Month: April 2023

“It is about repeat [customers], trying to increase customer loyalty at a local level and delivering value,” Mangels said. “Our goal is really around traffic, sales and repeat customer visits.”

In partnership with Vibes, a SMS and mobile digital wallet marketing program, the KFC franchise brand sends out weekly messages, whether that be a product offer, deals or other company news. The SMS effort targets regional and local people. It is meant to support KFC main brand marketing efforts, like TV campaigns and radio campaigns and social media campaigns, that run simultaneously nationwide, she added.

As the main brand, which is owned by Yum! Brands, KFC has more than 25,000 KFC restaurants in more than 145 countries and territories worldwide. According to Forbes, 99% of those units are franchised. (KFC declined to make a spokesperson available for this story.)

Last year, KBP spent $11,096 on media, according to Vivvix, a Kantar Company, including paid social data from Pathmatics. (Figures were not available for 2021.) Meanwhile, KFC spent nearly $235 million on media, up from the $181 million, per Vivvix. 

SMS offers the KFC franchisee flexibility, both in terms of creative, messaging and timing — something that has become increasingly important to marketers after the pandemic and while economic uncertainty looms. In comparison, print media buys can take months to come to fruition and digital media buys sometimes take weeks, ultimately offering less flexibility than SMS, she said.

To put numbers to it as an example, an advertiser with between 1,000 to 1,500 email contacts can expect to pay $59 per month for unlimited email sends and 3,933 free SMS messages as an Omnisend customer.

“We’re still facing staffing impacts [and] supply chain impacts. Some things you can commit to from a strategic perspective,” Mangels said. “But other things, we need to be a lot more flexible and timely.” 

The KFC franchisee isn’t the only company revisiting text message marketing, a marketing channel that first gained popularity in the early 2000s alongside the rapid adoption of personal cell phones. Increasingly, brands like Peace Out Skincare and BruMate drinkware have both added SMS to their core marketing strategies in a push to diversify their spend beyond social media ads. 

It seems SMS marketing is becoming a bigger priority for marketers, according to Omnisend. Per the platform’s customer research, in 2021, brands sent just north of 59 million campaigns. In 2022, that figure spiked to just north of 96 million, per the company’s research.

“The benefits are pretty clear: 307 million people in the US use a smartphone; SMS marketing allows a brand to get directly into the hands of your audience, quickly,” said Charlie Wade, global executive director of growth and innovation at VMLY&R Commerce, in an email to Digiday. 

But, given the intimacy of SMS marketing, which is delivered straight to people’s cell phones, advertisers must tread lightly, Wade added. “As with any form of communication brands must be wary of spamming,” Wade said. “SMS puts a brand in the same inbox as people’s friends, colleagues, or family – make sure you stand-out.”

SMS marketing won’t replace KBP’s KFC local marketing efforts like print and local digital media buys, at least not yet, per Mangels, adding that it’ll take a full year to build out a finalized SMS marketing strategy across its locations. 

“In a lot of ways, we’re looking for this to transition some markets or some stores out of other efforts and into this,” she said. “Out of the gate, it’s not going to completely replace a lot of other efforts. But over time, certainly think it can.” 

While Peretti did not name specific platforms in the memo, BuzzFeed leadership has called out a sharp decrease in Facebook referral traffic during the past few earnings calls.

Publishers have been noting a decrease in site referrals from social media platforms, and therefore a decrease in traffic, as these platforms prioritize short-form vertical video in hopes that users won’t leave their sites. Meanwhile, the instability at Twitter and the potential ban of TikTok is making two of the more popular platforms less reliable for publishers. So a news brand built for — and dependent on — a social media audience, could be facing the same algorithm-induced issues that occurred in 2016.

BuzzFeed News was “a social media ecosystem company, and the ecosystem went away,” said a former BuzzFeed exec who spoke on the condition of anonymity, “… HuffPost was a pre-social media company. And then got kind of eclipsed by BuzzFeed in the social media age. And then as social media goes away, the tide comes out, but HuffPost is still kind of there among the rocks.”

