Author: rssmasher

When House of Highlights decided to expand beyond its popular Instagram account, the Bleacher Report-owned sports and culture publication didn’t even consider Facebook.

First, Facebook isn’t a top destination for House of Highlights’ main audience of 12- to 24-year-olds, said Doug Bernstein, gm of House of Highlights. Second, the platform wasn’t just looking for scale for scale’s sake. “We want to be deeper with our community,” he said.

So House of Highlights turned to YouTube, joining a growing number of publishers and even famous athletes that see the Google-owned video service as the preferred platform to reach their core audience and reap some revenue in return.

A year ago, NBA star Kevin Durant was looking to reconnect with fans after switching teams. Durant and Rich Kleiman, his manager and co-founder of Thirty Five Media, sidestepped the other big platforms and met with YouTube’s top brass, including CEO Susan Wojcicki, chief business officer Robert Kyncl and chief product officer Neal Mohan. Kleiman already knew how big an audience YouTube had, but he came away from the meeting understanding how big YouTube stars had become and seeing that other athletes had not taken advantage of the platform.

“We just felt like, ‘Well, we spend all our time on YouTube consuming sports content, but none of it is original content or first-person content or docu-style content that we would normally create for another platform,” Kleiman said.

Durant’s YouTube channel launched in April 2017 — Kleiman likened it to Derek Jeter’s Player’s Tribune or LeBron James’ Uninterrupted — and after a strong reception from fans, Durant and Kleiman are trying to bring other athletes onto the platform. In January, Thirty Five Media announced a deal with YouTube to create YouTube channels for athletes, including NFL star Richard Sherman and NBA star Karl-Anthony Towns.

Safe harbor for publishers
While Facebook Watch hasn’t taken off as a revenue source for publishers and the social network has deprioritized publisher content, YouTube offers something of a safe harbor for publishers that want to get into the video business. For example, publishers can direct-sell into their video on YouTube, said Kai Hsing, svp of marketing and operations at Bustle, which recently rekindled its interest in YouTube. YouTube was the most lucrative platform for publishers after Facebook, according to a Digital Content Next report.

Publishers also recognize that people are going to YouTube specifically to watch videos. That’s a reason parenting publication Fatherly recently resurrected its YouTube channel. In January, Fatherly hired Adam Banicki, a former video producer at Vice, as its first vp of video. In February, it began uploading videos to its YouTube channel for the first time since June 2017.

“We all had the sense that the gross tonnage of views on Facebook was hitting a certain peak, and also, as a platform, Facebook didn’t have the same degree of intentional viewership that a platform like YouTube did,” said Fatherly CEO Mike Rothman.

Intentional viewing
Producing serialized shows for YouTube also gives publishers a way to try out programs that TV networks or streaming services may want to develop into long-form programming. Both Comedy Central’s “Broad City” and HBO’s “Insecure” originated as YouTube channels. Publishers that are new to YouTube are looking hopefully to this opportunity.

“Because we’re dealing with more intentional viewers, [YouTube] serves as a better test bed than Facebook for launching teasers for longer-form programming, where the monetization strategy can be taking a pilot concept that’s worked over a couple episodes on YouTube and then pitch to OTT or some other off-platform partner that can help us monetize through production financing and some kind of revenue split beyond that,” said Rothman.

House of Highlights’ YouTube channel has only been up for a little more than a month, but the publisher is already exploring original, scripted shows as an alternative to the highlight reels it has primarily been uploading.

“YouTube is a place that favors long-form viewing,” Bernstein said. “It’s also more appointment viewing. On Facebook or other platforms, you scroll by, and it’s the surprise element.”

Thirty Five Media has also been producing shows for Durant’s YouTube channel, including “Parking Lot Chronicles” starring Durant’s teammate JaVale McGee and a comedy series featuring actor Michael Rapaport. And Kleiman has been meeting with YouTube about producing episodic shows for YouTube Red, the platform’s subscription service.

“Instead of always having to sell a project, we can put something out on our YouTube channel and start to build a fan base and almost upstream it to YouTube Red or anywhere else on YouTube if the show takes off, or it could get picked up by major networks,” said Kleiman.

But for all the value that media companies are seeing in YouTube, they have to be wary of overinvesting in it, as with any one platform, or expecting the money to come overnight.

Refinery29 began putting a bigger focus on YouTube a year and a half ago, and in the second half of 2017, the publisher began focusing more on series to cultivate regular viewership. But Amy Emmerich, chief content officer at Refinery29, expressed caution about the platform.

