Author: rssmasher

Waymo LLC on Tuesday signaled a large expansion of its robot taxi fleet as the company prepares to open its driverless ride-hailing service to the general public.

The Pentagon is reviewing policies that allow deployed troops to use activity-measuring devices and fitness apps that rely on GPS tracking, after a digital map online accidentally exposed information that could reveal where American troops are deployed or even precisely where they exercise overseas.

AdExchanger |

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Rob’s-Eye View Rob Norman, who retired as GroupM chief digital officer last November, spoke with The New York Times about his expectations for media and advertising in the next decade. Despite the hype and the reality of duopoly dominance, Norman isn’t betting against an… Continue reading »

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For the past three years, publishers have benefited from fat guarantees from content recommendation services like Outbrain and Taboola. But the good times are coming to an end, as both players, along with upstarts, move away from a land-grab phase in development.

Publishers that spoke on background for this story because they were in the midst of negotiating said either that the content recommendation companies themselves weren’t offering guaranteed payments anymore or that the publishers themselves were opting for a revenue-share model where they’d be paid a share of the revenue when visitors click on a paid ad in the widget. One exec at a digital lifestyle publisher used to get a $1 million-plus guarantee a year and gave it up for a rev share with Taboola.

“When we looked at the stipulations, we decided we wanted flexibility on placement, and a guarantee doesn’t let you do that,” said the exec.

A senior executive at a different, midsize publishing company said that in recent negotiations, neither Outbrain nor Taboola offered a guarantee, instead offering to pay the publisher on a cost-per-click model.

The moves are critical to publishers. The guarantees delivered a predictable stream of highly profitable revenue, something especially attractive to public companies. Two publishing sources said they were paid $1 million to $2 million a year. “And it’s all 100 percent margin, so for all of us looking to optimize EBITDA, it’s pretty attractive,” said the lifestyle publishing exec. For all the criticism and self-hatred publishers experienced over the widgets, Outbrain and Taboola have become a crucial source of revenue for many, with Outbrain once saying it accounted for 30 percent of some publishers’ revenue. The shift away from guarantees should have upside for users, who should benefit by seeing fewer such ads — or at least fewer low-quality ones — on sites.

Outbrain said a significant number of its top publishers have recently been on guaranteed terms. The company said it’s not stopped offering guarantees, but that over the past year, almost a third of those publishers have chosen to renew with a non-guaranteed economic structure that affords greater flexibility and editorial control, said Matt Crenshaw, general manager of Outbrain. Taboola founder and CEO Adam Singolda wouldn’t directly say if the business has shifted away from guarantees but said the model hasn’t “materially changed.”

Revcontent, an aggressive third player in the field, hasn’t filled the void; CEO John Lemp said that being that Revcontent is a self-funded company (unlike Outbrain and Taboola, which both are investor-backed), 97 percent of its gross revenue is paid out on a revenue-share basis.

The guarantees may have been lucrative, but they came with downsides. The content recommendation companies were losing tons of money on the guarantees, according to publishers that have negotiated with them. For both, the guarantees were onerous to maintain; in exchange for the fixed revenue, publishers were required to deliver a minimum number of pageviews, which meant running the unsightly widgets on all or nearly all their pages. The agreements also dictated where and how big the placements were, which made for unhappy editors who were denied control over what they could put on their pages. One publishing exec summed up the internal conflict this way: “We hate this, but we can’t walk away from the money.”

Publishers faced external pressure from advertisers to curb the use of the content engines on their sites, too, either because they thought the widgets mucked up the look of the sites or because they wanted total share of voice on a page.

Ad clients seeking premium placements will prefer publishers that don’t have such widgets, said Andrew Sandoval, director of biddable media for The Media Kitchen. Publishers should think about it from a brand safety standpoint, he added, because eventually advertisers will start evaluating sites based not just on their content but on the ads or user comments on the site, as happened recently when YouTube was found to have comments from pedophiles on its site, he said.

For publishers that turned up the dial on the clickbaity (and more lucrative) ads in the widgets, there’s also been concern that Google and Facebook would penalize sites with spammy ads.

Moving off guarantees means less cost for the content recommendation companies and headache on both sides. As more publishers work on attracting direct visitors, especially in the wake of Facebook making it harder for publishers to get exposure in its news feed, being freed of the guarantee requirements will give them more control over how their sites look and the ability to use the high-value space at the bottom of their pages to drive revenue from affiliate e-commerce, branded content, video ads, etc. On a rev-share model, some Outbrain publisher clients make more money directly from rev shares or overall because they have freedom to use more revenue-generating tools on the page, Crenshaw said.