BuzzFeed Inc.’s CRO Edgar Hernandez and COO Christian Baesler will depart the company in the next few weeks and 180 staffers, or 15% of the company, are being laid off. BuzzFeed News has about 60 employees, and some will be offered jobs at other parts of the company, according to a report from The New York Times, but the number of employees who will stay with BuzzFeed was not disclosed. This round of layoffs comes after BuzzFeed cut 12% of its workforce in December 2022, and offered buyouts to the news division last March.

Peretti hopes its remaining BuzzFeed News readers will migrate to HuffPost, which BuzzFeed acquired in 2020, and quickly laid off 70 people in a restructuring to make it profitable. The site is still “profitable” and has a “loyal direct front page audience,” Peretti claimed in the memo, but a company spokesperson did not provide numbers to affirm that claim.

BuzzFeed News was the only part of the company that was unprofitable, a BuzzFeed spokesperson said. They declined to comment on how close to profitability the news division was.

“Anyone relying on social referrals as a key monetization factor has struggled in the last couple of years,” said Justin Eisenband, senior managing director of corporate finance in the Telecom, Media & Technology division at FTI Consulting. That traffic pattern combined with a general tough advertising market over the past year, would make it difficult to sustain a business.

Profitability issues

Notably, Comscore data showed that 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 vs. about 20 million to BuzzFeedNews.com. Even for the whole of 2022, BuzzFeed News’s average monthly unique visitors was about 19.5 million compared to HuffPost’s 22.4 million — a difference of only about 15%.

BuzzFeed News was more reliant on social as a referral than HuffPost, according to SimilarWeb data, which Eisenband analyzed and noted to Digiday and Digiday confirmed.

From January-March 2023, 31% of BuzzFeed News’ traffic direct, compared to 57% of HuffPost’s traffic, according to SimilarWeb data. Social channels made up 26% of BuzzFeed News’ traffic, compared to 13% at HuffPost. Most of the social traffic was coming from Facebook for both publications — 56% of BuzzFeed News’ social traffic was from Facebook, compared to 55% of HuffPost’s.

As short-form vertical video is prioritized, Eisenband said external links back to publishers’ sites are less amplified within social media platforms’ walled gardens, as the goal is to keep users on their app. Facebook especially has been a culprit of this, he added. 

Peretti was one of HuffPost’s (then called The Huffington Post) co-founders when it launched in 2005, and created BuzzFeed as a side-gig in 2006. Peretti left HuffPost in 2011 when it was acquired by AOL and turned his attention full-time to BuzzFeed, tapping Politico’s Ben Smith to lead its newsroom. HuffPost came back under Peretti’s purview in 2020 when he acquired it from Verizon Media Group.

BuzzFeed News’ editor-in-chief Karolina Waclawiak had one year to make the division profitable when she took the job in June 2022. “We exceeded our Q1 goals and were poised to make this newsroom financially sustainable over the course of 2023, only to be told — four months in — that we were out of time,” Waclawiak wrote in an email to BuzzFeed News’ staff.

“The decision to close is no reflection on the leadership of the newsroom or the progress they were making to monetize news,” said a BuzzFeed spokesperson in an email. “With our current performance and the surrounding economic conditions, it became clear the company can’t afford a standalone BuzzFeed News organization at this time. Right now, we need to be focused on businesses that will grow our revenue.”

AI or IPO to blame?

BuzzFeed announced it was going public via a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, in June 2021. As part of the deal, the media company acquired Complex Networks from Hearst and Verizon for $300 million. At the time, the deal valued BuzzFeed at $1.5 billion. But a year later, BuzzFeed’s stock was trading at roughly less than a third of the value it had when it debuted, at around $3 a share. And 94% of the $287.5 million the SPAC raised was withdrawn by initial investors when it merged with the publisher to take BuzzFeed public.

