Month: April 2023

See a running tracker of these reports released last week here. Though Gannett released the latest stats on the diversity of its staff, it did not break out the diversity of new hires.

While Hearst improved the percentage of people from diverse backgrounds that it hired year over year by two percentage points, the majority of its new hires were still white. The other four publishers, however, hired a larger percentage of white people in 2022 compared to the previous year and most of its recent hires are white.

Less diversity among new hires 

At Condé Nast, 39% of new hires in the U.S. were people of color in 2022, down from 41% the previous year. Of its new hires, 49% self-identified as white, up from 45% in 2021. The remaining 12% were “undeclared.” Condé Nast set a goal in 2020 to have 50% of its candidates on hiring slates from a “wide range of backgrounds and schools,” according to the report. New hires in the U.S. were 75% female, a four percentage point increase from 2021.

New hires at Hearst were 59% white in 2022, down from 61% in 2021. However, the company hired a smaller share of women: 48% of new hires at Hearst were women in 2022, down from 51% the previous year.

At The New York Times, 44% of its new hires last year were people of color, down a whopping 10 percentage points compared to 2021. New hires were 56% women, 43% men and 1% nonbinary, whereas in 2021, 62% of new hires were women. The company noted in its report that it already hit its goal to increase the representation of Black people in leadership roles by 50% by 2025, and that the Times intends “to build on this progress, and we are on track to meet this leadership goal with regard to Latino colleagues.” The Times report shows 7% of its leadership was Black in 2022, up one percentage point year over year. The share of Hispanic/Latino people in leadership roles remained the same year over year at 5%.

New hires in the U.S. at Vice Media Group were 54% white in 2022, up from 47% in 2021. While the majority of VMG’s new hires in North America were women last year, that majority shrunk by one percentage point year over year to 65%.

At Vox Media, 44% of new hires in the past year self-identified as people of color, down from 50% in its previous report.

Overall improvements

Gannett, Hearst, VMG and Vox improved the overall diversity of their workforces by one percentage point at their respective companies, compared to their previous reports. The share of white employees decreased by two percentage points at Condé Nast, and four percentage points at The New York Times.

At Gannett, 71% of its employees self-identified as white as of January 1, 2023.

“As a company, Gannett leads with inclusion and we are intentional as we make strides around our workforce diversity. As we deepen our understanding of our workforce and embed inclusivity in every aspect of our business, we are strengthening our culture of belonging,” said LaToya Johnson, senior director of inclusion strategy at Gannett, in an email.

A Gannett spokesperson added: “We can’t stress enough that diversity is a priority for Gannett and our efforts to retain and attract talent are showing improvement.”

Non-white employees made up 32% of Condé Nast’s U.S. workforce in 2022, the same as in the previous year. Overall, 62% of its employees are white, down by two percentage points.

White people make up 70% of Hearst’s employees, down from 71% last year. 

“We continue to make progress and are actively working to have more proportionate race and ethnic representation across our brands,” a Hearst spokesperson said.

The New York Times’ workforce is now 56% white, compared to 60% in 2021. 

VMG’s U.S. workforce is now 58% white. Employees at Vox Media are 59% white.

“In a time of more limited hiring, we continue to be committed to hiring from diverse candidate pools. Our DEI+ work also focuses beyond hiring to ensure that people of all backgrounds are welcomed, celebrated, and included here,” said a Vox spokesperson.

But Stickler, who has almost 10 million followers on TikTok, isn’t worried. That’s partially due to the fact that she already has over 1 million Instagram followers, 268,000 YouTube subscribers and 116,000 followers on Facebook. She’s also heartened by brands already shifting their influencer marketing dollars to other platforms for fear that the ads they buy on TikTok won’t be as evergreen as they once were.

On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Stickler kicks off the third-annual Creator Series — a four-week-long span of episodes — that will look at the rise of short-form vertical video and how creators, like Stickler, have been able to grow sizable followings.

Below are highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Being picky over brand deals, even with fewer happening on the platform 

Because of this whole potential ban, brands have been backing up [from TikTok]. They don’t really want to invest in this [platform] if it’s not going to be evergreen content that’s going to be on this app continuing to gain views and people are gonna watch it. So it has made me take a step back and really realize that the only thing I have is my reputation. So it’s not harder for me to say no to brands now, even at this point when it’s more detrimental when things are coming to a halt. It’s stressful, it’s scary. Like, I have a daughter and I’m trying to buy a place, but it’s just kind of doing all the logistics in your mind and it’s realizing that if I say no, and keep my reputation that is more important [than saying yes to brand deals for products or brands that I don’t like]. 

