, auto, world and media content saw double-digit percent increases in minutes spent year over year. Fox News declined to share raw numbers.

What’s changing

The homepage now is made up of two main columns instead of three. Images and headlines are larger. A new tool — which took the product team about a year to build — allows the editorial team to create and move modules on the homepage, Fiedler said. The homepage can display live blogs and create carousels of stories on a topic. The homepage also now has special breakout sections with kicker tabs on crime, pop culture and lifestyle stories. Nearly half of Fox News Digital’s readership comes through the homepage, Fiedler said.

Joshua Teixeira, svp and head of experience design at Digitas, said cleaning up the Fox News homepage improves the experience on a mobile device, where most people are reading the news these days. And a cleaner experience on the site means less clutter, making the ad placements “feel more natural.”

“We have the editorial flexibility to highlight things in ways that we couldn’t before to showcase the journalism that we’re doing across verticals,” Berry said. He gave the example of the “Meet the American Who…” franchise, which spotlights people in history who invented things like light beer, buffalo wings and stoplights.

A new section dedicated to video lives in the right-hand column, which surfaces Fox News’ live channels: Fox Business, Fox Weather, Fox Nation and Fox News. It now shows which channels are free to watch and which require a paid subscription to access.

Ads load 30-50% faster compared to the previous version of the site, Fiedler said. Ads on Fox News’ site are sold both through programmatic and direct channels. The same amount of inventory is available on the redesigned site. Fox News declined to share advertising revenue figures.

Buyers see more opportunities with website refresh

Two ad buyers that spoke with Digiday said Fox News’ move to make content other than hard news and politics more accessible on the site can help draw in more advertisers. (Fox News isn’t the only news outlet to recently invest in other coverage areas.)

Stacey Stewart, UM Worldwide’s chief marketplace officer, said the agency partnered with NewsGuard — which rates the credibility of news and information websites — last year to provide clients with a tool to pinpoint “responsible journalism” outlets. As of July 2022, NewsGuard rated Fox News’ site 57 out of 100: with their rating of “proceed with caution.”

More non-news content could help Fox News with its overall score on this tool, as “their content becomes more well-rounded versus one focus,” Stewart said. (It should be noted that Fox News is currently embroiled in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems that claims Fox broadcast claims that Dominion had manipulated the vote against Donald Trump, even though it knew they were not true.)

If there are more “environments that have less controversy or more brand safety for clients” on the Fox News site, then this will “absolutely” attract more advertisers and in different categories, Stewart said. “Some [advertisers] really want to reach that audience, but are nervous about it,” given issues of brand safety and suitability around news content, she said. “This addresses some of that.”

Jones said there are many clients that want to target Fox News’ “engaged and passionate” audience. Stewart shared this sentiment. As long as the publisher can show that they can deliver scale around verticals beyond hard news and politics — and offer a package to brands across its different verticals, Fox News’ website changes can attract new advertiser budgets, Jones said. That remains to be seen, she noted, given that she had not heard a pitch from Fox News regarding its recent website changes or if its expansion of non-hard news coverage had attracted readership. 

But something is working to draw in more eyeballs to Fox News’ website. Traffic to the site jumped 34% year over year in January 2023, according to analysis of Comscore data by TheRighting, which tracks traffic to conservative websites. The website brought in 100.5 million unique visitors in January. It was the second month in a row of audience growth after almost a year of declines.

Digiday’s survey found that, along with Facebook, Instagram is the top marketing channel among agencies, with 93% of agency pros saying their clients spend at least a very small portion of their marketing budget on the platform.

However, there’s a big discrepancy between agencies whose clients spend anything on Instagram and those who spend a lot: Only 33% of agency pros said their clients spend a large or very large portion of their marketing budgets on Instagram. That puts the platform in third place when it comes to big spending, behind Google and Facebook.

A very large portion of brands also spend on Instagram, Digiday’s survey found, but to a slightlly less degree than agencies. Eighty-five percent of brand pros said they spend at least a very small portion of their marketing budgets on Instagram, putting it in third place with Facebook after Google and online display ads.

