Americans increasingly relied on credit cards to make payments in 2016, and made more of those payments remotely, according to new data the Federal Reserve.
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Here’s the deal behind Jann Wenner’s deal to sell Rolling Stone, his iconic music magazine
It’s an “investment,” not a sale, for an important reason.
Fifty years after founding Rolling Stone, the iconic music and pop culture magazine, Jann Wenner is handing it over to new owners.
Penske Media, the publisher that owns trade publications like Variety and WWD, is buying a majority stake in Wenner’s Wenner Media, which in turn gives it control of Wenner’s 51 percent stake of Rolling Stone.
The deal puts Rolling Stone’s enterprise value — which includes the cash on Rolling Stone’s books — at more than $100 million, according to a person familiar with the transaction — which means that Penske put in something in the $50 million range to buy the magazine. That price surprised some people who had looked at the deal earlier in the year, and valued the stake in the $30 million to $40 million range.
That convoluted structure of the deal — Wenner’s team describes it as an “investment,” not a sale — is important for two reasons:
- BandLabs Technologies, the Singapore-based company that bought 49 percent of Rolling Stone last year, had a right of first refusal for any offer for the rest of the magazine, according to people familiar with the sale process. By structuring the transaction as an investment, this prevents BandLabs from buying the whole magazine.
- The deal also allows Jann Wenner and his son Gus, who has been steering the business of Rolling Stone for a few years, to call themselves equity owners in the family business. Jann Wenner will become editorial director of the property, and Gus will stay on as president.
As Recode reported last month, Penske Media owner Jay Penkse was one of three bidders circling the property: Irving Azoff, a longtime Wenner friend/frenemy, was also looking at it, backed with money from New York Knicks owner Charles Dolan. So was Bryan Goldberg, the CEO of Bustle, a digital publication aimed at millennial women, who also co-founded Bleacher Report, a site acquired by Time Warner’s Turner in 2012.
But it was never clear that Azoff and Dolan, who have no publishing experience, wanted to actually own and operate Rolling Stone magazine. And while Goldberg has now founded two digital startups, he doesn’t have any experience with print, which accounts for the majority of Rolling Stone’s business today.
But Penske’s portfolio, which is primarily tilted toward trade publications, does include print titles, like Variety. The stretch for him will be running an iconic brand: While Penske owns some consumer-facing properties, like Robb Report and BGR, this is by far the best-known title he will have owned.
Penske’s main task will be helping Rolling Stone create a business on the internet, which Jann Wenner proudly ignored for years. Today, digital is a tiny fraction of Rolling Stone’s revenue, though Gus Wenner says he has a plan to fix that.
Note that in Rolling Stone’s absence, no one has really created a dominant digital destination for music-related content. Perhaps that’s because the internet allows music fans to seek out whatever niche they like instead of coming to a general-interest destination. Perhaps that’s also because in a YouTube + Spotify age, there’s no reason to read about a band when you can hear and see them with a single push of a button.
In any case, it’s no longer Jann Wenner’s problem. But he’ll still be able to keep a piece — presumably a small one — of the property that allowed him to become a media star himself.
You can read about Wenner’s amazing life story via “Sticky Fingers,” a new semi-authorized biography by Joe Hagan. I talked to Hagan earlier this fall for the Recode Media podcast: You can read a transcript of that conversation here or listen on Apple Podcasts or below.
The Guardian’s David Pemsel: ‘Our relationship with Facebook is difficult’
This article appears in the latest issue of Digiday magazine, a quarterly publication that is part of Digiday+. Members of Digiday+ get access to exclusive content, original research and member events throughout the year. Learn more here.
David Pemsel, CEO of Guardian Media Group, is concerned about Facebook but bullish on the ability of philanthropic contributions to fund publishing. Below is our conversation, which has been lightly edited and condensed.
Your move to a more reader revenue-focused model has resulted in reader revenue overtaking advertising. What’s the future for that?
