Author: rssmasher

At the Digiday Retail Summit event last month in Austin, Texas, we sat down with 53 retail executives to learn their views on influencer marketing and Amazon’s impact on their businesses. Check out our earlier research on how European publishers expect Facebook’s algorithm changes to affect their audience size here. Learn more about our upcoming events here.

Quick takeaways:

• Two-thirds of respondents to a Digiday survey at the event said measuring campaign performance is a challenge with influencer marketing.
• Over one-third believe influencers pose a risk to brand safety.
• Only 29 percent said influencer marketing is extremely or very effective.

Reporting for influencer campaigns is unreliable
Influencer marketing has quickly gone from experimental to an essential component of brands’ marketing campaigns. Already valued at over $1 billion, spending on influencer marketing is projected to surpass $2 billion by 2019.

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Chris Giliberti would like everyone to know that Gimlet Media is first and foremost a podcast company. Nevertheless, Gimlet Pictures — the company’s TV and film division that Giliberti runs — will premiere its first show on ABC later this month featuring “Scrubs” star Zach Braff. And Giliberti will be in Los Angeles this week on the set of Gimlet’s second series, “Homecoming,” which stars Julia Roberts, is directed by “Mr. Robot” creator Sam Esmail and has been sold to Amazon. Further, Gimlet is also working on its first feature film with Annapurna Pictures, Oscar-nominated director Richard Linklater and Robert Downey Jr.

Despite all that, Gimlet remains a podcast company. More to the point, were it not for Gimlet’s podcasts, it would likely not have been able to make such a star-studded splash into Hollywood.

“There aren’t many examples of TV and film producers with a direct line themselves to a large number of people,” said Giliberti.

Gimlet Media is not the first audio-centric media company to have a go at Hollywood. “This American Life” host and podcasting’s proverbial godfather Ira Glass sold Showtime on adapting the public radio show into a TV miniseries more than a decade ago. But with podcasting’s growing popularity, TV networks, streaming services and film studios have taken a renewed interest in adapting audio programming into film and TV productions. Beyond Gimlet, examples of podcasts being turned into TV shows include Bravo adapting the Los Angeles Times’ “Dirty John” and HBO converting “Pod Save America” into a series of specials.

“What podcasts and particularly Gimlet podcasts do is all the elements of incredible narrative. Now, they’re just adding sight, sound and motion,” said Grant Gittlin, chief growth officer at advisory firm MediaLink.

The podcasts provide Gimlet with established intellectual property to make TV networks and streaming services more willing to bet on its productions. They also offer a built-in audience to market those shows and films. Gimlet is positioned to increase its value as a production-plus-marketing partner for its TV and film programming through its recent hire of former Netflix and Hulu marketing executive Jenny Wall as chief marketing officer.

“Getting a film or TV series picked up these days is very difficult in a congested and competitive market. What Gimlet offers is proven IP, and they already have an audience,” said Eunice Shin, managing director of consulting firm Manatt Digital.

TV beginnings
In the winter of 2016, John Davis, who has produced films such as “Joy” and “I, Robot,” reached out to Gimlet after listening to its inaugural podcast, “StartUp,” to see if the company would be interested in adapting it as a TV show.

“One thing that was clear early on was that we would be an IP company, and there was value in these rights and we would look to own them. Over time, the opportunity clarified itself through inbound inquiries around rights,” said Giliberti, who had joined Gimlet in July 2015 as its chief of staff and was its first hire on the business side.

Gimlet agreed to look into adapting “StartUp” into a TV series. With Davis as the lead producer, Giliberti saw an opportunity for the company to learn the ropes of developing and selling a show. By the summer of 2016, Davis had signed “Scrubs” star Braff as the show’s protagonist and “Scrubs” producer Matt Tarses as its showrunner and started pitching the series to TV networks. In the winter of 2016-17, ABC committed to funding the production of a pilot episode. Before the network’s upfront presentation in spring 2017, it got the green light for a full series.