In an all-hands meeting with the BuzzFeed News team the day its shutdown, Peretti told that team that he “should have started putting us on a path of profitability six, seven years ago,” said Albert Samaha, a (now former) senior reporter at BuzzFeed News.

Peretti announced during BuzzFeed Inc.’s Q4 earnings call in March that artificial intelligence is becoming a core part of the company’s business model in 2023, which began with the integration of OpenAI’s API within BuzzFeed’s quiz content. He added that BuzzFeed’s Creator Network was also going to be prioritized this year, but leadership did not allude to layoffs in the earnings call outside of saying there was a “voluntary reduction in workforce at BuzzFeed News” in 2022.

Risk in the grow to scale model

Sam Thompson, senior managing director at M&A advisory firm Progress Partners, said in an interview on April 12 that media companies like BuzzFeed and Vice Media Group have struggled to build sustainable business models over the past decade. BuzzFeed’s stock value is just a fraction of the roughly $11 per share it was trading at when it went public in December 2021, priced at around $0.70 per share on Friday afternoon. Meanwhile, Vice World News is reportedly on the chopping block.

“Any venture investor will look at that and say, ‘Why would I invest in the early stages? Because I’m not seeing any example where that actually plays out positively?’” he said. As a result, media companies will start to shed assets that are “non-core” or underperforming to focus on the parts of the business that are profitable or have more favorable margins, Thompson said.

Given the environment, publishers elsewhere are trying to re-shift how they monetize their brands. Earlier this month, PE-backed Recurrent Ventures sold Saveur magazine, the only food publication in its portfolio of 20 titles. Vox Media spun off the social-first video news site NowThis, which means NowThis will operate as an independent media brand, but Vox Media will maintain a minority share that earns it financial benefits without needing to cover upfront operational costs.

“The successful models — and there are very few — have robust subscription revenues with supplementary [advertising] feeding off the number and intensity of the subscribers’ use,” said Doug Arthur, managing director at media research and advisory firm Huber Research Partners.

General interest news is difficult to sell subscriptions against, Eisenband said, adding that news organizations that are differentiated are typically able to make reader revenue work. He pointed to local and metro news sites or publications that have a focus on a niche topic like finance (Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal) as some that have had success.

BuzzFeed News did not have a subscription business model, but previously asked readers for contributions to support its journalism in 2018 — a tactic typically taken by non-profit or mission-based publications, like NPR or The Guardian.

“To ask your readers to support news on a for-profit company seems like a little bit of a mismatch,” Eisenband said. A BuzzFeed spokesperson did not say how much money it had received in donations.

Brand safety concerns leading to down advertising 

News publishers have also been handed the short end of the stick when it comes to winning ad dollars for years now, both in the programmatic market and in direct-sold ad deals, with advertisers citing brand safety concerns. And media faces a glut problem: There is so much current inventory on the market, buyers say they rarely bat an eye over shifting gears to sites considered more brand safe, especially when buying programmatically.

“The ability to just blacklist news sites all together makes our job just a whole lot easier,” said Trey Dickert, vp of media and strategy at media buying agency Media Two Interactive. One client of his, who he declined to name, refused to advertise against both BuzzFeed News or HuffPost given their news categorization, but would advertise in other BuzzFeed Inc. properties, like Complex or Tasty. 

When Dickert’s other clients do consider advertising on news sites, they will often pick a portfolio’s non-news verticals via a private programmatic marketplace to avoid being placed against “negative news.”

Despite the overwhelming overhead that came from fast M&A expansion the past couple of years, those non-news verticals were very likely what was keeping advertisers coming to BuzzFeed Inc.

“When your strategy is more [based on] social referrals, having volumes of content certainly becomes more important … you’re more likely to be found,” said Eisenband, though more inventory doesn’t necessarily mean more advertisers will be knocking down the doors to buy it.