“For publishers who are in it for the long haul, it’s the best to go with a revenue share,” the lifestyle publisher said. “It really puts us in the driver’s seat.”

Condé Nast has opted for a rev-share model with Outbrain because it wanted the freedom to decide what it puts on what site to maximize the value for the company and the user, especially as it prepares to launch paywalls on sites like Wired and Vanity Fair. On big news days like the Grammys, for example, the publisher wants to be able to point visitors to its own content, which it can do better with its own content recommendation system, said Zach Block, vp of business development and partnerships at Condé Nast.

“You may take a short-term hit [by turning down a guarantee], but we think there’s upside in user experience,” Block said. “We’re able to use our own data to drive our decision-making and grow a deeper relationship with our audience.”

Giving up a guarantee isn’t without risk, though. Guarantees were paid based on how many article views a publisher could generate, and when publishers go to a CPC model, they try to make sure they won’t lose money, but they’re only paid when someone clicks on a link in the widget — which more discriminating users won’t do. “So revenue might be lower, but maybe not,” said the midsize publisher. “There’s certainly a risk.”

The post In a shift, publishers can no longer count on content-recommendation guarantee checks appeared first on Digiday.

Less than a month into 2018, brands have put up to $5 billion (£3.6 billion) in media spend up for grabs. But unlike the last flurry of reviews in 2016 when marketers wanted the best price for ads, now they want the best value.

Shell, HSBC, Mars and Asda are among a raft of advertisers reviewing which agencies to trust with their media budgets. The large number of media reviews adds up to between $3 billion (£2.1 billion) and $5 billion in annual billings, said Brian Wieser, senior analyst at Pivotal Research Group.

The likes of Procter & Gamble, Barclays, Diageo and L’Oréal have openly pledged they will pay a premium for quality ads if agencies can fully disclose how they spend those budgets. Those brands believe that as they take more media-planning duties in-house, the criteria for selecting agencies shift beyond securing low cost-per-thousand impressions. Instead, advertisers are pushing to buy based on business outcomes such as the cost per acquisition or the guaranteed completion rate on a video. That wasn’t the case two years ago, when many marketers didn’t have that confidence or the expertise to question how their budgets were spent.

Media strategy consultancy ID Comms sees the growing confidence among advertisers manifesting itself in recent pitches that are far more “strategic.” Brand marketers are building pitches around strategic planning and the added value the agency can bring by targeting the right client at the right time with the right message in a transparent way, said Tom Denford, chief strategy officer at ID Comms, which is helping Mars consolidate its $1.4 billion (£1 billion) media duties. Denford said those advertisers have to put the use of data and technology at the core of their strategic challenges, as they “seek to understand how the agencies can help drive more informed and smarter media decision-making.”

Nike’s review is an example of this shift. Although the marketer is reassessing digital rather than media agencies, the same principle applies. Nike is using a so-called “reverse auction” to select the agencies, in which each one competes for the business with lower and lower bids until one stops and the other wins. Interestingly, the agencies aren’t being knocked out of the running for business, according to an executive with knowledge of the pitch. Instead, they are locked into the lowest rate they’re able to afford. While some observers have branded Nike’s use of the “reverse auction” bad news for already squeezed agencies, the move is “not necessarily a bad thing” as long as the range of work is clear, according to one executive, who spoke to Digiday on condition of anonymity. If so, then a “reverse auction” can be an efficient — “if not a little lazy” — way of reviewing agencies.

The next task for advertisers is to find out where agencies have added value beyond buying clout. Consequently, some of the reviews are happening to establish relationships with agency partners based around strategy rather than execution. Enter the consultants.

As advertisers move to hybrid in-house models, Laetitia Zinetti, managing principal for media management at media analytics specialist Ebiquity, believes they will increasingly turn to consultancies, which have been “beating the digital transformation drum for years,” to help them set up, implement and even run parts of their in-house media operations.

Since the last spate of reviews, more advertisers have wised up to what happens to their budgets on their way to the media owner. A 2017 study from the World Federation of Advertisers, which surveyed 35 global brands with spend in excess of $30 billion (£21 billion), found that 65 percent had improved their internal capabilities over the last 12 months. It’s meant that some advertisers, like Diageo with its Catalyst marketing tool or P&G’s plan to halve its 2,500 agencies this year, are confident they can handle the strategy side of the media equation themselves.

The problem, said Henry Daglish, founder of The7stars media agency startup Bountiful Cow, is that “much of the media contracts have been built on pricing guarantees driven by the volumes that network agencies control.” Now, the “arguments” are moving from price to value, he added. “If they [advertisers] can drive better business results via ad tech, albeit at a slightly higher cost per thousand, then that’s the logical thing to do, the advantages of which probably outstrip a cheaper base price.”