And as with agencies, one-third of brands spend a large or very large portion of their marketing budgets on Instagram. It’s a big difference from the 85% who spend at all, but it puts Instagram in second place among platforms brands spend a large or very large amount on — behind Google but in front of Facebook.

Digiday’s survey found that most agency clients are spending a moderate amount on Instagram advertising. Nearly a third of agency pros (31%) said their clients spend a moderate portion of their marketing budgets on the platform, which has remained consistent over the last year.

The next-highest spending category, Digiday found, is among agencies who said their clients spend a large portion of their marketing budgets on Instagram. To be exact, one quarter of respondents said this. This percentage remained steady over the last six months, but did jump a bit from a year ago, when 19% of agency pros said their clients spent a large amount on Instagram.

Interestingly, agencies that said their clients spend just a small portion of their marketing budgets on Instagram also make up a significant chunk of respondents to Digiday’s survey. Twenty-one percent of agency pros said their clients spend a small amount on the platform. The percentage is a rebound among respondents who said their clients’ marketing spend on Instagram is small after falling from 20% in Q1 2022 to 12% in Q3 2022.

It’s also worth noting that the percentage of agencies who said their clients spend a very large portion of their marketing budgets on Instagram remained at 8%, after falling to that percentage six months ago from 14% a year ago.

When it comes to brands, Digiday’s survey found that the largest groups of brand pros spend either a moderate portion or a large portion of their marketing budgets on Instagram — 27% in each category, to be exact. In both instances, it’s a significant jump from six months ago, when 17% of brand pros said they spent a moderate portion of their budgets on Instagram and 14% said they spent a large portion. For the 27% of those who said they spend a moderate amount on the platform, however, that is on par with a year ago, when 28% said they spent a moderate amount.

The percentage of brand pros who said they spend a small portion of their marketing budgets on Instagram also saw a big change over the last six months. In Q3 2022, more than a third (35%) said they spent a small amount on Instagram. That percentage fell to just 12% in Q1 of this year — which is much closer to the 18% who said a year ago that they spent a small amount on Instagram. Based on Digiday’s data, it’s possible that some brands shifted from spending a small portion of their budgets on the platform to spending a moderate or large portion there in the last six months.

As with Facebook, agency spending is solid on Instagram. However, agencies’ confidence that the platform drives marketing success for their clients is on much shakier ground.

For instance, the percentage of agency pros who told Digiday they’re confident that Instagram drives marketing success for their clients has fluctuated a lot over the last year and a half. In Q1 of this year, more than a third of agencies (35%) said they’re confident in Instagram. Just six months ago, that percentage had fallen to barely more than a quarter (26%), after falling all the way from 45% in Q3 2021.

Meanwhile, those who said they’re somewhat confident in Instagram’s ability to drive marketing success fell slightly to one-third from 38% six months ago. But that’s still up quite a bit from the 21% who said they were somewhat confident in Instagram a year and a half ago.

For brands, on the other hand, confidence in Instagram’s ability to drive marketing success has been steadily growing for the last year. In Q1 2022, 30% of brand pros told Digiday they were confident in the platform. That percentage rose to 38% in Q3 2022 and is up to nearly half of brand pros (46%) in Q1 of this year.

Meanwhile, the percentage of brand pros who told Digiday they’re only somewhat confident that Instagram drives marketing success saw a drop-off over the last six months. Just over a third of respondents (35%) said they were somewhat confident in Instagram in Q3 2022. That percentage had remained fairly steady since Q3 2021, until Q1 of this year, when the percentage fell to under a quarter (21%).

Interestingly, brands who said they’re just slightly confident in Instagram’s ability to drive marketing success surpassed those who said they’re somewhat confident in Q1 of this year (24% said they’re slightly confident in the platform). And it is also worth noting that, while it’s a very small percentage, 3% of brand pros said they’re not confident at all in Instagram this quarter, after not one respondent said so in Q3 2021. That percentage jumped to 18% a year ago before dropping back down to 4% in Q3 of last year.