When we started this three-year plan, we recognized that advertising alone would not secure a sustainable business model. We looked at the binary decision of either putting up a paywall, which will inevitably impact reach, or going the advertising-only road and saw a third way in which we can still have reach but at the same time optimize reader loyalty globally and domestically.
Why not a paywall?
Well-intentioned people often tell me, “Just keep cutting costs, put up a paywall and the Guardian will be profitable.” But we have to remind people of the role the Guardian plays in the world. People are anxious about what the world is right now, and our unique ownership structure, which is totally independent and free of shareholders, means people trust our independence and want to support us to keep us as openly accessible as possible.
What are the cultural challenges in moving to more of a reader-revenue model?
We haven’t always legitimized genuine collaboration. There’s tension. When you’re trying to get to a sustainable outcome, a dynamic news agenda, with finite resources, you’re pivoting from an advertising-only to a reader-contributor strategy, there’s a lot of heat in the organization. You must deploy your most precious people in a strategic way, but give them autonomy to collaborate, debate and argue their way to an outcome.
What’s the opportunity in philanthropy?
There are some conventions derived from The New York Times that X percent of your regular readers are likely to become paying subscribers, and that’s your future business model. Over time, that will cap out. You’re then stuck with a finite number of paying subscribers. There are different groups of people who will subscribe digitally and others that contribute at an article level because they feel passionate about a subject. There is no ceiling on how far contributions can go.
What’s next for publishers’ relationship with Facebook and Google?
We have a close relationship with Google from [CEO] Sundar [Pichai] down. They recognize the role of quality news within their ecosystem. So we’ve collaborated a lot around video, VR funding, data analytics and engineering resources. It’s a valuable strategic relationship.
What about Facebook?
Facebook is a different picture. Our relationship with them is difficult because we’ve not found the strategic meeting point on which to collaborate. Eighteen months ago, they changed their algorithm, which showed their business model was derived on virality, not on the distribution of quality. We argue that quality, for societal reasons, as well as to derive ad revenue, should be part of their ecosystem. It’s not. We came out of Instant Articles because we didn’t want to provide our journalism in return for nothing. When you have algorithms that are fueling fake news and virality with no definition around what’s good or bad, how can the Guardian play a role within that ecosystem? The idea of what the Guardian does being starved of oxygen in those environments is not only damaging to our business model but damaging to everyone.
Should Google and Facebook be regulated?
Regulation ensures there isn’t negative impact from market dominance, which there is with those organizations, especially in advertising. But you can’t sound anti-platform or anti-digital or anti-Google or Facebook because it’s the future. News organizations have had this narrative of “it’s unfair, look what they’re doing.” But regulation needs to be used appropriately to ensure there is fairness.
You’ve described the digital ad model as broken. How would you describe it now?
The commoditization that’s come with everything being more machine-led has meant some clients have lost sense of how to build brand equity over time. There is nothing wrong with programmatic; it’s just the safeguards in that ecosystem need to be about total transparency. Some of those data points in media planning are completely opaque, and that still needs to be solved.
Who is responsible for addressing ad fraud?
There is a client at the top of this food chain. It’s their money. They can’t allow their money to be disseminated in places they don’t understand, so it’s beholden on clients being much clearer on where their money is deployed and for agencies to be more clear and transparent about where that money is going.
What’s a big trend you see in 2018?
Voice is increasingly on our radar. The translation of the written word into devices like Google Home or Alexa is starting to take off. What is the role of news organizations in a voice-activated search world with no interface? What’s the user experience? How do you get brand recognition? If you say, “Good morning, Alexa or Home,” how can you be reassured that the Guardian is the first thing that comes up in the news category? I love that challenge.
The future of media and net neutrality?
The discussion of net neutrality in the US telco landscape has become highly polemicized in recent years.
So much so that it’s now almost impossible to discuss the technical implications and limitations of net neutrality without touching on fundamentally thorny issues of political debate.