“You cannot grow YouTube overnight unless you’re buying [ads to promote a channel],” she said, “but even then, YouTube would say that’s not a good long-term plan.”

For more on the future of TV and video, subscribe to Digiday’s weekly Video Briefing email. 

The post Why media companies are shifting their attention from Facebook to YouTube appeared first on Digiday.

To Pete Spande, publisher and CRO of Insider (formerly Business Insider), a typical ad sales meeting looks like this: “I had a meeting today where for part of the meeting, I had editors in the room talking about what they’re planning on the next couple of quarters,” he said. “Then, I had people from my content studio talking about how we could create content for a customer. Then, we gave them a tour of our video and podcast studios. There were agency people, client people and a consultant in the room. This is a three-dimensional chess relationship.”

So it goes for media sellers today. Selling advertising used to be suited to the lone wolf; now, only team players need apply. That’s a function of the product being sold becoming more complicated and involving multiple parts of the media organization. Even the nomenclature is different; salespeople are “client partners” or “engagement directors” because no one wants to feel like they’re just being sold to anymore.

The message can take time to get through. Some sellers still want to just “update me,” said Tom Morrissy, president of the agency Noble People and a former publisher. (“Tell me you have an original idea; don’t update me.”) The transition is hardest at digital-only media companies that have fallen back on scale as their selling point and are now realizing they have to compete on more than scale now that the ad pie isn’t growing, he said.

Publishers have done a good job organizing their sales teams by industry, but the biggest challenge is in execution, said Emma Witkowski, digital investment lead, West Coast & Atlanta, for Mindshare North America. So once the campaign has been sold, it gets handed off to a post-sales team that fails to deliver basics, like impressions and the deadline for going live, she said.

Sellers also have more demands on them as there are that many more things to sell, from ad formats to platforms like apps and events. They have to be data strategists who can make sure the campaign delivers results at the end of the day.

“You have programmatic and private marketplaces; you’ve got branded content, live events, custom solutions,” said Eddie Koller, managing partner of executive search firm Koller Search Partners, who estimates he handles 10 to 15 CRO searches a year. “Think of all the products sellers have in their toolkit. People’s time is more precious. The days of just coming in with a 50-page deck are over. So it’s a mix between someone who can think like a marketer and consultant but can close an order.”

While media sellers are all looking for the perfect salesperson who may or may not exist, it’s harder to find them because they’re in demand by companies that have more cachet than traditional media companies. All the while, there are far more publishers than there are dollars to go around.

“It’s harder to find the right people,” said Avi Zimak, CRO and publisher of New York Media. “The talent pool has been diminished because those same people are hungry to work at that cool startup.”

For some publishers, native advertising is now the biggest source of their ad revenue and comes with its own challenges. It requires people with a hybrid journalism-advertising background that can write in the publication’s voice but sell the client, and there is a limited pool of people who can do that.

It’s hard to find people who come from marketing and can sell a creative idea that will excite the publication’s audience, while journalists often don’t know how to sell, said Annie Granatstein, head of The Washington Post’s WP BrandStudio. She recently took her team on a field trip to see “The Post” to inspire them, and she talks a lot about a campaign’s “story angle.”

Publishers are trying to change the profile of their sellers. The New York Times recently let go several ad sales directors while creating a new partnerships team to chase the elaborate partnerships that it sees fueling its growth, along with agency-like products and services. Bloomberg Media is looking for people with skills found in strategists, creative directors and engineers in launching a new sales model around consulting services.

“Identifying the right type of talent is the real challenge as it is not something that previously existed within the publisher ecosystem en masse,” said Keith Grossman, global CRO of Bloomberg Media. “Moreover, if the answer is always ‘your brand,’ you are not thinking like a consultancy. That was a shift in thinking we had to get comfortable with in order to go from selling media to selling creative solutions for our clients.”

The expectations for consultants are greater than most publishers are used to delivering. “Media partners have become more strategic partners to us,” said Jeremy Tate, Boston gm of the agency DWA. “If a publisher wants to come in and be more consultative and connect more to business results, that’s great, but they only see one part of the consumer journey. They need end-to-end data to understand what their impact [on sales] has been. A consultant tends to get deeper into a client’s business, their technology stack, their customer segmentation. I’m not sure a single publisher is in a position to serve that role.”

Making media sellers’ job harder is the rise of Facebook and Google as competitors for digital advertising with unmatched scale and audience targeting. Salespeople used to fall back on having a good relationship with the client as a key to winning business, but today, to recycle an old catch phrase, no one ever got fired for buying Facebook.

“We’re all looking for unicorns, and many things are making it harder to find that unicorn,” Spande said.