“We definitely observed the value of a great piece of talent and showrunner in the sales process. [The show] ‘Alex Inc.’ was able to punch through a competitive broadcast cycle because Matt Tarses is a known entity, and Zach Brach is a meaningful piece of talent,” said Giliberti.

Gimlet applied that insight to developing its second show, “Homecoming.” But this time, the stakes were higher. Whereas the company served as the secondary producer on “Alex Inc.,” it took the lead on “Homecoming.” Giliberti called the show the “first true Gimlet production” because the two-person team of himself and Gimlet producer Eli Horowitz were responsible for putting the entire production together.

Star quality
Gimlet had already worked with big-name talent for the podcast version of the scripted series, which featured the voices of actors Catherine Keener and Oscar Isaac and premiered in November 2017. For the TV adaptation, the company sought out an even bigger name: Roberts, who had never previously starred in a TV series. Fortunately for Gimlet, the company is represented by the same Hollywood talent agency as Roberts, CAA, and was able to submit its material to the Oscar winner.

“It hammered home the value of having a creative prototype in the process. She was able to listen to the episodes,” Giliberti said. It also helped that Gimlet had signed Esmail, who was coming off an Emmy nomination and a Golden Globes win for “Mr. Robot,” to direct the series.

Having sold “Homecoming” to Amazon, Giliberti and Horowitz have remained actively involved the series’ production, with Giliberti leaving the company’s New York headquarters every other week to be on the show’s set in LA. Gimlet has followed up its TV deals by signing a pact last year with Annapurna Pictures — which has been behind critically acclaimed films like “Her” and “Phantom Thread” — to adapt an episode of Gimlet’s “Reply All” podcast into a feature film. And to formalize its foray into Hollywood, the company formed Gimlet Pictures earlier this year to give a name to its film and TV division.

“The next evolution you’ll see from us is where we look to stretch into co-studio status,” said Giliberti. That means not only producing a series but having a hand in its financing and distribution. Giliberti plans to add to Gimlet Pictures’ two-person team and capitalize on the momentum from its initial deals to seek opportunities to adapt more of its podcasts, both to grow Gimlet Media’s fledgling film and TV business and its core podcasting business. The company has now taken in over $28 million in venture capital, including a Series B round last fall that netted a total of $20 million.

“It’s always been part of the plan that these shows could be an on-ramp to the Gimlet audio network,” said Giliberti.

The post How podcaster Gimlet Media is targeting Hollywood appeared first on Digiday.

Publishers casting about for new referral sources after Facebook decided it wants the news feed to be, ironically, less newsy are taking a fresh look at Pinterest.

The big shift last year in terms of referral traffic was Facebook declining as a source of traffic for publishers while Google surpassed it. Pinterest, along with Instagram, grew as traffic sources as well, although from smaller bases. The online scrapbooking platform represented nearly 8 percent of publishers’ social traffic in the second half of 2017, up from 4.5 percent in the first half of 2016, according to Shareaholic.

Claiming more than 200 million active monthly users, 8-year-old Pinterest falls somewhere between Flipboard and Twitter in the size of its user base. Its utility for people — often women — looking for home decor, fashion and menu ideas and the like makes it well suited to lifestyle publishers looking to get their content in front of new audiences (and advertisers looking to reach those audience, which is how Pinterest makes its money).

Publishers say their contact with Pinterest used to be less frequent and not especially helpful when it did happen, but they say in the past several months there’s been a marked increase in outreach, collaboration and requests for feedback.

“It sounds like we’re at a point where we’re about to discover how interesting Pinterest is for publishers,” said Michelle Kempner, vp of operations at BuzzFeed, where Pinterest is its second-biggest referral platform after Facebook.

“Pinterest is a major focus for us,” said Regina Buckley, gm of lifestyle and svp of digital operations and business development for Meredith, who handled partnerships with Pinterest, Snapchat and Facebook for the former Time Inc. lifestyle brands before Meredith acquired Time Inc. “It’s material and growing as a referral source. Yes, it does increase our interest in Pinterest, in light of Facebook. Pinterest is interested in being a real partner to us. They want to work together to grow both our businesses. That is definitely something I can’t say of all our distribution sources.”

