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The latest forecasts and financial updates are in and one thing is clear for ad spending this year: It isn’t speeding up but it isn’t slowing down much either.
This is what a correction looks like.
And it looks a lot more nuanced than the so-called downturn that overshadowed a lot of advertising at the back half of last year. Really, that was a precursor to a reversion to the mean (i.e. pre-pandemic levels). That’s not to say there haven’t been some real cutbacks in spending so far this year. Of course there have been. But those cuts were isolated rather than widespread.
In fact, advertising appears to have held up quite well considering how much the ad industry talked itself into a downturn toward the end of 2022.
Google, the largest seller of advertising, posted constant currency ad revenue growth during the first quarter of 3% compared to the same period a year ago. Meta was up around 7% over the same period, while ad spending on Microsoft grew around 6%. Meanwhile, spending on Amazon grew at 23% year over year during the period. As ever, ads do better the closer they are to transactions.
“My thinking was — and remains, after the results we’ve seen so far — is that advertising should probably be up mid-single digits this year,” said Brian Wieser, media analyst and author of the Madison and Wall newsletter. “So you could argue that’s like a pre-pandemic level, albeit with a boost from inflation.”
The numbers back up this view.
In 2019 (i.e. before Covid), Google’s ads revenue worldwide grew 15.4% on the previous year, per Insider Intelligence. In 2021, it jumped 43.4% thanks to a pandemic-induced digital boom. Then there was the subsequent slowdown (13.1%) a year later. Fast forward to 2023 and it seems like steady growth is starting to return, with spending tipped to grow at 7.2% this year and then 11.3% in 2024 — much more in line with growth rates before the pandemic.
“We’re at this stage where flat growth is a reason to celebrate, which is markedly different from what we’ve seen over the past few years,” said Jasmine Enberg, a principal analyst at Insider Intelligence. ”Each platform is coming out of this a little differently.
Simply put, advertising isn’t a negative market. But it is a slow one. And yet, that’s less about the economic downturn and more about the tough comparables of the year-ago quarter — when advertisers were spending at a rate that was unsustainable.
Those days are long gone. That might surprise some, but it’s not necessarily unexpected. The rampant growth spurt online advertising was on was always going to run out of steam eventually. The pandemic just brought that forward. And in doing so, it turned the likes of Google and Meta into mature, slow-growth ads businesses.
Take Google. Further analysis of owner Alphabet’s numbers reveals a dip in ad revenue — $54.5 billion in Q1 compared to $54.7 billion 12 months earlier — even though this was offset by new growth drivers that it may attempt to position as synergistic to both Madison Avenue and Wall Street.
Google’s key revenue driver remains its tried-and-tested “search & other” advertising offering, with revenues for the period hitting $40.4 billion, up from $39.6 billion 12 months earlier. And while the hype cycle around AI services such as ChatGPT continues to attract public attention, the numbers demonstrate Google remains the tool of choice for performance advertisers (for now).
“Both Meta and Alphabet’s earnings calls are an indication that these organizations are quick to respond to challenges and changes in the market, and are tremendous revenue driving machines that quarterly earn the equivalent of many small countries’ GDPs,” said Matt Ferrel, vp and head of growth at TickPick, who added that he believes that the industry shouldn’t panic about digital advertising — at least not yet.
For now, at least, advertisers continue to spend more, not less, on this sort of advertising. There aren’t that many reasons for them not to right now. Chief among them is the actual state of the economy. While guarantees are near-impossible in the current climate, it looks like there are grounds for cautious optimism.
Here’s a more detailed breakdown taken from Wieser’s blog Madison and Wall: “GDP figures for the United States for the first quarter of 2023 were released today, and on the basis I look at them — in year-over-year and nominal terms, which is the most appropriate figure to compare to reported advertising revenue growth rates rather than headline GDP figures which are reported in sequential, annualized and inflation-adjusted terms — GDP expanded by 7.0% in the quarter. Personal consumption grew even faster, rising by 7.2%.”
Downturn? What downturn.
This certainly seems to be the view of some of the largest advertisers.
For instance, Hershey said it increased advertising and related consumer marketing by 9% for the year. Similarly, Procter & Gamble, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and American Express have all said they spent more on advertising in the first quarter. Even publishers and media buyers say spending is starting to pick up despite a rocky start to the year.