The post ‘Three-dimensional chess’: The messy modernization of the media seller appeared first on Digiday.

Back in February, when Google’s general counsel, Kent Walker, said Google is “doubling down” on news, the evidence had already begun appearing on publishers’ analytics dashboards.

Google News’ share of overall referral traffic to publishers has grown 50 percent since January 2017 and now represents 1.5 percent of that referral traffic, with an especially sharp increase in the last three months, according to Parsely data.

“Consumers have realized that relying on accidental discovery through the Facebook news feed isn’t enough when it comes to learning about the world around them,” said Andrew Montalenti, Parsely’s CTO.

The increase on Google News hasn’t touched every publisher. For example, CNN, a top beneficiary of Google News, according to News Dashboard, hasn’t detected much change in the referral traffic it gets from there. But a variety of publishers have seen increases. CNBC said that during January and February, it had its best two months ever of referral traffic from Google News, an increase of 75 percent over its fourth-quarter average; Inc. said referral traffic from Google News has picked up “noticeably” during the past three months. The sites wouldn’t provide raw traffic numbers.

Google did not respond to a request for comment before press time, but the uptick in share comes as the tech giant is making changes to increase the referral traffic it drives to publishers from non-search products including Google News, Google Play Newsstand and Google Now. Referral traffic from those products nearly doubled from January 2017 to January 2018, according to Parsely.

“The thing that seems to be the real catalyst [for being added to Google News] is potential virality,” said Kurt Tietjen, the founder of search consultancy High Peak Media. “These were things you’d likely see getting traction on Twitter or getting traction on Facebook.”

Publishers that have detected this growth have noticed a similar pattern: Google will insert a news publisher’s story into its Top Stories widget, a kind of carousel that appears at the top of its search results. If that story attracts a lot of reader clicks, Google News would then add the story to its clusters on that specific topic.

Jim Robinson, CEO of search engine optimization consultancy ClickSeed, said the change in referral traffic from news could be a sign that Google News is now taking into account factors like click-through rate on Google search.

The growth in these referrals appears to be separate from the growth powered by Accelerated Mobile Pages, the fast-loading mobile page format whose influence Google has been trying to expand. CNBC, for example, has not changed the amount of news content it publishes using AMP over the past year; Inc. doesn’t use AMP at all, though it plans to start, said Allison Fass, the editorial director for Inc.’s site.

Dan Petty, the digital director of audience development at Digital First Media, which owns the Denver Post among other news outlets, said he has seen noticeable growth in Google News referral traffic on the Denver Post’s site, though that site does not have AMP enabled.

Petty speculated that a busy news cycle was a contributor. “We’re seeing increases in Google news traffic, but we’re also seeing increase in Google traffic, period,” Petty said.

For years, Google News has been a steady but unspectacular source of traffic for some publishers. It reliably ranks among the top 10 referral traffic sources for publishers, even though it only accounts for around 1 percent of global referral traffic, according to Parsely.

Yet in the past three months, Google News’ share of global referral traffic has risen sharply, Parsely data shows.

Still, until more data rolls in, publishers may be reluctant to make any meaningful changes to their distribution strategies.

“I always tell my clients to be careful,” Tietjen said. “The Google gods giveth, and the Google gods taketh away.”

The post In a small but welcome change, Google News referrals have perked up for publishers appeared first on Digiday.

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Since Milly launched in the early 2000s, the rules luxury brands are supposed to follow have changed.

“When we launched, there was no such thing as e-commerce, not really,” said Andy Oshrin, the CEO and co-founder of Milly, which he founded in 2001 with his wife, the designer Michelle Smith. “The way a brand was able to distribute was through a department store, a specialty store or their own retail store. So we decided that selling through luxury department stores and specialty stores was the easiest way to get started.”

That worked, for a time. But now that department store traffic is falling and boutiques are struggling to master e-commerce at scale, luxury brands that could once rely on wholesale networks for growth now have to allocate time, money and resources to building up direct retail channels, both in brand stores and online.

To recapture stalled growth, Milly has started direct-to-consumer operations and brought sales and marketing teams in house, and will launch a capsule collection later this year targeted at millennials, with more affordable prices and more frequently released pieces.

Oshrin joined the Glossy Podcast to share more about the brand’s evolution, the challenges that come with rerouting business and the role customer data plays. Edited highlights, below.

On dealing with department store decline
Oshrin and the rest of the team at Milly experienced firsthand what happens when the retail outlets you rely on for business start plummeting. It was right around the financial crisis of 2008 when the first pain was felt, and for the first time since the brand’s launch, that growth had leveled off. It wasn’t just sales that were impacted, either; with department stores changing their priorities in the downturn, less time was spent promoting and nurturing designer brands.