While it is easy to bring in wider discussions of basic rights or censorship it should be noted that the concept of net neutrality is primarily concerned with limiting or controlling how internet service providers (ISPs) can manage, monetize and develop their networks. Understandably, many operators in the media industry have been watching the debate in the US very closely.
One internet, many uses
As a society, we’re putting the internet, and the data we carry over it, to a huge variety of different uses. Countless articles online will tell you of the ‘proliferation of data’ due to the Internet of Things, 4K video, machine learning and many other bleeding-edge innovations. Internet traffic is rising at an annual rate of 26%.
As a result of this growth, ISPs around the world should be investing heavily in improving the infrastructure responsible for meeting this demand and delivering the next wave of technological innovation. Video content alone is forecast to be 82% of Internet traffic by 2021.
The requirements of a network capable of delivering an early bulletin board or email service is fundamentally different to one dedicated to delivering live video streams. The fact we can currently even consider doing this over the same internet is a testament to the highly effective architecture of the net and the collaborative, open work that continues to be done by organizations such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
This is the result of incredibly innovative engineering and service delivery operating at global scale. But there’s no reason to believe that these requirements won’t continue to evolve in the future. The internet’s reliance on overcapacity to ensure a consistent quality of service, is likely to be unsustainable and expensive in the long run.
The opponents of net neutrality claim innovation is being stifled by the requirement that all service providers to deliver a “lowest common denominator” internet. They argue that ISPs need an incentive, and investment, to upgrade their network infrastructure and provide valuable differentiated services catered specifically for the needs of different providers
The myth of a neutral net
The truth is that net neutrality is something of a myth from a technical perspective. The internet is already a two-tier race for those who have the money.
Lots of industries move data around private networks without resorting to the public internet. They are willing to pay for quality, consistency or specialty because they use it to secure a competitive advantage. This is especially true for sectors such as financial services and digital media. Broadcasters historically avoided carrying anything over a somewhat unreliable public internet, instead investing in private networks to deliver their service. Telcos even created a triple play business out of exploiting their own networks to deliver that same experience to the consumer.
Today, their contemporary competitors, OTT providers such as Netflix, similarly concerned about offering a consistent, quality service to their customers are investing hugely in their internet infrastructure. Cloud computing to make their operations more efficient and both globally and locally scalable, paired with content distribution networks and ‘edge’ computing – placing computing resources closer to the end user – helps to improve bitrate, reduce latency and reduce buffering on streamed video content.
These internet ‘users’ have chosen to spend money on more powerful and scalable network capabilities. This allows media operators to work across geographically diverse platforms, get closer to their consumers worldwide and use network redundancy to overcome inevitable failures. These ‘improvements’ can be conveniently categorized as network management and don’t fall foul of net neutrality because they are theoretically available to anyone, if they can pay. That net neutrality then guarantees their hard won advantage through the last mile to the consumer has more than a whiff of hypocrisy about it! The position becomes more forgivable when it is considered that that last mile is often controlled by dominant competitors.
Nevertheless, these improvements provide a clear example of market forces at work to deliver an improved value proposition and that also make the Internet work better.
An unbundled internet
When considering the rationale for investment in the internet, it’s important to note a key distinction between the internet and other public utilities. Water and electricity are essential elements of public life, but they do not operate as engines of commerce and business in the same way as the internet. Whole swathes of the global economy, not least the media and entertainment industry, have been built on or completely disrupted by the internet.
The truth of the matter is that net neutrality is a sticking plaster over an incredibly and increasingly complex value chain. A differentiated internet, underpinned by an unbundled, transparent payment/supply structure would allow the right services to be offered to the right customers at the right prices.
This is what needs to be considered when deciding on a regulatory framework for the internet. Governments and regulators should focus on ensuring the internet remains foremost a competitive platform for the economy, protecting consumers and promoting innovation.
The risks are high. Get it wrong and innovation could be snuffed out, setting the internet back by decades. Get it right and the internet could go on to become mankind’s greatest achievement.