Anna Lee, vp of growth at PureWow, which gets a “big chunk” of its social traffic from Pinterest, saw a change at Pinterest around a year ago. She said that the platform now calls every couple weeks to provide data on what topics were popular on the platform, help promote PureWow’s content and share news about features that were being tested. “There are definitely people more proactively reaching out,” she said.

Pinterest is a good place for BuzzFeed to recycle older posts and videos and get new life for content that doesn’t play that well on other platforms, like jokes and other humor, Kempner said. It’s also a good source of steady traffic that isn’t subject to the whims of the news cycle. For BuzzFeed, Pinterest is also a good barometer of how shareable a post is, as a lot of BuzzFeed’s Pinterest activity is driven by people sharing BuzzFeed content to Pinterest.

Buckley sees Pinterest and publishers working symbiotically together, as in the case of Pincodes, which are like QR codes that users can scan with their mobile phone to open special content on Pinterest. Pinterest worked closely with Time Inc. on developing Pincodes in the second half of 2017, and one of its titles, Real Simple, experimented with them. With Pincodes, Pinterest gets more exposure for its brand in the pages of magazines and elsewhere, and the publisher gets to provide its readers with another utility.

“They come to us looking for feedback on them, which is something I wasn’t used to hearing in the past,” Buckley said. “We were on the phone with them a ton.”

Still, it’s not entirely clear how the dynamic will evolve. The Pinterest relationship isn’t exactly a warm and fuzzy one, but as one publishing exec put it, “If you have Twitter and Flipboard on one end and Facebook on the other, Pinterest is in the middle.” For now, Pinterest remains chiefly an awareness and traffic driver. Publishers, naturally, would like more, but seem hopeful about their relationship with Pinterest, having been chafed by the Facebook experience.

A key person affecting Pinterest’s involvement with publishers is David Temple, who started in October as Pinterest’s head of content, a new role that’s part of product. Temple reports to Lawrence Ripsher, head of consumer products and oversees a team of 25 marketing, business development, sales, product and engineering people that’s grown under his watch.

Whereas Snapchat and Facebook started as social networks that bolted on content later, Temple described the relationship between Pinterest and publishers in mutually beneficial terms. He said most users come to Pinterest to discover content from publishers and individual creators and that “without that quality content, there wouldn’t be anything for pinners to be discovering and pinning. Publishers aren’t competing with friend content on Pinterest.” Unlike Facebook, which optimizes for likes and shares, Pinterest also is a place where publishers can trigger real-world actions. For example, Pinterest created a “tried it” button users can check to leave feedback on a recipe or another do-it-yourself project.

“My mandate is to make sure we have inspiring content on the platform, and the biggest lever we have to do that is to work really closely with creators who are already creating great content, and make it easier to publish and distribute and measure its impact,” Temple said. “We care about publishers because they make the content that makes pinners have a great experience on Pinterest. It’s important to us how we’re doing.”

Brit Morin, founder and CEO of lifestyle media company Brit + Co and one of Pinterest’s top publishers, with referral traffic up 10 percent from 2017 to 2018, saw Temple’s hire as a win for publishers. “We’ve always had a solid ear with Pinterest, but with David in place, that’s his main job,” she said. “He’s directly responsible for serving the needs of content creators.”

Temple said Pinterest was looking to give publishers more tools and analytics to distribute their content on Pinterest and measure its impact. He said Pinterest has run a small test with publishers distributing branded video content and that it’s exploring other monetization opportunities but didn’t have details to share.

All that sounds good in theory, but the big question for publishers is whether Pinterest will go beyond being a meaningful traffic source and become an actual revenue source. Those efforts are in their infancy, with limited ad sales opportunities and data, and after being burned by Facebook, publishers are leery of platforms’ promises.

“There aren’t a lot of native tools with strong analytics and that would be a huge opportunity for Pinterest to make an argument that they’re a strong partner for publishers,” Morin said. “There are a lot of different levers it can pull.”