“We recognized that department stores, which were our biggest supporters, were overleveraged. They had too many stores, there was less customer service in the stores, and it had an affect on our brand,” said Oshrin. “They changed their marketing strategy so they could be efficient in their marketing spend, and they began marketing items and not brands. In a way, that hurt our ability to grow and our ability to bring out our brand ethos. It was an impossible task to cover expenses and make money while at the same time getting our brand message out there.”

On the direct-to-consumer switch
Department stores may not be as reliable of sales engines as they once were, but Milly hasn’t pulled the plug on third-party retail entirely since it launched e-commerce and opened its first retail store in 2011. To put it simply, building a direct-to-consumer business out of a wholesale brand is expensive.

“We’re engaging customers with experience, high-end customer service, and technology like data management, messaging and CRM. The only challenge we have is that it’s very expensive, and we have to remain in the wholesale sector to be able to pay for that,” said Oshrin. “So then you have this balancing act: You’re still in that sector and confronting their problems, [like promotions and falling traffic]. So we’re stuck with that model, but we need that revenue to promote and grow our e-commerce. We’re waiting for that tipping point.”

That tipping point is Milly’s current goal to have 60 percent of sales happen through its owned channels and 40 percent through retail partners.

On the new customer era
To achieve that, Milly is constantly compiling customer data from physical stores and the online store, in order to figure out who the customer is, what trends each demographic is interested in and how she likes to shop. From that work, Milly is releasing its first ongoing capsule collection, a line that’s exclusive to the Milly stores and based on millennial data. From design to sales floor, the collections are turned around in about six months, but Milly’s reactionary timeframe (how quickly it can ramp up production of items that are selling well) is as short as two weeks.

“We want to be in control. We know our customer age breakdown, and having a sweeter price point for a younger customer is, I think, going to be a blessing for us,” said Oshrin. “We’re going to message to them differently, personalize the collections and design based off customer data. Doing something new and different that creates engagement is what we’re interested in.”

The post Milly CEO Andy Oshrin on making the DTC shift appeared first on Digiday.

A few days after Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election, a strange topic captured part of the national imagination: programmatic ad inventory.

It happened thanks to Sleeping Giants, an anonymous Twitter account that first took aim at finance company SoFi, which was at the time buying ads on Breitbart News. The organizers behind the account took a screenshot, then tweeted it to SoFi. Thanks to the black box of programmatic — and the willful ignorance on the part of brands about where their ads appear — SoFi had no idea it was running ads on the site, which routinely publishes sexist, racist and bigoted stories.

The post Fighting the man: How shadow organizations are creating change in marketing appeared first on Digiday.

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In a Q&A with Digiday, John Martin, CEO of Turner, talks about turning its legacy TV institutions into multiplatform media businesses, the big consolidations happening in media, the growing rivalry with tech giants and the rise of streaming TV services.

What’s the biggest threat to Turner’s business today?
Our biggest challenge is to remain relevant when there’s an increasing number of choices for consumers to spend their time and energy — and their money. Thankfully, we still have big brands and we do have scale, but we have to think about our brands in a more holistic way and not just as basic cable, ad-supported television networks.

CNN’s been active in expanding its business to new platforms. How has that worked out?
By leaning into nontraditional platforms, we have a brand that resonates with people of all ages. The average age of a U.S. TV watcher of CNN is getting younger, but it’s still in the 50s, which by the way is 10 to 15 years younger than Fox News. Then, you have CNN.com, which averages users in the early 40s. The CNN app on the iPhone, it’s early to mid-30s; some of the partnerships CNN has done with Facebook and Snapchat, it’s early to mid-20s.

These are no longer just television channels, but branded environments that can exist anywhere. Even within CNN, we still talk about, “This is CNN, and this is CNN Digital.” The conversations I have with [CNN President] Jeff [Zucker] is that I can’t wait for the day that we drop that distinction — because there isn’t one.

What’s stopping you?
It’s organizational. When I first came here, CNN’s live TV organization and the editorial and video-on-demand organization did not sit in the same building. Under Jeff’s leadership, those two not only sit in the same building, but they now sit on the same floor. Thinking of ourselves as not a television network company but a content company, trying to reach people who are passionate about our brands, is a cultural shift that takes time.