There was one brand I remember [I did an ad for]. It was like an OK brand. It was a cheap product, and I think it was like $10. And I’m like, I would never use this. And for months, I felt so guilty for doing the ad for it. And I was like, never again. Never again will I ever do that and compromise my integrity for a paycheck. At the end of the day, that’s not going to get your business blossoming. It’s not going to get people to trust you. It’s not going to get you to the point where you can do your own product and you don’t have to be working for other people.

Not worried, even in the face of a possible ban

I know that if TikTok ended tomorrow, I would be OK. But I also think as a creator, whenever you’re doing something that’s backed by fear, it kind of adds a little bit more [aggression into how you approach posting on platforms]. I am realizing that I am working a lot on YouTube now and now I’m also going back to Facebook [and] I don’t remember the last time I used Facebook. So it’s me getting back in touch with this stuff, because it’s the smart thing to do. 

I read the whole bill and I watched the whole hearing that they had, but it’s kind of hard to comprehend that they would [ban TikTok] but either way, it’ll all be OK. I don’t want to stress about it. But yes, not [having] all my eggs [in one TikTok basket]. [I] have to take a step back and distribute [my] energy. 

Building audiences on new platforms by knowing what they want 

My YouTube people see a totally different side of me. They see me in 10-20 minute spans talking about my emotions. Instagram sees a different side of me through Stories, like more time with my daughter, some pictures of this is what I did, this is what’s on my mind. And TikTok sees this very curated [version of me] — sometimes, because sometimes I go on there and I’m bawling my eyes out. 

So I try to look at [my audience] as the same [across platforms], but I think people know where to go based — I don’t want to say what version of me they want — but you get different sides of me based on the platform. Not because I’m trying to be some type of way, but I just feel like on YouTube, I can talk more because I have 20 minutes now instead of 60 seconds to keep your attention. And on Instagram, I can be more chill and relaxed because it’s a day-to-day story or it’s a [photo]. It’s whatever they want from me. 

While TikTok is “pushing more performance campaigns in general, it’s definitely a test and learn environment, where benchmarks need to be established within the platform and how to compare performance to other channels/partners,” explained Erica Patrick, svp and director of paid social media at Mediahub.

It’s unclear how much marketers are increasing their performance marketing dollars on the platform just yet. However, marketers and agency execs said that, overall, TikTok’s share of social spending has increased from roughly 15% of social ad budgets last year to roughly 25% of social ad budgets this year. As for the Smart Performance Campaign effort specifically, marketers and agency execs said it’s to soon to tell what its impact will be and that they don’t have figures for spending nor performance to share yet. 

“Smart Performance Campaigns work like a regular campaign but they allow the machine to optimize based on what the user is doing,” said Dan Yhip, director of media investments and platforms at No Fixed Address, adding that the offering is part of a larger trend of platforms pushing automated media buying options now.

“As you take manual buying away from buyers and have the automation there, automation gets better,” explained Yhip. “Then buyers can lean into what the data is telling us and how can I optimize the experience.”

Katya Constantine, CEO of performance marketing shop DigiShopGirl, likened the Smart Performance Campaign push from TikTok to Google’s AI-based solution Performance Max offering. Meta is also pushing its own AI media buying offering, Advantage+, which the company announced in February. “This next iteration of black box, AI-driven marketing tools is the future,” noted Constatine.

As more automation comes into play for advertisers and media buyers, questions about control or the future lack thereof are bubbling up. The answers to those questions are yet to be seen. 

“We are seeing a push across the board to more automation, such as Smart Performance,” said Patrick. “While this can streamline setup it can also mean less control for advertisers, so it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution, but there is speculation this automation will become the only way to buy across the industry.”

3 Questions with Monica Ho, CMO of SoCi marketing platform 

SoCi is further integrating artificial intelligence into its offerings. Why?

We’re a marketing platform built specifically for multi-location brands to really manage all of their digital marketing efforts across search, social reviews, and really manage their brand at the national level and the local level. What we’re really focused on right now is helping our marketers, our partners grow in this market. We’ve got still Covid, we’ve got [the] recession potentially looming. We know budgets are tight. We know resources are tight. That’s always been our march. Our focus is [to] consolidate everything into one tool. We’re going to make it efficient for you.