The post After Facebook news-feed changes, publishers look hopefully to Pinterest appeared first on Digiday.

As publishers cast about for reader revenue in a tough digital ad market, many are finding that local sports coverage, which attracts especially passionate, engaged readers, is a good game to be in. For that reason, sports has emerged as a critical test case for the proposition the future of digital news lies in reader revenue rather than advertising.

The most prominent player in the space is $48-a-year subscription-based outlet The Athletic, which claims 100,000 subscribers and just closed a $20 million funding round led by Elevation Partners, bringing the total amount of capital it’s raised to $30 million. Elsewhere, there’s DK Pittsburgh Sports and the 7-month-old Boston Sports Journal, which charge up to $35 for a year’s subscription. Hook ‘Em, a paywalled sports product that the Austin American-Statesman launched in 2015, claimed 16,000 digital subscribers in the third quarter of last year, costing $3.99 a week in a bundle with its parent paper.

Their growth is also an encouraging sign for publishers who hope to focus on consumer revenue rather than advertising.

“One thing that’s abundantly clear in our industry is that free is not a business model,” said Todd Dybas, one of the co-founders of The Sports Capitol, a Washington, D.C.-focused subscription site that launched this March.

The idea of a subscription-based digital sports publication isn’t new. Dybas, for example, released a paid iOS app for his coverage of the University of Washington’s football and basketball teams back in 2012. The market for people who will pay for local news is usually limited by geography, but sports is different because interest in a hometown team persists even after someone moves away. For example, 48 percent of DK Pittsburgh Sports’ subscriber base lives outside western Pennsylvania. Hook ‘Em’s national audience is also helping it sell advertising the American-Statesman can’t get as a local paper, said Steve Dorsey, gm of the American-Statesman.

Subscribers to sports news can demonstrate a high propensity to renew. Alex Mather, The Athletic’s co-founder, said the renewal rates among his publication’s subscribers are above 90 percent.

To find expat fans, The Athletic uses Facebook advertising and retargeting as well as a referral program that gifts subscribers $10 in Amazon credit for successful referrals. DK Pittsburgh Sports, which got off to a strong start with Twitter ads, now uses paid Facebook ads and mobile app downloads to drive subscriptions.

The new subscription sports outlets will have challenges growing reader revenue. Like other subscription-focused publishers, they face competition from large, ad-supported established players, customer acquisition costs, churn and over time, competition from each other. Their content formats, like postgame rapid reactions, are easily imitated by competitors.

The bet is that they’ll succeed by serving their readers. While a few sites offer things like Periscope access to postgame news conferences and private podcasts, most of the sites focus simply on well-written, deeply reported written features and profiles. The Athletic gets reader feedback from one-question surveys at the bottom of every story and uses that feedback to inform its editorial direction, said Paul Fichtenbaum, The Athletic’s chief content officer.

“We’re intent on serving our audience, and we know what they want,” Fichtenbaum said. “We’re not interested in hot takes. We’re not interested in aggregation. Video is not on our radar right now. It’s not like the audience has asked for it.”

Direct feedback is taking other forms. Boston Sports Journal founder Greg Bedard said he is thinking about using a Kickstarter-esque system, where the Journal’s staffing and coverage will depend on whether enough people indicate they’d be willing to pay for it. “If we can get a thousand people to sign up for Revolution coverage, that probably pays for itself,” Bedard said.

The post Why subscription sports sites have scored early wins appeared first on Digiday.

Graeme Adams doesn’t have the intensity you’d expect from the head of media at telecommunications firm BT. Aside from being the internal cheerleader for media efficacy at one of the U.K.’s biggest advertisers, Adams prefers a low-key approach to maintaining control over BT’s media budgets.

And yet he has much to shout about. Under his tenure, BT has had to wrestle working directly with online platforms, which accounted for 10 percent of his time when he joined in 2011 and now occupy half of it. While Adams has taken more control from his agencies in that period, he still needs their expertise, particularly to help him exert even more control over ad tech and algorithms.