A lot of digital publishers see Facebook and Google as existential threats to their businesses. Do you?
We had a conversation this morning about our presence on Instagram: How much of it is marketing, and how much of it is a real business where you can actually make money? In many respects, these alternative platforms, it’s about half and half at this point. When you’re frenemies with the likes of Google, Facebook and Snapchat, we want to be partners, but we have to get paid at the end of the day. We’re starting to make breakthroughs. We are starting to have conversations with these alternative platforms about potentially getting paid for our content.

Would you ever walk away from a platform if it doesn’t pay?
Leverage is an ephemeral thing. You need strong brands because then you can have a seat at the table and talk to these platforms about a partnership where we both get paid. But if you have marginal brands, you’re dead in the water.

So Google and Facebook aren’t existential threats to Turner’s future?
We don’t look at them as threats, but we need to pay attention to each of those companies — and I’d throw Apple and Amazon in there, too. All of a sudden, our biggest competitors are no longer Disney, Fox, NBC, CBS and other networks; it’s these “digital companies” that are coming in and taking two-thirds of all digital ad revenues and 85 percent of the marginal growth in digital ad revenues. We’re playing at a scale where we can get their attention and get them to come and want to partner with us.

Aren’t they going to compete for the future of TV?
Too many people give them credit that they are going to be able to get into long-form and short-form and professionally produced programming, and they are going to do it well. It’s hard to do.

I think Facebook is learning that right now.
And Apple is learning it, too. They’ve now hired some world-class people to come in and get their TV business off the ground, but in many respects, people still think of those companies as utilities. And last time I checked, people don’t have an emotional connection to their search history or shopping cart. What we do in terms of storytelling is very difficult to duplicate.

The mega-media consolidation that’s happening — with AT&T and Time Warner, with Disney and Fox — it’s at least in part a response to the growing power of the tech giants. Why is consolidation the answer?
It’s about relevance. In our case, getting together with AT&T is about technology, data and consumer relationships. There’s going to be more growth in mobile content consumption. To be able to tap into the tens of millions of customer relationships that AT&T has on mobile would be a great head start.

Disney argues that it needs to bulk up as it builds more direct-to-consumer products. How important is that to you?
There’s a more concerted strategy here about developing direct-to-consumer businesses, but you have to balance it. We get paid almost $12 billion a year between our advertisers and our affiliates, so we want to make sure we have really powerful offerings that continue to bring in those dollars.

But we need to develop new businesses, and increasingly, those businesses are not going to be new cable networks, but businesses that can stand on their own and consumers will be willing to pay for. We need to grow our non-advertising, nontraditional subscriber revenues.

Are customers going to want to pay for 20 different subscription services, or are we headed for a rebundling of sorts?
I think the idea of rebundling is a real idea. One of the reasons I like being in the same company as HBO and Warner Bros. is we collectively have unbelievable content offerings. It’s not a crazy idea to, say, soft-bundle HBO Now and Boomerang. All of a sudden, HBO Now, which already has more than 5 million subscribers, can also offer this unbelievable kids offering.

Are streaming TV bundles a legitimate opportunity or a quick, short-term Band-Aid to combat eroding cable subscribers?
Last time I checked, the cumulative number of subscribers for these virtual MVPDs in the United States was almost 4.5 million. These are becoming legitimate numbers.

What’s the challenge there? Most of these services are being more selective about what channels they include in their base tiers.
What that’s demonstrating is that there are too many bad networks in this country. There are networks that are carried as part of the uber-bundle that have absolutely no consumer value. And they were originally launched in an era when there was an idea that you could have unlimited amounts of affiliate fees and the pie would continue to grow, and you could sell advertising on the back of that as well. Those days are gone.

The post Turner CEO John Martin: ‘If you have marginal brands, you’re dead in the water’ appeared first on Digiday.

In our latest poll, we surveyed 41 members to get their thoughts on brands bringing media buying in-house.

A long-established trend in marketing is for brands to in-house their marketing efforts and rely less on external agencies. Digiday research recently found that 56 percent of brands plan to handle more of their marketing internally in the coming year.

The post Digiday Research poll: 69 percent believe brands should conduct media buying in-house appeared first on Digiday.

President Donald Trump blocked Broadcom’s $117 billion hostile offer for Qualcomm over national-security concerns, quashing what would have been the biggest-ever tech deal.

TBS’ presentation of the iHeartRadio Music Awards tallied 10.858 million interactions across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, dominating the Nielsen Social Content Ratings for the week of March 5. The last two installments of ABC’s The Bachelor placed second and third, with 2.573 million total interactions for the penultimate installment and 1.909 million for the finale….

The Trump administration’s extraordinary intervention against the $117 billion takeover of Qualcomm surfaced suddenly last week. But it was months in the making.