The same goes for Amazon. its ad business generated $9.5 billion during the quarter.
“Even in difficult economies, most people still shop,” said Andy Jassy, Amazon’s CEO, on the company’s earnings call last week (April 27), adding that the web’s largest e-commerce store is an attractive proposition for advertisers.
“That coupled with a very substantial investment in machine learning to make sure customers see relevant ads when they’re looking for various items have meant that these advertisements have performed unusually well for brands, which makes them want to advertise on Amazon,” he added.
The comments speak to the broader role of AI in Amazon’s plan to win more ad dollars. Last week, Amazon’s DSP chief Neal Richter spoke with Digiday how such machine learning investments were key to its strategy to better attract advertisers’ budgets after the decline of third-party cookies.
“We don’t necessarily think that 2023 is going to be an inflection point in the overall market shares [of the large online media owners],” said Luke Stillman, svp of global insights at IPG’s Magna Global on last month’s call on its revised ad spending forecast for 2023. “Now of course concentration has increased so much in the past decade that it gets increasingly hard to further gains in concentration, but we still think there are a lot of advantages to scale in the digital ecosystem.”
Advertising on Pinterest is a another case in point.
In Q1, Pinterest managed to increase its revenue 5% year over year to $603 million, as the business pushed forward with its focus on being a shoppable app. CEO Bill Ready highlighted that the company had seen “promising results” so far, with click-through rates and saves of Shoppable Pins growing 35% year over year.
Continuing the positive momentum, the platform made a bold move by announcing its multi-year partnership with Amazon on the same day as the company’s earnings call. This first partnership of its kind for Pinterest aims to bring third party ad demand to the platform, which continues the app’s plans to expand its ads business.
Beyond Pinterest, ad dollars continue to pour into areas including TikTok, short-form video more broadly, CTV, podcasts and, of course, retail media. The numbers spell this out. According to the IAB, internet advertising revenues grew 10.8% year over year, totaling $209.7 billion, and overall revenues increased $20.4 billion year over year — surpassing $200 billion for the first time ever.
In short, online advertising faces a headwind (this year at least), not a hurricane — as far as spending is concerned.
The fact is, the industry needs to look at this more long term, and not get too hung up on quarterly figures, according to Dorston Gerstel, CEO of Perion. In his view, the pandemic drove an enormous growth in digital spend, and a number of those behaviors will stick, but younger consumers who are entering their peak earning years will still buy far more online than their predecessors.
As robust as all these efforts look in the round, the economy continues to throw up curveball after curveball. True, none of those curveballs have knocked ad spending too far off course, but there’s always a chance one could — especially if an entire industry and its incumbents gets upended. Look at how quickly the recent implosions of Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse escalated, for instance. That’s to say nothing of the layoffs and closures happening across the media industries.
No wonder marketers remain cautious.
“Recent weeks have brought tentative grounds for optimism, with open auction spend on our platform following close behind the wider market shift — moving from Q1 declines to stabilization and steady increases in most geographies,” said Romain Job, chief strategy officer at ad tech vendor Equativ. “But the rest of the year will bring inevitable challenges to sustain this upward-trending growth at market level.”
Somewhere between this reset and reversion to the mean is the cold, hard fact that online ad spending is maturing. That’s what happens when a market gets too big not to slow down. And there’s nothing inherently bad about that.
As the media and marketing industries grapple with economic worries that just won’t let up, instinctually marketers and agencies have turned to performance-driven options that deliver a quick and obvious return on investment.
Tie in that the pandemic put e-commerce into hyperdrive as people were stuck at home, and the result is an alignment of scenarios has led to the explosion of commerce media in the last two years.
And any media agency worth its salt at this point needs to have a competitive commerce offering. “It’s almost table stakes to almost any RFPs that we are putting out these days,” said one media agency executive.
This vast landscape that is commerce media encompasses both swaths of e-commerce terrain dominated by Amazon (which now is feeling some competition from live shopping alternatives) and continents of retail media networks both large and small. Together they represent some $1.3 trillion in enterprise value (all the money generated from sales and ad revenue together), according to McKinsey, which last year wrote a somewhat definitive report outlining its potential.