That wasn’t the case six years ago when Adams took on the role, and running BT’s media meant securing it at the cheapest price. Now, his role requires deals “that are right for us and right for them [the agency],” Adams explained. A former agency executive of 15 years, Adams is among a small group of chief media officers at advertisers like Tesco, Asda and L’Oréal using their insider knowledge to get agencies to open up. “We know the right questions to ask [our agencies],” claimed Adams. “And we know the right level of challenge to put into the responses that we get shown back.”

Adams never thought he’d be the one calling the shots in media, even though his formative years at Dentsu, Publicis and OMD were spent as close to clients as possible. Whether it was as a media planner at Dentsu or as a business director at OMD, Adams liked the influence he had over how his clients spent their budgets but he never had the final say on what got bought. Working at agencies was never going to be enough for him. “I wanted to be closer to where the decisions get made, rather than just making the recommendations,” he explained.”We’d make good plans [at the agencies] and sometimes they would get signed off by the client and other times you were left wondering why they hadn’t. Now, I’m more involved in the impact our plans have because I get to see the daily results of the work we do.”

Settling at a brand wasn’t easy, however, for an agency veteran like Adams accustomed to working in businesses where everyone understood his role. The importance of articulating media’s impact on BT’s performance, particularly when the efficacy of online advertising is so widely debated, isn’t lost on Adams. “We’ll take our effectiveness work to other parts of the business, and there will be times when people broadly believe it, but they don’t believe it all,” he said. “There are people here with different levels of familiarity with media, whether that be in the legal, finance or procurement teams, and it’s made me find ways to make media simpler so that they understand why I’m making the decisions the way I do.”

When the WPP-owned media agency Essence won BT’s £160 million ($222 million) account last year, for example, Adams ensured the arrangement would work toward planning and buying campaigns reliant on the advertiser’s own data and view of the customer, not the agency’s view. He spent hours educating senior stakeholders at BT, from the CEO through to legal teams and procurement executives, explaining that what they were about to buy wasn’t a tangible item. In appointing a media agency, BT would be buying talent, experience and capability that more often than not doesn’t exist internally.

Working with Adams isn’t “a question of presenting 20 slides and coming back in two weeks,” Nick Baughan, CEO of Essence in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said of the relationship between advertiser and agency. Instead, Adams takes responsibility for media plans, said Baughan, viewing personal accountability as the most important factor between the brand winning and losing in advertising. Great chief media officers, Baughan added, have “collaborative relationships” with their agencies based on expertise, as opposed to “just being a customer.”

Like any advertiser with aspirations to be fairer to its agencies, Adams constantly monitors better contracts, clearer processes and value-driven remuneration. More pressing for him, however, is bringing media and creative together. Handing the same, core brief to each agency narrows the gap between the two disciplines, as does looking at all those different budgets — for media, public relations and advertising — together for some campaigns. Adams said some of those processes were already there; it’s just that he redoubled efforts behind them this year. Even on accounts where he’s not the main client, he is known to sit in on meetings, said one executive, who recounted Adams’s attempts to work with teams outside of his own on condition of anonymity.

Beyond his agencies, Adams has his sights set on ad tech. The executives closest to him cite his ability to purge waste from a media plan while extending BT’s reach. Ad tech, and the tangled mess it’s in, could become his blind spot, however, which is why he wants to know more about programmatic auction pricing. BT is considering a direct deal with a demand-side platform, with Adams keen to use the technology to help him understand how much of his programmatic budget reaches publishers.

Adams expects things to get easier as more of BT’s media trading is automated. The more the advertiser can automate, the more time he has to work with his agencies on the strategic parts of media plans, he continued. One such project underway involves the BT marketer and Essence sorting through 15 or so video formats to determine which can remain on its media plans.

“The role I do is changing because I spend more time looking over a piece of technology, listening to advice on software we’re thinking about using or even getting our agencies to create things,” said Adams. “I’m spending more time thinking and less time getting snowed under by the data.”

The post BT’s media chief: ‘I wanted to be closer to where the decisions get made’ appeared first on Digiday.

Despite gripes that it harms the user experience, autoplay video isn’t going anywhere.