Inside the newsroom

Samaha described an emotional meeting with the news division and Peretti on Thursday. “Almost everyone was crying,” he said. “It was a venting of frustrations.” While Samaha said he’s seen a number of layoffs throughout his career, he called the “full shuttering” of BuzzFeed News “the most devastating and dramatic of them.”

“I’ve built a lot of scar tissue,” Samaha said. The BuzzFeed News reporter said he has two items on his agenda now: “Find job, and long ass vacation.”

Great Clips’ campaign is part of its five year partnership with the NHL involving creative marketing mixes during the Stanley Cup Playoffs. The financial agreement was not disclosed.

According to Lisa Hake, vp of marketing and communications at Great Clips, the difference between what the brand did during March Madness and the NHL playoffs is that it did not use its college athletes this time around. Instead, ad spots feature a roster of hockey professionals, such as the New Jersey Devils’ Hughes and Canadian hockey star and gold medalist Sarah Nurse, as well as social influencers, including TikTok dancers Cost n’ Mayor, “America’s Got Talent” finalists the Cline Twins and hockey fan Jesse Pollock, who are helping to extend Great Clips’ call to action with their own fans.

“In addition to paid amplification, we’ve really put an emphasis on leveraging the popular creators who are hockey fans,” said Hake. “Kids, amateurs and hockey fans proudly sport and talk about their own styles and flows, and we felt the time was right to spotlight, memorialize and reward those unique, individual Hockey Hair styles.”

Hake said that the talent they used for the ad spot have all recently experienced Great Clips haircuts at local salons and created content they thought their fans would ultimately enjoy engaging with that is also authentic to their personalities and fandom. All of the content was published on their own social media accounts on April 17.

“Our fans are educated, tech-savvy and socially engaged in conversation around our game, which makes social media a fun and compelling way to engage with them via our partnerships and the activations that we co-created,” said Evin Dobson, NHL’s senior vice president of partnership marketing.

In addition to allocating marketing budget for its contest via marketing emails, in-app messages and social media platforms such as TikTok, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, Great Clips has invested in digital out of home on NHL’s digitally enhanced dasher boards around the ice rinks during the Stanley Cup Playoffs to extend its reach to television viewers. A similar strategy is being used by WWE during premium live events, when ring apron displays are utilized for sponsorship opportunities. Hake did not provide any specific figures for the amount of advertising Great Clips spent on this year’s NHL tournament.

Meanwhile, NHL and New Amsterdam Vodka are offering hockey fans a new kind of insurance as part of the vodka brand’s Stanley Cup campaign: New Amsterdam Win(surance). During post-season celebrations, this “insurance” can cover spilled drinks, food shortages and any other playoffs-related mishaps. A $100 HSA (hockey savings account) card will be given to Win(surance) policyholders in case of injury.

For green energy brand Kruger Paper Products’ part, it partnered with the NHL for its “Find The Cup and Win Contest,” in which the brand has hidden a marked cup within its products somewhere in Canada. The first person to find its location will win a $10,000 Stanley Cup Final VIP Experience, including round-trip travel to the Stanley Cup Finals, hotel, two NHL player-signed items and front-row seats.

According to Steve Dunphy, executive creative director of Chase Design Group, diehard sports fans are becoming more excited for the spring sports season, which brings both NHL and NBA playoffs along with the MLB season. The season is filled with buzzer-beaters, overtimes and upsets that these fans are devoted to.

“In this wonderful frenzy of texting, cheering and stat-checking, fans build up a competitive appetite for what some would argue is the best part of the game-day experience and brands that embrace the competitive spirit of the season,” said Dunphy. “By creating gamified social campaigns, [they] are putting themselves in the seat and screen right next to their consumers and will see big wins.”

“We believe in AI as a business enablement tool,” Gardner said. “The real opportunity is to think long, not short, on the use of AI. This is not tech that should be viewed as a one-off campaign, but real disruption.”