Although alternatives like live shopping have their appeal, the bulk of growth in the commerce media world lies in retail media networks (RMNs), which have been sprouting up faster than mushrooms in a rainy forest. While the Walmarts and the Albertsons currently dominate the space with the size of their operations and the connections they’ve made to either media companies or fellow commerce media players, it seems every retailer that’s sitting on valuable first-party data is setting up its own RMN to harness this moment in time.
“Whatever the pace of e-commerce sales, advertising spending by packaged goods companies on retail media channels will most likely outpace e-commerce growth given the ongoing establishment of new media offerings from these retailers,” wrote media industry analyst Brian Wieser in February.
The other factor that helped to jumpstart commerce media in the last two years is third-party cookie deprecation. “The deprecation of third party cookie makes it harder to target and place media against desired audiences across the web, and it’s a massive change to digital media,” said Frank Kochenash, CEO of Omnicom Transact, which coordinates commerce media activity across the holding company. “I’m not sure how planned this was, but retailers have come to realize that when it comes to purchase data they have, it’s very valuable data — because they have the purchase behavior” data that every marketer and agency wants access to.
Media agencies are furiously trying to stay abreast of the options in front of them. Several of the holding companies have put commerce media czars in place to facilitate the breaking down of silos internally, to deliver more coherent retail media strategies that also take into account e-commerce options.
For example, Kochenash took his current post just last year (he acknowledges he operates most closely with Omnicom Media Group). His job is to centralize commerce media efforts on behalf of the holding company’s clients, which range from the obvious CPG types (Unilever, Johnson & Johnson) to automotive (Nissan, VW) and QSR (McDonald’s).
“When it comes to e-commerce, retail media has been interfacing with our media agencies and our commerce group agencies,” said Kochenash. “With our agencies, we plug in and support them with those two types of of expertise. It helps our clients align their shopper and commerce and e-commerce plans with their brand media plans. It’s also consultancy and strategy, as well as tools and data-driven discovery and budgeting.”
Omnicom is not alone in coordinating its efforts around commerce media to harness its opportunity. WPP’s GroupM is among the most aggressive in pushing its commerce and retail media units together. And spending has continued to grow. In December, GroupM increased its 2022 forecast for the category to $110.7 billion, up from $101 billion in September. But rather than coming from advertising budgets, media agencies are working hard to blend in billions of dollars in trade and shopper marketing budgets.
In fact, McKinsey reports that something close to 80% of the spend toward retail media is incremental from existing trade/shopper marketing. A survey it conducted in 2022 of 188 advertisers shows about 50% of spend comes from net new budgets, and about 30% comes from other marketing channels (brand/upper funnel and other digital).
Not everyone is buying ads for retail media networks. Some client budget cuts are making it hard to buy ads across every platform they want to test, according to Duane Brown, CEO and head of strategy at Take Some Risk, a Toronto-based performance marketing agency.
“The appeal is there, if you know your customers shops a lot of Walmart or one of those large retail chains,” Brown said. “There could be other customers who don’t know about you that you can get in front of. Makes a lot of sense as a test if you have the budget and runway.”
The world of commerce media stands the potential to benefit from newer tech innovations such as artificial intelligence, said Kristi Argyilan, senior vp of retail media at Albertsons Media Collective. “AI can have a significant impact on the foundation of how and what we execute, but it also can lead to brand new innovation,” Argyilan noted. “Think of a lot of the tasks that humans still have to touch — simple things like optimizing campaigns — AI can actually accelerate that and get us to where we can do many more optimizations in a given campaign.”
But any new form of media activation eventually hits a pothole or two — in commerce media’s case, it’s a growing tension between advertisers the more aggressive RMNs. Notably, some marketers have felt a pressure to spend ad dollars on the retailers’ media networks if they want to maintain strong presences in retailers’ brick-and-mortar locations. Media agencies are stuck in between in trying to defuse those pressures.
Ultimately the relationship between retailer and marketer is changing irrevocably. And media agencies need to tread carefully to ensure that changed relationship doesn’t result in them getting frozen out of the equation.
“It’s somewhat under-appreciated how what’s happening here is making a pretty fundamental change to the economics of retail,” said Omnicom’s Kochenash. “This also goes hand in hand with a pretty fundamental change to the relationship between the retailer and the brand where it was strictly supplier-customer and now, it kind of goes both ways. We’ll see how that plays out.”