Autoplay ads have allowed publishers to eke out incremental revenue through video, but often to the detriment of user experience. As browsers Chrome and Safari have developed filters to block intrusive ads, publishers say they have steadily improved their sites to prioritize user experience, making muted autoplay video the new normal for publishers.

Publishers argue that muted autoplay is not an intrusive ad format and that there’s a misconception that autoplay is not premium. Sixty percent of publishers use muted autoplay to boost digital video views, according to a Digiday survey of more than 50 publisher executives. But despite delivering strong view metrics, muted autoplay’s effectiveness is debatable for driving brand metrics like awareness or purchase intent.

Perform Group’s sports player, ePlayer, which runs on publisher sites like MailOnline, The Independent and MSN, uses semantic technology Perform built in-house to serve contextually relevant muted autoplay video content. Since rolling out the technology in mid-2017, Perform said it has seen a 21 percent rise in view-through rate on the content.

“[Autoplay] not the best experience, but it’s somewhat normalized,” said Meredith Artley, svp and editor-in-chief of CNN Digital Worldwide on the Digiday Podcast in January. “If there’s a significant slice of pie that says autoplay is happening in a lot of places, audiences might not love it, but it’s something you have to do. It’s one of our biggest collective sins.”

To some extent, publishers face pressure to keep using autoplay from agencies with an eye on keeping view counts high, meeting short-term goals rather than building longer-term audience strategies.

“It’s an engineered feel-good factor, an artificial bubble,” said Alessandro De Zanche, an independent consultant and former News UK executive. “It’s delusional short-term thinking.”

“It’s a shit experience whether you mute it or not,” said one publishing exec. “We’re all mercenary, but we need a dose of self-awareness.”

Publishers like News UK, Time Inc. and The Washington Post have moved to click-to-play or click-for-sound ad formats, which arguably offer a better user experience, as they show the audience intends to watch the content if they click.

“Video is all about trust,” said James Pringle, co-founder and CEO of video recommendation engine Suggestv, which works with publishers that use autoplay and click-to-play formats like Global and Unilad. “Click to play is harder to scale, but you can encourage engagement through clear titles, calls to action and by making discovery simple, contextual and consistent.”

In November, Suggestv switched the label on its video recommendation player that appears at the end of text articles from “related video” to “watch next,” leading to a higher click-through rate, which Pringle believes is partly because the language resembles an editorial format rather than in-stream native units like Taboola and Outbrain.

According to ad buyers, the CPMs for muted autoplay and click-to-play formats are roughly the same, around £15 ($21) CPM for a news publisher, despite the better user experience and higher quality of the engagement on click to play. Publishers, therefore, don’t have much financial incentive to prioritize click to play. The similar CPM rates are partly because autoplay is bought on different models like cost per view or cost per completed view, while selling click to play on cost per view would pose more of a risk for publishers. A lack of research on how these formats affect brand metrics also affects their perceived value.

“The direction of travel is that advertisers are asking for more scrutiny over metrics like viewability, completed views and content the ad is in front of over just views,” said Jonathan Waite, head of product at Amplifi. “If you’re optimizing toward those other metrics, it will lend itself to click-to-play formats.”

While there’s more enthusiasm across the board for the click-to-play format, it varies across sector, objectives and advertiser type, said Liz Duff, head of media and investment at Total Media. “There’s a bit more nervousness moving away from autoplay for brands that are less well-known or less established. Autoplay can work well at driving brand awareness.”

As with most newer digital formats, the creative assets for click-to-play formats must improve, but change won’t happen overnight. “Creative agencies have no real interest in creating short-form content that really works,” Waite said. “There will likely be a rise in specialist companies creating this.”

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

The post ‘An engineered feel-good factor’: Why autoplay video will persist appeared first on Digiday.

Marketers are starting to question the decisions agencies have made on their behalf. Consequently, marketers of the likes of Procter & Gamble, Unilever and Royal Bank of Scotland believe they should be the ones, not agencies, to make decisions about how their budgets are spent. It has meant more marketers are trying to control more of what they spend on programmatic advertising, and there are signs that they want to create more ads themselves.