Stagwell agencies have been using broader AI functions across the company and creating open-source tools in the tech community. Locaria has been using automation of multilingual content and AI for their global brands in particular,. Hannes Ben, CEO of Locaria, said the agency is continuing to work with AI to “connect the dots” across audience insights, media plans, content and performance – which traditionally work in silos.

“AI is a complementary element to our existing strategy driving incremental growth,” Ben said.

Last month, Stagwell agency YML, recently folded into the Code and Theory network, developed an AI tool called Y-Chat, which is used to integrate any app with ChatGPT with less than 10 lines of code. While it is aimed at developers and not specifically built for a particular client, it will allow any company to implement ChatGPT faster for their projects. YML said it plans to add more OpenAI models and capabilities across various platforms.

Other agencies are experimenting with the OpenAI model in order to expand its advertising capabilities. PMG last week said it has already begun integrating ChatGPT to create new copywriting and campaign efficiencies for its paid search campaigns across clients. The generative AI is integrated into its proprietary tech platform Alli, which is used by teams as a sandbox for testing.

ChatGPT is plugged into Alli’s campaign management data and insights, allowing marketers to speed up campaign performance. The initial focus is on paid search campaigns. Last year, PMG also developed Alli Creative Insights to compare and test creative assets for campaign audiences using real-time data.

The platform is used to support brands across PMG’s portfolio, from generating description versions for search engines to testing a brand’s voice and positioning. This can cut down on hours typically spent refining content, but the process is still in an experimental phase, said Jason Hartley, head of search, social and shopping at PMG.

“The guidance I give our teams is to treat generative AI as a new employee with very little experience: Give clear direction, but don’t assume that the output will be what you want it to be — and give good feedback when you discover errors,” Hartley said.

Holdcos find cross-agency applications

Meanwhile, holding company Omnicom has similarly made strategic moves in several areas of AI, with CEO John Wren saying in the company’s Q4 earnings call in February that automation tools will help “eliminate” mundane agency projects. Wren added on the call the holdco is “embracing [AI] as quickly as we possibly can.”

Omnicom recently worked with Microsoft to integrate its ChatGPT model into Omni, its data and insights orchestration platform. Slavi Samardzija, CEO of Annalect Worldwide, the data and analytics arm of Omnicom that manages Omni, mentioned there are more than 25 applications being developed through this, including automating insights for strategists and planners and new ways of activating media optimization workflows.

In a dedicated Azure environment, Microsoft’s cloud platform, teams can “develop new custom trained and use-case specific models within Omni, as well as support overall automation and transformation efforts,” Samardzija said, adding that teams are evaluating confidentiality and privacy in the process.

“Privacy and business ethics have been at the center of our approach to the use of generative AI,” Samardzija said. Some of the concerns include confidentiality of client data in models, and mitigation of biases in the datasets and outcomes.

The influencer side of life

Additionally, AI is continuing to change the influencer marketing business. Last week, former CEO of Open Influence Eric Dahan launched a new firm MightyJoy to focus on full-funnel influencer marketing. The agency will combine creative and performance marketing for brands and prioritize return on ad spend using its data and content creator and brand strategies.

Dahan said the biggest impact of AI in the creator world is helping to “spot patterns” where humans cannot. The tools can be used to catalog creators and identify trends in the top performing content that would be difficult for a human. Dahan said the aim is to get away from a campaign-by-campaign approach and focus on long-term brand building.

“We are all about investing in what drives the most impact and avoiding bloat wherever we can – that means integrating AI as an integral part of our process,” Dahan said. As agencies cut down on entry-level and analytics work, Dahan sees AI capable of freeing up “brain power” for their workforces.

And as Omnicom boss Wren explained during earnings, AI will have an even more positive impact on the business, especially in jobs of the creative knowledge workers “five years from now.”