When the long-running esports organization CLG announced its acquisition by North American organization NRG last month, many observers heralded the news as yet another sign of the imminent collapse of the esports industry. But esports industry executives believe the doom and gloom is overblown, pointing out that CLG’s demise represented a significant expansion for NRG.
Before going into the story of NRG’s acquisition of CLG, it’s important to acknowledge the human impact of the esports org’s closure. Shortly before the acquisition, CLG laid off the majority of its staff — dozens of employees, according to LinkedIn — and let go the bulk of its competitive roster, with the exception of CLG’s “League of Legends” team.
The most visible outcome of the acquisition is arguably that scores of talented esports workers and competitors have now been left without a job — and at no fault of their own. Cody Schwab, one of CLG’s “Super Smash Bros.” players, had won a major tournament only a few days before the news broke. “I have thought of retiring every single night this past week,” he told Digiday.
Whether the acquisition of CLG is a positive or negative for the industry, it’s clear that the esports winter has arrived in some form — and it’s the rank-and-file workers who are feeling it first and hardest.
“It sucks, but at the same time, I know that esports is really unstable,” said Chloe Wong, a former social media manager for CLG. “So it was kind of something that I signed up for, anyway.”
The human impact notwithstanding, the true circumstances of NRG’s CLG acquisition might be less scary for the industry than some observers believe. Contrary to the prevailing industry narrative, CLG did not sell to NRG for a fire sale price because it was on the cusp of failure, according to NRG CEO Andy Miller. After all, the organization was backed by MSG Sports, a massive sports entertainment holding company that generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue last year. If CLG had a runway, it probably wasn’t at the threshold quite yet.
The closure of CLG was a direct result of NRG making an acquisition offer that CLG couldn’t refuse. NRG was interested in entering the competitive “League of Legends” space by acquiring CLG’s franchise spot, so its initial offer was for just the “League of Legends” portion of CLG. But after some negotiations, NRG ultimately decided to buy the whole hog.
“There was a narrative that NRG fired everybody; we didn’t fire anybody,” Miller said. “We basically said we’re interested in this part — go sell the other parts if you want, which I think they tried and it didn’t make sense for anyone. So, if we wanted to close our deal, we could not take on another 30 to 40 people, and we couldn’t afford to keep those other teams that were losing money, because we don’t have a lot of money.”
Miller confirmed to Digiday that the deal was an “equity swap” rather than a cash transaction, although he declined to share specific numbers. As part of the deal, MSG Sports now has equity and a board seat with NRG.
“People are always like, ‘What do you value it at?’” Miller said. “It doesn’t really matter, because it’s just a percentage.”
Given the nature of the deal, it’s hard to spin the acquisition as anything but a win for NRG. The organization now fields teams in three “tier one” esports — “Overwatch,” “Valorant” and “League” — and it’s entered the “League of Legends” Championship Series just as league operator Riot Games has signaled its intention to more thoroughly share the league’s revenues with franchised teams. NRG acquired the most valuable parts of CLG, and it did it by expanding its ownership group, rather than spending millions of dollars.
There’s no denying that the esports industry is facing challenges. Some brands have divested from esports, a scary situation for any industry that is somewhat over-leveraged on brand partnership revenue.
Still, executives at NRG and beyond are confident in the entertainment value of the core product — competitive gaming — and remain bullish about the long-term prospects of the industry. They do, however, acknowledge that further consolidation will inevitably be necessary to get the industry into a more sustainable position.
“Don’t get me wrong, it’s going to be ugly. There are a lot of teams that don’t have money through the rest of this year, and where are they going to get it?” Miller said. “All the traditional sports guys are getting flushed down, because this is not for them. And there’s going to be other orgs that are just small, or mismanaged or just have bad luck, and so we’ll either see them consolidate or go away. This time next year, things will probably look pretty different.”
Esports is not going away any time soon, but the industry’s period of easy victories is over. Esports organizations are going to have to find more creative ways to convert their fandom into meaningful revenue, and it is imperative for the industry to decrease its reliance on brand partnerships as marketers grow more skeptical about the return on investment of esports sponsorships.
“Five or six years ago I think esports was us throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what stuck,” said Stafford McIntyre, a broadcast producer for Wisdom Gaming. “Now we’re at a state where some of that spaghetti is starting to fall off of the wall. But there are things that are still stuck, and that are obviously working.”