Here are five charts that show why advertisers are in-housing their marketing and what skills they’re prioritizing.

Brands are clueless about media’s effectiveness
A study released in March by media consultancy Ebiquity on behalf of Radiocentre, the marketing body for commercial radio, backs Wheldon’s comments. The report, which surveyed 116 senior marketers working for brands and agencies, found that marketers consistently overvalue online media channels while undervaluing the traditional ones.

Advertisers aren’t cutting agencies entirely
In a survey of 149 marketers by the Association of National Advertisers late last year, more than a third (35 percent) said they had reduced the work they brief to agencies after they had bolstered their own in-house programmatic expertise. Like Pritchard, those marketers want to run the strategy for programmatic campaigns, leaving their agencies to manage them by performing tasks such as post-campaign reporting.

Data has increased importance
In China, P&G is using one of the country’s largest data-management platforms alongside its own proprietary measurement system to do better propensity modeling and frequency capping on more nuanced audience segments. According to brand chief Marc Pritchard, the setup slashed P&G’s waste online by 30 percent last year and increased reach by 65 percent. Other advertisers like RBS, Jaguar Land Rover and Pernod Ricard are realizing they need to leverage their own data wisely if they’re to properly take ownership of their marketing. An Ascend2 study of 233 marketing professionals conducted in January found that most are prioritizing data management this year.

Advertisers face competition for talent
It’s easy for an advertiser to talk on a stage about taking control from agencies. It’s harder to find people who can do that and have a direct impact on the business. Agencies, on the other hand, can offer talent jobs across multiple clients and at a scale that many brands can’t. Advertisers acknowledge the talent challenge and have made recruitment and internal development a priority in 2018. A study released last month by the World Federation of Advertisers found that nearly half (46 percent) of the 28 advertisers surveyed that spend over $50 billion (£36 billion) globally on marketing have made strengthening their own programmatic skills a priority over the next year.

Brands are producing creative in-house
In its annual report, Unilever said its in-house teams are creating content faster and around 30 percent cheaper than external agencies. Like other big brands, Unilever thinks it can save considerably by in-housing more of the production of its ads and reducing the number of agencies it works with. Three, Lucozade, RBS and others are trying to replicate Unilever’s efforts, attempting to create more of their ads internally. These advertisers aren’t alone, according to a global study of 4,198 marketing professionals by Adobe and Econsultancy that found that more advertisers plan on bringing content production in-house in 2018.

The post The state of brands taking marketing in-house, in 5 charts appeared first on Digiday.

It’s Jan. 14, the night before the final regular-season game between the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers, and Kevin Durant and LeBron James are sitting in the back of an Uber — a Cadillac Escalade, to be specific — in Akron, Ohio. But instead of talking trash while riding through the falling snow, the two rivals are discussing President Donald Trump.

“Our team, as a country, is not ran by a great coach,” Durant says.

The post Open look: Athlete-driven media companies have the attention of fans and advertisers appeared first on Digiday.

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Joanna Coles, chief content officer at Hearst Magazines, argues that print is having a moment, with former advertisers coming back, and makes the case that Snapchat is a healthier social network than others. Here’s our conversation, lightly edited.

Hearst seems to be more bullish on — and do better at — magazines than other big magazine companies. Why is that?
We love print. I’m a huge believer in it. We’ve lived with devices long enough to understand their enormous advantages and disadvantages. If you’ve spent 90 minutes scrolling on your phone, you don’t necessarily feel more informed. You may feel listless and restless. We’re moving into a post-digital euphoria. We’ve seen e-books have plateaued, and real books have had an enormous rebirth. A magazine is restorative. You need to be able to unplug. You absorb information differently when you read it on the page.

How many magazines is Hearst going to launch this year?
We’re probably going to launch two or four in the second half of this year. Two, definitely.