Companies jumped on the Earth Day to tout their ESG progress

Every year, Earth Day (which just passed) brings out a host of green-related decarbonization/sustainability announcements from companies across the business spectrum, and this year, media and tech stepped up their efforts. Though it’s easy to be skeptical since companies tend to make these announcements at times more people are paying attention. So if you are paying attention, here’s this year’s crop, along with a brief description of what they say they’re doing: — Michael Bürgi 

• Leading decarbonization firm Scope3 released its report on sustainable advertising, noting that the programmatic business generates more than 215,000 metric tons of carbon monthly across the U.S., U.K., France, Germany and Australia. Surprising no one, but still confirming the problem, Scope3 found that 60% of the carbon produced by programmatic is the result of “ad selection emissions” due to the complex digital supply chain.  
• A few firms announced they are partnering with Cedara, a London-based climate management solutions provider. They include digital marketing agency Cloud and ad exchange Yieldmo, 
• Contextual ad firm Seedtag is implementing a broader strategy around ESG, re-setting KPIs with DSP and SSP partners based on Impact+ and Scope3 inputs, reducing carbon use in its offices and transportation, as well as using offset credits.
• Programmatic firm TripleLift committed to at least 50% reduction in Scopes 1-3 all by 2030. It’s also partnered with Patch, which is investing in new solar technologies. 

Color by numbers

Paramount and Videoamp last week released an outcomes report on several campaigns in categories across across automotive, CPG, QSR and entertainment that ran on Paramount Network in 2022. Here are some of the results: — MB

• Optimizing campaigns against VideoAmp currency resulted in an 11% higher conversion on average, specifically +25% in CPG, +9% in autos and +6% in QSR
• Conversion rates increased by an average of 37%  on “advanced audiences” vs. demo-based audiences, specifically +70% in autos, +61% in entertainment and +27% in QSR
• On average, 83% of advanced audience reach was exclusive to digital, with CPG showing 83% incremental lift, autos 82% lift and QSR 80% lift.

Takeoff & landing

• Holdco Publicis released its Q1 2023 financial results, registering 10% net revenue growth — of which an impressive one-third derives from data and tech (Epsilon and Sapient units) — as well as 7.1% organic revenue growth. Broken down by region, Europe showed the strongest organic revenue growth at 12.3%, and the U.S. delivered 5.8% growth. Based on the strong results, Publicis standing by its earlier predictions for full-year 2023 growth, despite economic headwinds.
• IPG’s UM and streaming service Roku partnered to give the IPG media agency’s investment and planning teams (and other IPG media agencies) access to Roku’s data in order to identify and measure minority media and networks that often don’t appear in mainstream ratings data. 
• Horizon Media landed global AOR duties for the NFL, responsible for handling strategy, planning, activation and measurement, and taking over from a combination of agencies including OMD, Tinuiti, Mediacom and Starcom.
• Acquisitions: WPP acquired sonic branding agency Amp and will add it to its Landor & Fitch unit…Media tech company Popreach acquired independent California agency SCS, which counts clients such as Vans and Warner Bros. Discovery.
• Nielsen’s national TV ratings service was once again given accreditation by the Media Rating Council, after losing it in 2021.  

Direct quote

“We’ve been talking for some time about DTC. We’re seeing a new form of DTC: it’s direct to creator. As we continue to look at the importance of content as a modifier for commerce — if content is going to continue to be important, the idea of brands going direct to creators of all shapes and sizes, of all colors and ethnicities, that is a massive sea change for the industry.”

— Medialink CEO Michael Kassan, on what he sees as a priority shift in the blending of content and commerce, in a video interview with Digiday at the Possible conference in Miami last week.

Speed reading

• Digiday senior reporter of marketing and tech Marty Swant spoke with marketers about Google’s latest rumored moves to infuse more generative AI into its search products.
• I wrote about the continued expansion in the agency and entertainment worlds of augmented reality and virtual reality products beyond just the world of sports.
• Digiday had a presence at the inaugural Possible conference in Miami Beach last week, seeing Elon Musk address marketers’ concerns about Twitter, and broader discussions on the blending of marketing, tech and culture, as well as a look at the exploding world of retail media networks.