Give me an example of that. Why does it matter? 

We just launched an integration with Open AI. With this integration with OpenAI, what happens now is you get an alert that a [product] review happened. Immediately, we give you a suggested response through this Open AI feature, ChatGPT. And all you need to do is review it, post. ChatGPT, OpenAI, what they’re going to do is to make us a lot faster, a lot more efficient. It still needs that little bit of human involvement because it’s still not yet known how accurate some things are.

Shifting gears, performance and digital marketing is becoming more crowded with advertisers and brands. What will be the role of organic, digital communities in marketing this year?

Communities have a lot of potential for businesses. We’re seeing a lot of brands start to invest there. Brands have been challenged to engage communities. There’s a lot of communities popping up that they’re just not involved in. Even if it’s content they can’t use, say for social, listening in on those communities is invaluable. The best part about these communities [is] they’re free. You’re listening, you’re learning [and] you may have some content you can post. — Kimeko McCoy

By the numbers

Marketers say they will be using technology to streamline content creation, management and distribution to remain competitive amid the current economic uncertainty, according to the State of Content report commissioned by the cloud-based digital content management platform Bynder. For the report, 1,297 global CMOs were surveyed about their plans regarding content goals, challenges and future investments. Find more details from the report below:

• 83% of senior marketers are focused on consolidating their technology systems and reducing agency spend this year.
• 98% are prioritizing faster time to market and the delivery of content experiences across multiple platforms this year.
• 85% of marketers intended to invest in a digital ecosystem powered by a digital asset management solution. — Julian Cannon

Quote of the week

“[Marginalized voices on Twitter have] been ruthlessly deprioritized and deprioritized in a way that feels malicious. I hope that we can learn from the lesson of what we lost.”

— a former Twitter employee, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told Digiday when asked about the fate of Black Twitter following Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform

What we’ve covered

• Confessions of a programmatic sales lead on brand safety filters
• How Fubo is using Major League Baseball to draw new viewers to the streamer
• Bud Light uproar exposes need for marketers to manage marketer influencer controversies

They needed technology that was going to be better at matching advertisers to audiences who were visiting the online classifieds site. This isn’t an easy problem to solve, but something had to change. Gumtree’s ads team did just that last January, when it swapped the old data management partner for another (Permutive).

“We were seeing under 40% match rates with that particular data management platform, and it was causing some scale issues,” said Victoria Trevillion, head of ad tech and operations at Gumtree.

While the online classifieds site did not disclose what those newer match rates were, the results suggest they’re significantly higher.

Here’s what this means in cold, hard commercial terms: the click through rate of those direct ad campaigns’ run for the first three months of the year was around 36% higher than for the whole of 2022 — this includes programmatic guaranteed, programmatic direct and insertion orders, but not private marketplaces. The average cost per thousand impressions of this direct inventory over the same period is up 14% on the same period a year ago.

Impressive as these results were, the long-term benefits of the changes are still a little hazy. Yes, those numbers have piqued the interest of more advertisers in using Gumtree’s data to advertise on its sites, but that isn’t always turning into intent. In fact, most of the ad money Gumtree collects is from the open programmatic marketplace. It is cheaper and logistically easier to advertise this way, after all.

“The open market is about 60% of our business but that also includes our app inventory where open marketplaces are more dominant,” said Trevillion. “Forty percent is direct — and of that 70% is direct [insertion orders and programmatic guaranteed] and 30% private marketplaces.”

It won’t stay this way — but the change won’t be rapid. Marketers are nothing but creatures of habit. It takes them a while to adopt something new, and even when they do they don’t fully commit straight away. Still, of all the problems that could go wrong with this part of Gumtree’s ads business, this one is manageable — as in it’s more a question of when, not if, it gets resolved. Gumtree has seen enough over the last year to believe more advertisers will see the value in its data.

“Over the last year or so, we have around 400 different audience [segments] that have been additive,” said Trevillion. 

Granted, some of those audiences are different iterations of the same thing, so a 30-day version of a particular audience segment or a 60-day one, for instance. But Gumtree has also been able to add more audience types, from newer lookalike segments to ones filled with people who have clicked on previous campaigns — all thanks to those changes. And as a result, more advertisers have wanted to buy them — and in some cases pay more for them.