Game over: The death of the sales funnel and leveling up attribution
It’s game over for the traditional customer journey.
Today’s consumer has fragmented the ancestral sales funnel by wandering freely across channels and devices in search of the best product or deal. The average consumer owns more than seven devices, using more than three each day, of which marketers typically only see one, according to the Data & Marketing Association’s 2017 Statistical Fact Book.
To put it a different way: The path to purchase has evolved from a two-dimensiona
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Poundland social team doesn't face sack over teabag tweet – part of a lewd £25.53 marketing campaign
UK discount retailer Poundland has denied its social accounts were hacked after it posted an off-colour tweet where an elf on the shelf elf teabagged a female doll.
The brand’s creative juices were flowing in a post promoting its Twinings teabags where it asked consumers how they take their tea. The post, issued on Thursday 21 December, appeared on the Poundland and Dealz social media accounts and referred to the insertion of the scrotum into another’s mouth, a colloquialism often deployed and enacted virtually in video game communities.
International Business Times quotes the brand’s marketing director, mark Pym said he was proud of the campaign which cost a reported £25.53 to deliver. Cheap for the media space the stunt may have seized.
The post came as part the brand’s long-running #ElfBehavingBadly campaign that was running through December. There were complaints on Poundland’s social channels however. Some users enquired if the account had been hacked.
Hi Mark. The Poundland account has not been hacked. I am sorry that you feel this way and will share your feedback. Thanks, Zoe
— Poundland (@Poundland) December 21, 2017
There was also some marketing flattery chucked into the mix.
— Poundland (@Poundland) December 21, 2017
Further to this, there was a debate as to whether journalists should be pursuing this story. The jury is out on that one.
You’re aware that The Drum is a marketing news website and so reporting on a badly misjudged misogynistic marketing campaign is the sort of thing it does, right?
— Simon HB (@norock) December 21, 2017
Restoring trust will bring in a sustainable digital future, says the IAB: The Drum Digital Trading Awards 2018 open to entries
Digital trading focused on the quality considerations and effective use of budgets last year, according to IAB, which believes that work around restoring trust has been huge and some of those initiatives are setting the industry on a course for a sustainable future.
“Digital is still a very young media with countless firsts and frontiers still to be reached, its fast paced and even the smallest contribution can make a titanic difference. In the end you need to be in it to win it though, and every innovation is worthy of praise,” said IAB UK’s senior programmes manager, David Frew, who is a judge for The Drum Digital Trading Awards 2018.
He continued: “These awards remain a great way to showcase exemplary work in digital that leverages all of the unique capabilities of such an interactive media. Digital remains, the best way to reach and wow consumers and brands need effective ways to expand from getting their message out there to holding an actual conversation.”
The Drum Digital Trading Awards, return for a fifth year to recognise and reward the very best in the ad-tech/programmatic environment. Entries are open to anybody in the digital media eco-system and will reward those who can actively show that what they do, day in and day out works for their clients or for themselves.
Show me entity :: 17094
Manning Gottlieb OMD took home the Grand Prix prize, among other categories, for the campaign, proving mobile effectiveness for Specsavers. Talking about why the company entered these awards, Matthew Taylor, head of digital planning said: “The Drum Digital Trading Awards are rooted in digital effectiveness, whatever the category. As such, we really wanted to showcase how we [as an agency] typically formulate towards effectiveness, which for us is demonstrating our ability to partner data with creativity.
“The best use of mobile was one such category that allowed us to showcase this, hence its humble title ‘Proving Mobile Effectiveness for Specsavers.’
“To be recognised as the Grand Prix winner in this space was fantastic, especially as the Digital Trading Awards encompass such a variety of entrants from across the industry. As such, the sense of achievement for us and the client was palpable.”
What categories will you enter? There is a wide variety of digital areas you can choose, including: Best Audience measurement Platform, Most Effective Use of Data, Best Overall Technology for Programmatic Trading, Most Effective Programmatic Trading Partnership and more.