When the esports winter thaws, the teams that are still around will be stronger for it. Reports of esports’ death have been greatly exaggerated — but individual esports organizations will have to become more cutthroat and close-to-the-ground if they hope to survive the cull.
“Businesses built in a winter of any kind turn out to be the best and strongest when the winter’s over,” said Greg Selkoe, CEO of the esports org XSET. “So, yes, there’s a winter — but to me, I’m totally bullish on the space.”
In April 2022, BuzzFeed Inc. reorganized its business team to have the staffers who helped HuffPost reach profitability in 2021 do the same for BuzzFeed News — the only arm of the company that was still unprofitable. It was the first time that a sole team would be dedicated to monetizing BuzzFeed News and the company gave the division just one year to become profitable.
But its time was cut short.
HuffPost remains the sole news arm within the BuzzFeed Inc. portfolio, and yet characterizing its content as breaking news may be a misnomer. Over the years, its content has grown to include more entertainment, lifestyle and culture news, which combined with its much larger scale, give it a firmer ground to stand on.
HuffPost had more than double the audience BuzzFeed News had, CEO Jonah Peretti told Digiday, and as a result, HuffPost’s revenue was “much bigger” than BuzzFeed News’. He declined to share exact revenue figures. BuzzFeed News was roughly 5% of BuzzFeed’s total traffic, though that percentage fluctuated at different time periods, he said.
BuzzFeed’s entertainment content was “10 times bigger than BuzzFeed News ever was,” Peretti said. He declined to provide exact figures.
Many, now former, staffers said that BuzzFeed News had also transitioned to being primarily centered around culture and entertainment content as well alleviating some brand safety concerns that many advertisers have with breaking news. For BuzzFeed News, however, former and current staffers say it caused what was once unique about the brand — its investigative reporting — to vanish. Left behind was a product that was undifferentiated in the advertising market.
And yet, the team working toward that “impossible goal” of profitability was on the right path. BuzzFeed News exceeded its Q1 2023 revenue goals and recently landed large sponsorship deals and ad campaigns, three former and current BuzzFeed News employees who had knowledge of the company’s financials told Digiday. They did not disclose which brands were advertising with BuzzFeed News. BuzzFeed’s communications team declined to share how close to profitability the news division had gotten before it was shuttered.
When asked why BuzzFeed News was shuttered despite this progress, Peretti said a number of changes to social media platforms — which drove a significant amount of traffic — were a sign that more challenges were ahead for the division’s business, such as Facebook’s shift away from news. Last summer, Facebook told publishers it wouldn’t renew their contracts to feature news content in its News tab.
While revenue from Facebook wasn’t “a majority” of BuzzFeed News’ revenue, those changes — in addition to the recent upheavals at Twitter — led Peretti to believe BuzzFeed News’ path to profitability was “not going to continue in the future.”
“If you build a social news model, and it’s getting closer to profitability but still is not profitable, and then the future ecosystem is getting worse, not better — it just creates a situation where it’s like, why wouldn’t we open up roles at HuffPost? Open up some roles at BuzzFeed? Consolidate around one news brand?” Peretti said.
But beyond the potential challenges in the future, why didn’t the HuffPost monetization strategy that led the news brand to profitability in one years’ time, not work for the other news brand during the two years of overlap they shared within the BuzzFeed portfolio?
Multiple BuzzFeed News employees told Digiday their department took the fall for BuzzFeed’s larger business issues and the pressure put on the company given the current state of the ad market. A BuzzFeed spokesperson previously told Digiday the company’s “current performance and surrounding economic conditions” led to the decision to shutter its news division.
“Advertisers aren’t trying to buy news, especially [for] the last two years. It’s much easier for a company that isn’t exclusively news to get rid of their news division when everything’s down and point to that [as the scapegoat],” said a source familiar with BuzzFeed.
Ever since the company offered buyouts to its 100-person news division last year — which led to an exodus of top editors, including editor-in-chief Mark Schoofs, dismantled BuzzFeed News’ investigations, politics, inequality and science teams and left behind a staff of only 59 — BuzzFeed News’ content has focused more on culture and entertainment news, according to former staffers.