And some strategies are recommitting to the investment.

Time is expanding its climate coverage with a new editorial franchise, special magazine issue, and dedicated hub on Time.com as the publisher sees more investment from advertisers around this content category.

About 20% of advertising dollars spent with Time is going toward the publisher’s sustainability coverage and businesses. Roughly half of that money is in the form of event sponsorships and the other half in digital and print advertising, a Time spokesperson said. The spokesperson declined to share how much this represents in raw figures.

Michelle Chong, group director at ad agency Fitzco, called that a “big number.” “But it feels right,” she continued. “We’re seeing a lot more focus on that [topic] and a lot of this type of outreach.”

The new franchise, called the Time CO2 Earth Awards, will bring in nearly seven figures among advertisers Deloitte, co-executive chair of Galvanize Climate Solutions Tom Steyer and Ralph Lauren, the spokesperson said.

Simon Mulcahy, president of sustainability at Time, declined to share the financial arrangements of those deals. Deloitte is providing insights for panels at the Time CO2 and Time100 summit, as well as sponsoring part of an upcoming Earth Awards gala on April 25 and a climate newsletter by journalist Justin Worland.

Time isn’t alone in seeing more advertiser interest in climate and sustainability verticals recently:

The Financial Times has seen about a 9% increase in advertising revenue from 2021 to 2023 from Climate Capital and Moral Money, the publisher’s main climate and ESG focused verticals, a spokesperson said, without providing exact figures.

Roughly a third of all Economist Impact deals — where the business unit provides corporations, foundations, NGOs and governments with data, research, branded content and other consultancy services — are focused on sustainability, said Claudia Malley, president and managing director of partnership at Economist Impact, in an email. Last year, Economist Impact expanded both existing and new deals with clients, she said. “Over 50% of all discussions are focused on sustainability themes and many are aligned with COP28,” Malley said.

The Washington Post credited its climate coverage with driving “some of our most significant partnerships,” Johanna Mayer-Jones, The Post’s head of global client & agency partnerships, said in an email, without naming names. Food safety company Ecolab recently paid for a campaign with The Post, including an activation in New York around Climate Week. The financial terms were not made available.

Vox Media reported internal figures that showed over 400 million views on climate and sustainability coverage in 2022. “We are seeing an influx of demand tied to opportunities around Earth Day and Earth Month, but we are also seeing brands come to us outside of cultural moments as more of our partners prioritize making [corporate social responsibility] a core part of their advertising strategies,” said Aaron Tabas, vp of content strategy and innovation at Vox Creative, in an email.

About a quarter of all of Time’s journalists contribute in some way to sustainability coverage, according to the company. Readers on average spend over 10 minutes per visit with Time’s sustainability content, said Time CMO Sadé Muhammad. Time declined to share how much time readers spend on other verticals in comparison. Time has recently produced branded sustainability content for companies like American Family Insurance, Audi, Siemens and the Singapore Tourism Board.

The number of requests for proposals have gone up around sustainability and climate change at Time, though the company declined to say by how much. Muhammad said that 20% of ad spend going to sustainability content is part of an overall growth in advertising revenue for Time. First quarter ad revenue was up 20% year-over-year, with sustainability being a large driver of that, a spokesperson said.

“Almost every company that we talk to also wants to talk to us about sustainability,” Muhammad said.

Media buyers said they are not seeing specific requests from clients to increase their ad spend around sustainability content, however.

While Fitzco’s Chong isn’t seeing an uptick in the RFPs they’re sending to publishers around sustainability, Chong said she “wouldn’t put it past us to do that this year with that focus,” due to the topic being considered brand-safe, relevant and timely. Fitzco works with clients in a variety of verticals, such as healthcare and retail, she said.

