Author: rssmasher

If you don’t succeed, try again. Snapchat really wants Spectacles to happen, again. But this time, Snap’s retail strategy involves a lot less hype — no fancy vending machines — and a lot more by-the-books tactics. 

The second generation of Spectacles has several improvements from the first, including taking photos (not just videos) and faster-loading and better-quality snaps. The sunglasses are also sleeker and lighter than the previous model, and they’re water-resistant. Snap also announced an official partner for making prescription lenses, Lensabl.

Yet the biggest shift isn’t those changes in the product. It’s the marketing. Starting at launch, Spectacles are available to buy on Spectacles.com, within the Snapchat app and through Lensabl. If that sounds practical, that’s because it is — and is very different than the original Spectacles debacle, which came with a $40 million write-off due to overestimating demand. Snap suddenly introduced its first-generation Spectacles with distribution relying on mysterious vending machines dropped seemingly randomly around the world to offer a limited number of glasses for a limited amount of time. The approach paid off with lots of buzz — winning three Gold Lions at Cannes  — but didn’t rack up much in the way of sales.

“The first round for Spectacles was mediocre for selling glasses, but very successful for showing how Snap can innovate as a marketer first and product manufacturer second. It let the product live to see another day, too. This time, they have to show off the product, not the marketing,” said David Berkowitz, marketing lead at Storyhunter.

Indeed, Snap only sold 220,000 of the first-generation Spectacles, despite the Snapbot drops and the later move to sell on Amazon and via Spectacles.com. Snap also bought outdoor displays, such as buckets at airport security, and ran programmatic ads. The company set up more permanent Spectacles stands at high-end retailers and on college campuses, and still, 0.11 percent of Snapchat’s daily average users purchased them.

The exclusivity in their early days did create an expensive online resale market and stir up interest with some Snapchat superfans who weren’t nearby any of the first few drops.

“My friends were snapping about it and being in line for hours. I saw that everyone wanted one, so I wanted one,” said Cyrene Quiamco, a Snapchat influencer. “My first thought was, ‘Why would anyone want to turn their phone?’” Quiamco said, referencing Spectacles’ ability to take 180-degree videos. That was a focus in Snap’s promos.

But after getting her first pair thanks to a friend, Quiamco started using her Spectacles and Snapchat’s creative tools (like text and doodling) to make videos that encouraged her followers to turn the phone. Now, a year and a half into wearing Spectacles, Quiamco said she’s planning to buy the second-generation product.

“It’s similar to cell phones whenever you get a new version,” Quiamco said. “It’s faster. It’s sleeker. Technology is kind of like that. It’s more stylish. I think the second version is more usable.”

Of course, wanting Spectacles when you, in part, make your living isn’t too surprising. When it comes to the mainstream consumer or really the 187 million people who use Snapchat every day, Snap introduced new marketing strategies.

While Snap previously did not allow media outlets early access to Spectacles (other than WSJ. Magazine), the company gifted tech outlets, including The Verge, Mashable and Wired as well as Time and Refinery29, with the second-generation product for a quick review. That earned press helped spread the word at launch rather than just having a surprise drop of a Snapbot nearby the headquarters in Venice, California.

“Although there was hype with vending machines, I don’t think it achieved a desired measurable success. They are likely more confident in this product with its tweaks in function and design,” said Tyler Hayes, content manager at tech product startup Xcentz. “But ultimately, can’t you really only do a secretive marketing campaign once before it’s played out and predictable?”

On launch day, Snapchat ran an ad for Spectacles in the Discover section of the app, where users could swipe up to buy. The company plans to show more of these ads on the app, a Snap spokesperson said. Snapchat also will create Our Stories that feature snaps captured by Spectacles. To celebrate people who buy them, the Actionmojis (live Bitmojis on Snap Map) will show if a user has their Spectacles connected or recently took snaps with them.

A Snap spokesperson declined to comment on whether the company will run TV ads or any other type of paid ads, like billboards or online ads, as they have in the past. Snap has two promotional videos on the Spectacles YouTube page. The videos emphasize the summer launch of the product, which is indeed a pair of sunglasses in addition to a camera.

Snap could use those promos for ads and continue to market Spectacles in other creative ways. Or not. 

“It would have been cool to open Snap Map and hunt for very limited pairs of Spectacles in AR, [and] if found, shipped to you for free or at discount,” said Nick Aguirre, a law student who is an investor in Snap. “But I think they maybe just didn’t want any gimmicky marketing this time around. Just straight to the point.”