The post Ad quality rises to the top of the agenda for media agency reviews appeared first on Digiday.

When Oreo tweeted its seminal “Dunk in the Dark” tweet during the 2013 Super Bowl, social agencies everywhere felt the shock. Some wondered whether “real-time marketing” had finally jumped the shark — or if this was more proof that they needed to make the serious investment in a “war room,” equipped with just enough monitors to make sure they were ready for their own “Oreo moment” in the future.

Here is the story of the Super Bowl war room and how it came to be.

2009-13: The pre-Oreo era
Before there was the war room, there was second-screening. Agencies were waking up to the fact that people may be on Twitter or Facebook while watching TV — and they may want to talk about their brands during live events.

Adam Kahn, executive creative director, Possible: The first time I did a war room, it wasn’t for the Super Bowl. It was a political campaign for a retailer in 2010. But the first Super Bowl I did participate in with a war room was in 2012, for Verizon. It was when brands finally knew they needed to do more beyond TV.

Danielle Trivisonno Hawley, CCO of Americas, Possible: Arguably, the first war room was when we did a hashtag for Audi during the 2009 Super Bowl. That kicked the door open.

Kahn: When we did the Verizon thing, it was because brands were realizing that they didn’t want to just spend money to run stuff on TV without the second screen. It was like, clients were giving us the keys to a car.

Lee Maicon, chief strategy officer, 360i [worked on Oreo tweet]: That whole idea, it was grounded in the fact that when agencies are their best, it’s during pitches. During a pitch, you always have a war room. You’re throwing a group of people together; there’s a discrete moment in time; there’s a clear end date.

Ken Kraemer, CEO, Deep Focus [had a “command center” for the 2014 Super Bowl]: For me, the idea of a war room was always something that we at Deep Focus balked at a little bit because war rooms are only interesting when you know something is gonna be happening.

Maicon: When we first started working on the brand, we had to go the senior-most heights of the client to even do something like respond to celebrities who said they liked Oreos. It was so different. We were gonna work on brand A and brand B, and the pitch war room environment went on its way to becoming a thing we were comfortable working with.

2013: Have you heard of a ‘war room’?
Starting in late 2012 and leading up to Feb. 3, 2013, Oreo ran a series of “real-time marketing” Twitter posts called the Daily Twist, with 100 days of pictures of Oreos during cultural moments. That soon turned into a group of people from 360i, Mediavest and the brand clustered in a room during the big game. When the lights went out, they were ready — with a tweet, but also a smart public relations plan. Suddenly, the term “war room” was everywhere.

Cassie Reed, brand director, Innocean [had a war room from 2014-16 for Hyundai]: I remember Super Bowl 2013, of course. I was hanging out at my kitchen table when that Oreo tweet went out. The next day at work, we were like, “We all need to be ready for the next one. We have to be in the same place, be able to quickly respond and replicate.”

Maicon: It can be a great way to work. You see everything on the wall. You sort of have preordained prophecies and approaches. You have the lawyer on your bat phone, clients waiting for a call.

Jonathan Mesquita, editor, Deep Focus: I was at my brother’s apartment, and they sent that tweet. Everyone was laughing, and I was seething. There was an absolute sense of jealousy throughout me.

Maicon: After, we got a lot of clients saying, “Can we have a war room?” One thing we captured in the moment was the value of PR along with the war room. We got lots of people saying, “Give me one of those!”

Mesquita: Every single brand in our portfolio asked us what our plan was for the Super Bowl when it came to being reactive. Everyone wanted the opportunity for themselves.

Kraemer: There was a client we’d worked on for years who made a super complex war room. And this other tech company who set up a big war room for the Golden Globes in 2013. I remember thinking that the attention is not on the advertisers during this. It’s brand myopia sometimes, where they think everyone cares about something.

Maicon: We did not want to productize war rooms or do lots of war rooms. We said to clients, “Cool, you want one of those. Why?” And in a lot of cases, we turned to whatever the client’s business value was. We couldn’t turn into “Wars Rooms ‘R Us.”

Mesquita: It’s funny. Every single deck we got after had the question of what are your examples of what we would do if there were a blackout at the Super Bowl.

2014-16: It’s kind of quiet around here
Once agencies had set up their expensive war rooms, it became a matter of justifying them. The Super Bowl blackout wasn’t going to happen again. But the real-time marketing epidemic was still there. War rooms soon turned into large affairs, with brands and agencies creating live content as it happened, forcing “moments” by talking to other brands and hijacking the TV action with their own tweets. 