Entries for The Drum Digital Trading Awards close on Friday February 16, for more information please click here.
Spotify Wraps Up 2017 With This Darkly Comic Salute to Ed Sheeran
It’s been a strong holiday season for Spotify, which rolled out its fun, data-driven “2018 Goals” billboards, fact-checked the year’s top songs with The New York Times’ T Brand Studios, and unveiled personalized “2017 Wrapped” experiences for users and artists. Now, the streaming music service is putting a bow on things with a 30-second TV…
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Transparency and Trust: How to boost returns on marketing investment in 2018 and beyond?
With the continuing fall out of Brexit and how it impacts on consumer confidence, a knock-on effect will be how that influences brand budgets, and as a consequence, a push for real focus on ROI as a metric for customer success, according to Bing UK head of strategic sales, Aaron McGrath.
McGrath says there are two areas that should be questioned. How does the industry really drive ROI and efficiency? And how does it continue to build trust with consumers?
He expresses that ROI has always been a metric for success, but in 2018, what the industry will see is brands thinking about how much they are spending, how they are going to spend and how effectively they will do that.
Also, publishers, brands and agencies should be keeping an eye on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. How will these concepts be used as a crucial success to 2018?
We’re talking to machines a lot more than we used to, and machines, like Alexa and Cortana, are listening to us more than they used to. The same goes for image or video recognition, allowing machines to watch us a lot more than before. With the power of machine learning, machines are collecting all this data in a much more powerful way, explains McGrath.
The opportunity for brands, agencies and publishers then is how to turn that into an emotional connection/intelligence. Thinking about how they can be intentional about it and how to understand the emotion of the user/consumer in a way that seems natural to them, by overlaying AI with what is found to be the most intelligent and sending that message at the right time, to the right person.
However, there is always a danger when pushing out words like listening, talking, watching and collating, when it comes to machine. Consumers don’t want to be thinking that Big Brother is watching them at every moment. But the only way you can break down that resistance, according to Bing, is by being transparent about how the technology is being used.
As an industry, GDPR is an interesting reflecting point. McGrath asks whether everybody should follow the rules and regulations of governments and legislators or focus on how to really build trust as publishers, agencies and brands with the industry.
He believes this should push thoughts on how the industry can go beyond concepts like GDPR and how to talk in an open and transparent way. For instance, talking to consumers and users about how KPI‘s are connecting, how information is being used and how privacy is being respected within that environment.
The opportunities, explains McGrath, are unlimited, but as an industry, search needs to start with transparency otherwise the challenges faced in 2017 will continue beyond 2018
This discussion arose from The Drum Search Awards breakfast panel, in association with Bing on Monday December 3. The Search Awards are now open to entries for 2018, which will close Friday February 2, 2018. Click here for more information.
The founder of Timehop left Snap after less than a year
Jonathan Wegener joined Snap in January to work on product. Now he’s gone.
Timehop founder Jonathan Wegener, who joined Snap in January to work on Snapchat’s product, has already left the company.
Wegener, whose old startup Timehop surfaces your social media memories years after you posted them, confirmed his departure to Recode.
“I had a great year at Snap — love the product, team, and learned a ton,” he wrote. “But ultimately I’m most passionate about building companies and products from scratch, and I decided to take some time off to travel and be inspired before I get back into the swing of things in 2018. Keep an eye out next year.”
People come and go at big tech companies all the time, but Snap tends to see execs come and go quicker than most. A number of well-known Silicon Valley techies have gone to work at Snap over the years, and many of them don’t make it more than 18 months. Here are a few examples.
Wegener’s departure also comes right as Snap is redesigning its entire app. The company announced the major redesign late last month, though it still hasn’t yet rolled out broadly to users.
Wegener was a big Snapchat fan before joining the company. “I’m incredibly bullish on Snapchat as a company and this new move in particular,” Wegener wrote when Snapchat launched Memories, its feature for saving photos and videos. “Snapchat is perfectly imperfect,” he added.