“After the buyouts last year, the idea was to focus on the coverage areas of the desks that remained — so doubling down on culture and tech and breaking news,” said Albert Samaha, senior reporter at BuzzFeed News. He said the team was continuing to focus on “chasing big interesting stories that touch on the issues of the moment.” Losing a lot of the investigations team, however, the majority of content coming out of the newsroom was around the culture and entertainment category.
How BuzzFeed News was pitched to advertisers also changed. Its go-to-market strategy before the buyouts included the tagline “the Gen Z news outlet,” and used its 2021 Pulitzer Prize win as an example of its rigorous journalism, said two sources familiar with BuzzFeed’s ad business. The prize was for a series of articles that exposed China’s vast infrastructure for detaining hundreds of thousands of Muslims in its Xinjiang region. Post-buyouts, the sales strategy focused on pop culture and entertainment news.
“This whole past year was spent mirroring the HuffPost strategy [and] things were becoming a lot easier to sell,” a member of the business team said.
The new editorial focus being on culture and entertainment made it feel like BuzzFeed News was competing with the other brands in the BuzzFeed Inc. portfolio — BuzzFeed, HuffPost, Complex and Tasty — for ad dollars.
“[Peretti] gave the business team an impossible task, to convince clients to buy into a version of BuzzFeed [News] that focused on culture and entertainment, but had the most brand unsafe word in the title, which is ‘news,’” said a member of the business team. “But at that point, [BuzzFeed News] looked way too similar to BuzzFeed to have a distinct market proposition.”
To try and create a unique market value, staffers focused on BuzzFeed News’ health vertical because that was less likely to have much overlap. But the most successful strategy for bringing ad dollars into BuzzFeed News was selling it jointly with HuffPost in bundle deals, the member of the business team added.
When asked how much of HuffPost’s content is considered news coverage compared to lifestyle or entertainment stories, a BuzzFeed spokesperson said the breakdown is “not how we think about or prioritize our content.”
“Entertainment news is news. Health news is news,” they said.
Peretti emphasized BuzzFeed’s commitment to covering entertainment trends, interactive AI formats and creators in a memo sent to staff last week on Thursday afternoon outlining his vision for the future of the company. “The only profitable, sustainable content businesses that can be built on top of the big platforms will be focused on entertainment. This is why we are doubling down on entertainment to focus the BuzzFeed brand on making the internet more fun,” he wrote.
In a memo that went around to staff on Thursday, April 20, Peretti said that cutting BuzzFeed News was a last-ditch effort to manage the company’s finances following other cost-cutting efforts. “I made the decision to over-invest in BuzzFeed News because I love their work and mission so much,” he said, but ultimately, the breaking news category did not drive the necessary revenue to support the journalism.
HuffPost’s sheer scale was difficult for BuzzFeed News to compete against, according to a member of the BuzzFeed business team. While BuzzFeed News had 59 people in its newsroom, HuffPost has double that at roughly 120. And as a result, the content output was vastly different. (A BuzzFeed spokesperson said HuffPost is “hoping” to bring BuzzFeed News reporters onto the team to add to its coverage, but declined to share how many people would be a part of this reorganization of roles.)
“With the scale of HuffPost, it can be profitable with programmatic advertising and [the] commerce initiatives they’re doing,” Peretti said. Additionally, HuffPost’s Voices vertical and its other lifestyle sections are also more “advertising-friendly sections that can be sponsored,” he said.
A BuzzFeed media kit (see below) from March 2023 shared with Digiday shows HuffPost’s “total reach” was 46 million, compared to BuzzFeed News’ 21 million. HuffPost had 45 million cross-platform followers, compared to BuzzFeed News’ 7 million, according to the document.
While Comscore data shows HuffPost’s average monthly unique visitors for the first three months of 2023 was only 13% higher than BuzzFeed News’ average monthly unique visitors – 22.6 million to HuffPost.com compared to about 20 million to BuzzFeedNews.com – HuffPost publishes significantly more stories per month than BuzzFeed News.
Muck Rack, a company that offers tools for people in PR and journalism, shared data with Digiday that shows BuzzFeed News published 497 articles in March 2023, compared to 1,882 articles HuffPost published in March 2023.
Two BuzzFeed News employees told Digiday the team was focused on producing more stories as part of their efforts to increase their reach and ad revenue. Muck Rack’s data – which comes from its internal database and the site’s sitemap, a spokesperson said – shows a 32% increase in the number of articles BuzzFeed News published from November 2022 (377 articles) to March 2023. BuzzFeed News published 314 articles in March 2022.