The post Snapchat’s new shot at high-tech glasses comes with a more traditional marketing strategy appeared first on Digiday.

A year after creating an interactive news team, Politico says it’s paying off. The content has drawn 7 million unique visitors to more than 20 interactive graphics such as one detailing White House visitor logs and a fact-checking analysis of the State of the Union address, and it gets seven times as much readership as the average story, said Politico editor Carrie Budoff Brown.

The five-person interactive team’s work has also sparked advertiser interest. Politico got AARP to sponsor a series called “The Deciders” that will focus on U.S. voters who are 50 and older heading into the midterm elections. That series will include polls conducted by Politico and AARP that the interactive team will convert into charts and other visualizations, which will then inform articles in Politico’s print magazine.

“The fact that we have a team that can do visually compelling interactive graphics is a selling point for us as we do ambitious projects that might have an underwritten component for sponsors,” said Brown, who emphasized that sponsors have no role in the editorial content they underwrite.

Brown took a personal interest in establishing the interactive news team, which she did soon after taking the reins of the publication after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. One of Politico’s first reporters, having joined a month before its 2007 launch, Brown always wanted to tell stories in multiple ways.

She shared that objective with Paul Volpe, who was hired from The New York Times in November 2016 as Politico’s executive editor. At the Times and The Washington Post before that, Volpe had worked with visual journalists and interactive developers, and he saw the importance of visual journalism as an enabler of transparency and accountability journalism, he said.

Politico’s interactive team illustrated that importance with one of its first projects. After the Trump administration decided against releasing public White House visitor logs, Politico reporter Andrew Restuccia worked with the interactive team to create an unauthorized version. “We were trying to tell a story on the surface level for anyone who just popped in and wanted to gain some information,” Volpe said. “And then we were also able to provide users a tool to go deeper and look at the types of people, whether it was from industry or by race or gender, that were visiting the White House.”

Beyond individual articles, the interactive team rebuilt the technology underpinning Politico’s election results coverage. It also created a custom content management system to make who’s who lists like the Politico 50 more mobile-friendly and a chat tool to have Slack power its live blogs.

All of that work can overextend the interactive team, particularly as more members of Politico’s newsroom want to work with it. To deal with that, the team has built back-end tools for other reporters to do their own visual journalism, such as a chart maker that can be used in daily news coverage.

While Politico’s interactive news team has more than doubled from its two members at launch last April, its members can still be counted on one hand, though it will add a sixth member by June. “I wish we had more of them because really, the demands are that strong,” said Brown.

The post Inside Politico’s five-person interactive news team appeared first on Digiday.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Digital Content NewFronts kick off this week, so cue the brand-safety pitches. One of the first comes from NBCUniversal, which is pitching the market on a new way of buying its short-form video.

NBCU Choice bundles video across NBCU’s own clips from its shows like “Saturday Night Live” and “Late Night with Seth Meyers” as well as short-form video from the partners it sells for, BuzzFeed, Vox Media, Snapchat and Apple News. An estimated 50 percent of that inventory exists on YouTube. With the many public ad-safety debacles that YouTube has had this past year or so on other channels, NBCU saw an opportunity.

“There’s enormous demand from clients for brand-safe video, and places they’ve been buying from aren’t delivering on brand safety,” said Trevor Fellows, evp of digital sales and strategy at NBCU. “But they don’t want to go brand by brand. It’s a real issue.”

NBCU defines “short-form” video as anything that’s not episodic, which is priced lower than long-form video and has the advantage of having less ad clutter by virtue of its shorter length. Fellows said NBCU opted to sell this way because agencies tend to buy by format. NBCU isn’t requiring a minimum spend, but he said he expects deals to be at least in the “hundreds of thousands” of dollars and that he’d “love to be doing in the hundreds of deals in the first year.” CPMs are expected to be in the low teens to high 20s.

NBCU Choice builds on NBCU’s move in 2015 to begin selling ads against “The Tonight Show” clips on YouTube.

There’s been a drumbeat of headlines about ads appearing next to racist, pedophilia and other offensive YouTube channels. Many marketers paused their spending on the platform, and the company has responded by adopting stricter ad policies, hiring more people to review videos and giving advertisers more control over where their ads appear. There hasn’t been a wholesale shift by advertisers off the platform in part because it’s hard to replicate those huge audiences elsewhere, though.