While sustainability isn’t a specific category that advertisers are “demanding,” Ollie Joyce, global chief transformation officer at ad agency Mindshare said his team is “pushing for increased investment in areas such as responsible journalism which this would absolutely fit into.” Some marketers, he noted, worry about sustainability content being accused of “greenwashing.” 

Mulcahy said marketers’ concerns around greenwashing are part of why Time CO2, a division the company formed last September, was created. Time CO2, which hired over a dozen people to create a 15-person team, acts as a consultancy and custom content business, as well as a consortium of sustainability leaders and organizations to help businesses with their sustainability challenges. 

“There are a lot of organizations who really care about climate… and they don’t want just a logo slap,” Mulcahy said. “It’s not just a media buyer, who’s saying, ‘Give me some climate media stuff.’ We’re having conversations that bring a CMO with a media buyer and a chief sustainability officer, or it could be led by the CEO.”

Exverus estimates that between about 40 million and 48 million Zennials exist in the U.S. currently. As Talia Arnold, managing director and author of the report, explained, “Generations are no longer homogenous across a period of 20 years — things change more quickly today. The difference between someone born in 1995 vs. 2005 is wider than in the past.”

“We’re interested in this generation because they’re newly entering the workforce, rapidly increasing their disposable income, yet are still cultural tastemakers — a critical combination,” Arnold said. “We were lumping them in with Millennials and Gen Z, two groups they’re surprisingly different from.”

Ed East, CEO of influencer agency Billion Dollar Boy, agreed that discussion of Zennials is necessary, because “a generational view to audiences is very limited.” His agency defines Zennial as those born between 1993 and 1998, and advises clients to consider subcultures and microcultures rather than demographics.

“Generations generally span around 15 years, so treating that broad of an age bracket the same is not going to deliver the personalized approach that consumers want or that will drive value for brands,” East said. “We need to be looking at more psychographic data. There’s more that [can] tell us than demographics. Brands have so much data at their disposal, they can afford to do this.”

Exverus’ research included surveys of more than 1,200 U.S. respondents, two-thirds of whom were millennials and one-third of whom were Zennials.

While millennials and Gen Z are considered digital natives, the research found that Zennials embrace digital tech but also value in-person and analog experiences. The study found 10% of them are more likely to be regularly using mobile apps and 10% are less likely to be using social media than their millennial counterparts. Exverus noted this was consistent with previous research in which Zennials reported that they post less often on social media, which was different from Gen Z and millennial respondents.

Over the last year, Zennials have spent more time with video games — 77% more than reported by millennials. Interestingly, Zennials are also reporting spending more time listening to AM/FM radio compared to other generational groups, listening to radio 29% more than millennials.

In mostly all categories surveyed, Zennials said they were less likely to switch brands in the next 12 months compared to millennials. They are 16% less likely to switch beverage or personal care brands and 24% less likely to switch pet-related brands. Researchers noted that Zennials may be spending more time with these brands, because they do not have “pressures of providing for families yet.” They are still establishing routines and favorite products at this point in their lives.

This means consumers in this Zennial cohort could be less price sensitive as well, willing to pay more for products and services that are “perceived as high-quality” and research product reviews before buying, according to the study.

Zennials also seem to be more interested in saving for long-term goals like starting their own business (they’re 64% more likely to do this than other groups) and thinking about retirement and other investments. One in four Zennials said they were saving up to buy a car, while one in three said they were saving up to buy a house.

When it comes to influencer content, which particularly appeals to younger audiences, East said Zennials are driving a shift toward “more authentic, socially-conscious, and creative content.” East explained that Zennials are like the bridge over to Gen Z, who do not want to see curated, polished content.

“They want raw and more reactive/spontaneous content,” East added. “They’re drawn to influencers who are genuine and transparent, vs. those whose content is overly polished. … Even more so than authenticity, Zennials crave relatability — they want to see their lives reflected back at them in the content.”

Read more about how agencies are also studying the upcoming younger Generation Alpha.