“We were clear about that – that was part of the revenue strategy, [to] produce more [stories],” a BuzzFeed News employee said.
A source familiar with the company’s advertising business said that while the increase in inventory does help in generating more revenue from the open programmatic marketplace, the reason that HuffPost was getting more from advertisers over BuzzFeed News was the brand recognition.
“[For] advertisers who are not as tuned-in to journalism, [BuzzFeed News] gets lost with the marquee BuzzFeed name, versus HuffPost standing on its own as a brand,” the source continued.
“Audiences will still want news, they just don’t want it to ruin the fun when they are escaping into entertainment,” Peretti wrote in his Thursday memo.
Although she’s been around the media agency world for many years, Kasha Cacy feels like she finally found the right agency environment that balances deep-diving data science with sound media and creative strategies, as head of media at independent agency Known.
Cacy most recently was CEO of Big Village Media and EMX Digital, but oversaw its downsizing and eventual declaration of bankruptcy, which she admits was a tough time. Prior to that five year tenure, Cacy was a rising star within IPG’s media arm having risen to president of UM from a strategy role in McCann Erickson before she left in 2018.
“I am crazy passionate about data and analytics and using that to inform marketing,” explained Cacy, who’s almost two months into her role as chief media officer at Known. “I just feel like every other business function has been transformed using those capabilities, and marketing has been slower to the table.”
Rebundling sits at the core of Cacy’s vision in many ways. “I’m extremely passionate about bringing marketing back together,” she told Digiday. “The idea of not doing media in a silo, but being able to marry everything we know — with the creative, the content and culture and social, and how you really optimize that entire system on behalf of a client.”
The following conversation has been edited for space and clarity.
What makes Known different from all the other media agency jobs you’ve had before?
The first way that they’re unique is they brought together this very, very substantial and rich data and analytics capability with the content that was Stun [one of the agencies that merged to form Known in 2020], and the creative that’s also part of the agency that includes social and all channels of creative. I’ve just never seen that done in as integrated way as I have in this organization, where people from all those disciplines talk on a daily basis, work together on problems, no matter where the entry point is.
What was also really appealing to me is they really started out in the data and analytics space versus trying to add it afterwards. They’re able to do that at a scale that I’ve never seen anywhere else … and it really does have data and analytics at the core. Probably half the group is data scientists. Those people are embedded into clients, they’re actively working on client challenges and they’re innovating at this really rapid pace. But we also have the engineering capability to productize that and make it available to clients in a way that is repeatable and scalable. Traditional agencies don’t typically come at something from an engineering perspective.
How much does speed and responsiveness play into it?
There’s two components to that. One piece of it is yes, we have the people sitting right next to us. So it isn’t a ‘Let’s collect a lot of data and then analyze it and then figure out what happened.’ The other thing that Known does, which I have never seen, is when they go into a client, they will set up a series of tests right out of the gate. They don’t cost a lot of money but they give us a lot of data in a very short period of time, that allows us to get into that optimization cycle much more quickly.
A lot of times what happens — and I’ve seen this in other agencies I’ve worked with — you have to wait for the flight to be done. Or you have to wait for six months worth of data so you can build a model. What Known does, which is really interesting, is they look at the data they have, they look at what’s missing, and then they put a test plan in place to fill in the gaps right out of the gate so that we can get to those models and that optimization really fast.
How do clients deal with that? They may not always love what they hear.
Clients are really struggling with how to spend their money because budgets are tight. That’s what happens when you’re in the macro economic environment we’re in. We’ve had clients come to us and say, ‘We have to deliver the same results that we did last year on half the budget — how do we do that?’ It’s a very intense data exercise, and a very intense tracking and optimization exercise. Sometimes we have to maim a sacred cow. But at the end of the day, what we’re trying to do is drive business results.
For most clients, if you could increase their business results (whatever they are) in most cases by 10%, that’s worth way more than cutting their media or agency fees by 10%.
What do you want to add at Known, or what’s missing?
When you think about dynamic creative and what AI is going to do for creative, there’s a lot of territory to tackle with that. How do you tweak the message? How do you tweak the pictures? Up until this point, even with dynamic creative engines, it’s been a big effort to do that and I think AI is going to change that completely.