Magazines have had more of an advertising challenge than a reader challenge. Is there any sign that’s changing?
For certain advertisers, the metrics that some of the digital companies give allow them to be really specifically targeting when they want to move product urgently. But if you want to establish trust with your customer, a magazine is unbeatable. We are hearing from advertisers who pulled out from print who are coming back. We offer incredible value for money; the ad is seamless in the consumer experience. You can’t unsee an ad in a magazine. And it’s high-quality content. It’s real; it’s not bullshit.

How’s the approach to launching a magazine different today than before?
All our successful partnerships — Oprah, The Pioneer Woman — we launched with existing media partners. We’re now launching with digital partners who have enormous consumer audience and no longer want to be a pure digital play, understand the value of having a physical manifestation of their brand. No digital company now wants to be purely digital. They want to use it as a totem of being a member of a tribe. If you carry Airbnb, if you have a copy of Harvard Business Review or The Economist, it says something about the nature of who you are.

Hearst’s approach to magazines has changed. You’ve taken the approach of having, say, one beauty editor for multiple titles. How has that changed things, and what have the challenges been?
I had argued for a long time that it made absolutely no sense for the same company to be sending eight different beauty editors from eight separate titles in eight separate cabs to the opening of the same mascara and writing eight stories. It’s not a great use of resources. We were competing against each other with our company’s money. It’s been super reinvigorating. A lot of staffers have been excited to work on different brands. As a result, we have better differentiated content. Now, you can have one person writing three points of view. With the eight, you’d be getting the same story.

Hearst decided to separate print and web, while some publishers still believe integration is the way to go. What’s the case for that?
Here’s how I think of it. I’m the coach for the American Olympics team. My goal is to bring back as many gold medals as I can. The team for running the marathon is focused on different things than the team running the 100-meter sprint. You would never expect one person to be able to do every sport. It’s just not practical to expect people to be able to do everything all the time.

It seems like we’re in the backlash phase of #MeToo. Do you worry there won’t be lasting change coming out of it?
I think the only permanent change that’ll come about is if we have real diversity in the leadership of companies and government. I’m working as hard as I can to ensure that comes to pass for the next generation. There’s no tipping point till you reach 30 percent on boards and senior management. One of my goals is to look for the best possible female and diverse talent and give it the most support I can.

Do you find it hard to be optimistic?
I don’t think it’s hard to be optimistic. I think Trump was a wild-card candidate. I would be astonished if the Democrats didn’t take the House back. And I think millennials will put down their phones and get to the polls because they weren’t energized for either candidate [in 2016].

How do you think your membership on the board of Snap has helped Hearst?
It’s certainly helped my understanding of how a tech company works. It’s been integral to how Cosmo’s developed awareness [on Discover]. We now have seven Hearst brands on Snap, so we’re the publisher that’s the most represented.

You have long-standing experience in news and magazines. What impact do you hope to have there with that experience?
One of the reasons I was so engaged with the Discover platform was Evan Spiegel’s really prescient understanding that the web was full of crap, and human editors were increasingly important in a world that relied on algorithms. He completely foresaw fake news and wanted to build a platform with reputable media brands. He reads an enormous amount.

How aligned are Discover publishers and Snap?
I think all our goals are aligned, especially in light of what’s happened to Facebook. We want to make sure we are an easily available route to high-quality journalism.

Thanks so much for talking with me.
I hope you’ll mention my book. It’s called “Love Rules: How to Find a Real Relationship in a Digital World.” It’s really about how, in this particular moment, the importance of actual relationships, communicating face to face, is really important. We’re at the point now where people who have a real-life social network will live longer than the people who don’t. We understand the nature of electronic media can be addictive.

How does that square with your involvement with Snapchat?
The biggest indicator of whether you’ll use Snapchat is you have one true friend. There’s no like button — the goal is to keep you connected with your actual friends. So not all social networks are created equal.

The post ‘We need real diversity’: Hearst’s Joanna Coles says more women in leadership will lead to culture change appeared first on Digiday.

There are no superheroes in real life, and the best we’ve got for watchmen in the war on so-called “fake news” is Snopes. People still seem to believe in Snopes. I have no idea why.