Gumtree tested how big that demand actually was last November when it put up its rates for direct campaigns by 10% following a review of the aforementioned changes.

“Historically we’ve probably had over 50% of our revenue coming from auto clients, which has obviously been a challenge, but we’ve been able to use audiences and insights to diversify away from that spend,” said Trevillion. 

Nevertheless, automotive advertisers remain a key part of Gumtree’s ads business. In fact, they’ve been some of the most progressive to adapt to the changes from the online classifieds site. 

One unnamed marketer used the insights that Gumtree shared on those users likely to purchase an electric vehicle to change its creative. Normally, it’s a rarity that marketers like this give feedback to Gumtree on the back of insights shared — let alone act on it. 

For many more marketers, however, seeing the most in this sort of data is a work in progress. As in, it’s more of a question of when, not if, due to the slow degradation of third-party tracking. The more this happens the more important it’s going to be for marketers to explore and implement alternative data strategies, including leveraging data from publishers like Gumtree. 

“Marketers shouldn’t be waiting for Google to make changes to third-party addressability to adapt their first-party strategy because first-party anything, whether it’s first-party data or first-party IDs, is a much more effective way of running any ad campaign over those that use third-party cookies or IDs,” said Phil Acton, country manager at ad tech vendor Adform. “This way the marketer gets a lot more information and data on someone than they would do if they were reliant on third-party tracking.”

That’s according to a first-quarter survey of just shy of 100 agency pros.

Digiday’s most recent survey found that the majority of agency pros are hybrid workers. To be exact, 59% said they work in their companies’ offices between one and four days in an average week. And among those hybrid workers, the highest percentage work in their companies’ offices an average of two days per week (24% said this).

And it turns out that, overall, agency pros who work a hybrid schedule do so by choice. Forty four percent of agency pros said their companies don’t require employees to work in the office at all. This category by far accounted for the largest percentage of respondents to Digiday’s survey. It is also worth noting that the next largest percentage of respondents were the 24% who said that their companies require employees to work in the office two days per week — which matches up with the 24% who said they work in their companies’ offices two days per week on average.

Interestingly, a significant percentage of agency pros are fully remote workers. Thirty percent of respondents to Digiday’s survey said that, in an average week, they don’t work any days in their companies’ offices. Meanwhile, only 10% of respondents said they work in an office full time, and an even smaller 8% said their companies require that employees work in the office full time.

Further supporting agency pros’ preference for a hybrid work culture, Digiday’s survey found that 80% said that, given the choice, they would prefer to work a hybrid schedule. Meanwhile, only 17% said they prefer to work remotely full time and a very small 3% said they prefer to work from an office full time.

More specifically, most agency pros said they prefer a hybrid work schedule in which they work remotely most days and spend some days in the office. Fifty-three percent of respondents to Digiday’s survey said this. And 27% said they prefer a hybrid schedule in which they work in an office most days and work remotely some days.

Digiday’s survey found that agency pros’ desire to see coworkers in person is a big driver of the hybrid culture agencies seem to have settled into. A whopping 93% of agency pros told Digiday that they agree somewhat or strongly that they enjoy seeing their coworkers in person. Looking a bit more closely at the data, nearly two-thirds (62%) said they strongly agree with this, and nearly a third (31%) said they somewhat agree. Only 1% of respondents to Digiday’s survey said they somewhat disagree that they enjoy seeing coworkers in person, and not one respondent said they strongly disagree with this.

It is also notable that 86% of agency pros told Digiday that they agree somewhat or strongly that they enjoy the change of scenery of heading into an office, with 44% saying they agree strongly and 42% saying they agree somewhat.

At this point, very few agency pros worry about the health risks associated with working in an office. Nearly three-quarters of respondents to Digiday’s survey (73%) said they disagree strongly or somewhat that they worry that going to the office presents risks to their health.

But agency pros are somewhat split on whether working in an office upsets the work-life balance many employees achieved during the pandemic. Forty-three percent of agency pros said they disagree strongly or somewhat that going to the office upsets their work-life balance. But a slightly less but still significant 34% said that they agree strongly or somewhat.

In this particular category, most agency pros seem to fall somewhere in the middle. One-quarter of respondents to Digiday’s survey said they somewhat disagree that going to the office is bad for their work-life balance, 22% said they neither agree nor disagree with this, and 21% said they somewhat agree.