There’s tremendous value there that we can put into the analytics engine and start to really define what that value looks like and what you should be paying for it.
How do marketers really feel about the future of generative AI? Digital marketing firm BMV in April asked 1,000 marketers, content marketers and agencies and brands about topics like ChatGPT and AI budgeting. –Antoinette Siu
Some findings:
“I’m always less excited about driverless cars. Also, language translation is something where we’re getting closer and closer, then we aren’t getting closer. There are so many idioms across the languages and so much context — but I will say it’s getting better.”
Stagwell chairman/CEO Mark Penn, on tech innovations he finds less exciting.
As this year’s NFL Draft is currently taking place in Kansas City, NFL CMO Tim Ellis wanted to bring a youthful energy and better connect with younger audiences. To do so, the NFL is hosting a three-day event showcasing the talent of current Gen Z content creators through on-site social activations.
The NFL has partnered with Zachery Dereniowski, a motivational influencer who goes by @MDMotivator on social media, as well as TikTokers Josh Richards, who goes by his name on social media and Scarlet May, who goes by @scarlet_may.1 on social media. May has created inclusive content that explained the Draft through sign language. Meanwhile, video creator Lisa Nguyen (@LisaNguyen on TikTok) visited her favorite Kansas City restaurants to talk football and food. The goal for this is to connect with Gen Z NFL fans authentically while also leveraging its content creators to gain interest on the NFL Sunday Ticket.
This comes months after the NFL revamped its social media strategy with its NFL Content Creator Network to allow fans to directly engage with Gen Z football fans, such as Twitch streamer Esfand, who presented a showcase of the meeting of traditional athletes and gaming creators.
Digiday caught up with Ellis to learn more about what league intends to do to continue to attract and retain Gen Z viewers beyond the NFL Draft and their plans with their newly drafted players who are under current NIL deals.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Hosting Draft in different locations lets us to spotlight the respective city and all it has to offer. For example, we are leaning into BBQ and highlighting some of the top pitmasters and BBQ spots in Kansas City. We also showcased the local culture through our Draft creative, which is displayed throughout various OOH installments in Kansas City. The vibrant street art, the exposed brick and the overall vibe of the city were really important for us to capture in all the creative designs for Draft.
Gen Z is one of our priority target audiences, and we’re always looking for authentic ways to engage with them to continue growing our NFL fanbase. Creators are an important part of reaching this demographic. We generally target creators in strategic verticals – fashion, gaming, wellness and music – as well as those native to TikTok – specializing in humor, food, art, animals or endemic to football.
We’re excited to announce the first-ever partnership with [AI artist] Adrian Curiel, where we are creating an incredible AI-fueled backstage set at the NFL Draft. It promises to not only push the boundaries of creativity, but also deliver on our commitment to immediately unite top prospects with their new cities.
This approach is a testament to our dedication in utilizing the most cutting-edge tools while enhancing our helmets-off storytelling. Ultimately, Adrian will help us create over one hundred ultra-customized, dynamic pieces of art, using AI as the players are selected.
This directly ties back to our helmets-off strategy and allowing fans to get to know these players as interesting people as opposed to just world-class athletes. We use Draft as an opportunity to introduce prospects to NFL fans in a more human and authentic way. Who are they? What do they care about? What are their interests? Who are their loved ones? What’s their life journey?
We know a strong marketing machine is integral for a brand to be successful. It has to be one that delivers relevance and relatability. We work hard at this every day and invest in our marketing accordingly. There is no off season. We engage our fans year-round, whether it’s Draft, Super Bowl, schedule release or Back Together Saturday. We are always looking for opportunities that bring joy and excitement to our fans, and we work to bring out the humanity of the game, telling stories that they care about.
Once prospects enter the league, they are free to have their own individual deals, either new ones or ones they carry over from college, as long as those deals don’t use league logos or marks.
There’s certainly a shift where fans are following their favorite players regardless of team, and for us, a lot of that is driven by our helmets-off strategy. Unlike other sports leagues, our players are constantly behind their helmets. My goal for the last few years has been emphasizing the personalities, goals and passions, highlighting who they are with their helmets off. I want our players to be relatable, which means removing the proverbial helmet and showcasing a more human face of the league, a league that authentically leans into youth culture and stands behind our players and what matters most to them.