Fellows doesn’t have any illusions that NBCU Choice, which can reach 10s of millions of viewers, can compete with the scale of YouTube, whose users upload hundreds of hours of video a minute. But he said the benefit of NBCU’s pitch is that the content is guaranteed to be brand-safe and can be targeted to audience segments, which could end up shifting share from low-quality video. “The challenge is not YouTube as a delivery of quality — it’s YouTube as a guaranteer of brand safety,” he said.

If NBCU can offer a brand safety advantage along with a guarantee that revenue isn’t shared with owners of user-generated content, it could have some merit, said Rob Auger, vp and group director, media technology at Digitas. “The thought of advertising dollars possibly funding unethical individuals/groups makes our more conservative advertisers uncomfortable,” he said.

JoAnna Foyle, COO of video analytics firm OpenSlate, said for advertisers that don’t require huge scale, NBCU’s pitch could be a viable option. “You can get to a very clean version of YouTube, but it takes time,” she said. What you’re trading would be scale and a very different audience. Part of the reason our advertiser [clients] are committed to YouTube is, there are audiences they can’t reach elsewhere.”

We’ve asked YouTube for comment; we’ll update this story if it responds.

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One emerging tactic in turning readers into subscribers: get them involved.

The Financial Times often asks for reader contributions to its projects, either through submitting essays, like during its Future of Britain initiative, or sharing personal experiences. Dutch publisher De Correspondent involves members throughout the process, from reporting to proofreading. The Guardian’s gambit: Reader surveys form the basis of articles across its news desks to encourage loyalty.

“Our readers know a huge amount about the topics that we cover,” said Lilah Raptopoulos, community editor at the FT. “If they’re not experts, they often have relevant experience around what we’re reporting on or have really good questions that our reporting can help answer. Opening up the traditional reporting process to include them is a no-brainer to me.”

Publishers have long invested energy in their comments sections not just to mine them for editorial direction, but to encourage loyalty and boost frequency of visits with audiences. Others, typically subscription publishers, have gone further. Just as giving access to editorial talent through events can encourage subscriptions, giving the most engaged members a look behind the curtain is a perk.

The FT considers the gap in coverage it wants its reader to fill and the best way to reach the reader — whether a survey, a prompt at the end of a story, questions on a podcast — as well as how responses are used and how to measure success. This week, Simon Kuper, life and arts columnist at the FT, published a callout on the site and on Twitter asking how young people plan to watch the World Cup. In December, the FT ran its seasonal appeal for Alzheimer’s Research UK, including a call to readers to share their experiences having or caring for someone with the disease. The three collections of stories and photos that were published had some of the highest dwell times of the series.

According to Raptopoulos, subscribers who respond to the FT’s callouts are 35 percent more engaged for eight weeks after submitting their response compared to a control group.

Becoming more customer-centric is a natural evolution for publishers looking to grow reader revenue, said Nial Ferguson, a consultant who works with publishers on setting up reader-revenue streams. “The word ‘funnel’ will be used more and more by all publishers,” he said. “Every ounce of reader data will be called upon to improve conversions and connection.” He also added that in terms of content, value and control will be key.

De Correspondent, which now has 60,000 paying members, has no audience engagement team. Instead, it’s the responsibility of everyone in the organization. Writers are contracted to spend 50 percent of their time interacting with members, who can contribute their own experience in publicly accessible reporters’ notebooks, said Jessica Best, engagement editor at De Correspondent. This stems from believing that a number of health care professionals will have more knowledge that one health care correspondent.

When reporting on the porn industry, De Correspondent sent out a wide range of requests, including asking for academics to talk about the sociological impact, asking readers to scrape data from porn sites and inviting actors from the industry to the publisher’s office. This range offered all readers opportunities to get involved as much as they wished.

Another byproduct of involving readers to this degree is it encourages entrenched reporters to think more objectively and avoid falling into their unconscious biases around topics they have covered for some time. De Correspondent writers are encouraged to share when they change their mind, too.

Ernst-Jan Pfauth, De Correspondent co-founder and publisher, said the publisher is in the process of introducing a reward system for readers to boost their reputation on the site. But even without visible kudos, offering readers the chance to get involved has benefits.

“The journalistic value of this translates into commercial value,” said Raptopoulos. “Even just the callout being there sends a message to our readers that we respect them and know we can learn from them. All of this work builds trust. And that builds loyalty.”

The post Driving value from subscriptions, publishers involve readers in the process appeared first on Digiday.

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