Trivisonno Hawley: After “Dunk in the Dark” happened, everyone was chasing this cultural moment. There were war rooms all over the country — just waiting. There wasn’t quite another blackout. The year after that, everyone just waited and waited for one.

Kraemer: There were other things, too. I remember thinking with R/GA when they redesigned their office, their main space looked like a big war room. It was so influenced by real-time information with big monitors.

Reed: Hyundai was a sponsor of the Grammys and FIFA in 2014. We need that dedicated space and also the resources ready to go in one place. One big element was being able to speed up approvals.

Maicon: For Oreo specifically, we took ourselves off the market the following year. It was a mic drop.

Kahn: We did a war room for Febreze in 2016, which was three people. Last year, it was 15. We had a six-minute turnaround time to make creative after someone commented.

Trivisonno Hawley: Yeah, I remember that. [Kahn] sent me a picture of the Febreze toilet that year from the war room.

Lori Martin, creative director, Innocean: It showed creative folks new ways of interacting on social. They had permission. We were all very jealous of how quickly [Oreo] moved.

Mesquita: In 2014, Ian Schafer was our CEO then. He loves football. So handling the duties for the NY/NJ host committee was like the biggest opportunity in the world.  

Reed: For the 2014 Grammys, that was our test run for our war room. It was the year Arby’s had that tweet about Pharrell’s hat. We built out a construction. We had multiple TV screens and new technology.

Mesquita: We did a big war room, command center, in Times Square. When it came to the organization of it, we realized that we didn’t have enough people. We had to get like 18 volunteers to help us answer all the questions on social media, and all that.

Reed: 2014 was when brand-to-brand banter got big. So in our war room for the Super Bowl, we kept a table full of other brands’ products, like Cheerios. So if there was an opportunity to talk with other brands, we were prepared. Just have the products on hand for inspiration.

Mesquita: We had this FAQ doc with 500 questions and answers. Each question had a copywriter assigned to it.

Reed: We had a Genesis spot running in 2014 where we were demonstrating our automatic emergency brake. Cheerios tweeted at us, and then we replied back.

.@cheerios And we remember all those times you saved our mornings. #NextGenesis https://t.co/A94Jmz3Kk5

— Hyundai USA (@Hyundai) February 3, 2014

Mesquita: I walked in on Jan. 28 — the game in 2015 was on Feb. 2 — I walked in, and this intern had fallen asleep on her keyboard because she’d been up all night. I woke her up, told her to go home. The one image that sticks with me is our senior comms manager at the time. He was sort of our pump-up guy. He had a megaphone. When everything was sort of quiet, people were falling asleep, he’d jump up on a chair and scream and yell. The volunteers were mortified. I loved it.

Trivisonno Hawley: Eventually by 2015, when people realized you couldn’t rely on a cultural moment, we had to make our own happen. So that year, our war room became a 50-person engine.

2016-present: RIP, war room
The war room concept is mostly dead. Agencies have figured out that they’re expensive, time-consuming — and actually kind of silly. Clients are demanding more than so-called “engagement.” 

Mesquita: We may not have a war room of that stature, but learnings continue. U.S. bank is one of our clients this year, and they’re the title name sponsor of the stadium in Minneapolis. We’re going to do a war room there.

Maicon: We now have rooms dedicated to each account here in the agency. Oreo does have a war room — it’s just a room where people go work on Oreo. We have stacks of cookies and cookie jars.

Martin: Technically, we still have the room; the space is there. But we use it for other things, too. It’s all about the practice of people who are creatively and quickly responding to things.

Kahn: It’s true that the investment of a war room becomes harder if the campaign doesn’t link to a cultural moment. What works for Febreze is that there is a link between having people over to watch the Super Bowl and the bathroom getting messy and all that. We own the bathroom break. 

Kraemer: It’s kinda over. It would have continued and evolved had that kind of earned media remained free. There was somewhat of a rollback. If you look back at that [Oreo] tweet now, it kind of makes no sense. Why is the cookie talking about a blackout at a stadium? It was the fever pitch of the medium of social media.

The post ‘War Rooms ‘R Us’: The definitive oral history of the Super Bowl war room appeared first on Digiday.

Influencer marketing has had its reality check: After years of news on fraud, bots and shady amplification practices, it’s come to a head with the publication of a New York Times exposé on how far-flung the problem is. For agencies, it’s a moment of glee — or a scramble to prove their worth.

“It’s been the talk of our company’s Slack all weekend,” said Alexa Tonner, co-founder of influencer marketing agency Collectively, adding that she’s expecting clients to put her team “through their paces” and ask the right questions about its practices. Still, it’s not a problem for Collectively. “They’re seeking reassurance, but this is good news because it kind of gets the problem everyone has known about to some level to the topmost people.”

At WhoSay, an influencer marketing agency that Viacom bought earlier this year, President Rob Gregory warned his team over the weekend when the Times story was published that clients would ask questions — and that for him, the “answer is easy.” The company is touting its Talent Agreement Plan, a questionnaire sent to influencers it works with that requires them to pledge that they’ve never bought fake followers. “We love moments like this,” Gregory said.

At Ahalogy, co-founder and CEO Bob Gilbreath said something like the Times article would finally get top brand marketers to start asking the hard questions about their own influencer marketing practices and partners.

For influencer marketing agencies, this scandal is more proof that brands need to do more direct deals with them, cutting out traditional public relations or social agencies. “The business model of PR agencies has been under even more disruptive force than ad agencies. They are trying to find more billable services that they can provide for their big clients,” said Gregory. “You gotta be sure you have the data and manpower to do the kind of the vetting we do.”

But agencies with influencer marketing practices like Edelman feel the opposite. Sybil Grieb, Edelman’s U.S. head for influencer strategy and programming, said this is more proof that the “era of nonstrategic influencer marketing is dying.” Brands will now ask for more complete strategies that include influencer marketing instead of keeping it in a silo with a different company. “It speaks well to us for the direction the industry is going,” she said.

Grieb said the issue of fraud is common and well-known — the Times article just put it in one place. She said she’s seen everything from metrics like “reach-engagement,” essentially a bloated figure that combines influencer followers with comments, as well as “potential impressions,” which could be the potential number of people that could see a post — not how many actually did.

Justin Moore, the CEO of Trending Family and a YouTube influencer with just over 1 million followers, said this will be the turning point where brands continue to push to accelerate away from “reach” metrics and focus on “engagement.” What that “engagement” looks like, however, is up for debate. But the growing interest in so-called micro-influencers who have an engaged commentariat is proof of this, Moore said.

Moore, who works mostly with agencies and does a small number of direct brand deals, said that anecdotally, he’s already seeing pressure put more on so-called influencer platforms. “We’ll see more agencies placing value on full-service influencer agencies” instead of self-serve platforms that rose in popularity last year as a way to “plug and play” influencer campaigns, he said. Now, as CMOs pay more attention to influencer fraud, they’ll need to use services like vetting.

In a way, the kerfuffle is reminiscent of last spring’s brand-safety crisis, where due to Twitter accounts like Sleeping Giants, marketers had to finally pay attention to the nitty-gritty plumbing of ad tech that resulted in ads being shown in places they didn’t want — or didn’t know they didn’t want — such as so-called alt-right sites like Breitbart. At the time, plenty of the top brass at marketers were publicly outraged over their ads appearing on such sites, with brands like Allstate freely admitting they weren’t getting full disclosure on how and where ads were run.

The question is whether this signals a pullback for influencer spend. For most, it doesn’t: Gregory said the effectiveness of professionally executed influencer campaigns and the KPIs that result from them don’t always filter up to the CMO. “There’s a lot of high-fiving at the mid- and upper levels,” but not so much higher up, he said. “When this gets to the CMO, it forces them to realize that influencer marketing is mainstream enough to be the subject of investigation.”

One place that will happen is the continued drive toward paid media and keeping organic followings a very small part of the puzzle, execs say. “Audience size will be important, but it’ll have less impact,” Tonner said.

“From an influencer perspective, it’s like blow after blow of bad PR, between the YouTube ‘adpocalypse’ and Logan Paul,” said Moore. “But even with that, there’s been more interest in working with influencers, just differently.” Four years ago, 90 percent of Moore’s revenue came from ads. Today, 90 percent comes from sponsorships. “Influencer marketing will move in the next 18 months out of the shadows and the expendable budget category and into mandatory,” he said.

The post ‘We love moments like this’: Influencer marketing agencies scramble to reassure antsy clients after NYT expose appeared first on Digiday.

TGI Fridays is using artificial intelligence to do everything from power chatbots to personalize service at locations. The chain is particularly focused on how AI can keep app users.

From May to November 2017, TGI Fridays used “predictive churn” tech to predict when a user would leave the app after signing in, then target users that were likely to leave soon with offers based on their past orders. TGI Fridays sent push notifications encouraging these users to make another purchase. When a user tapped on a push notification, they would be brought into the TGI Fridays app, where they could edit their order and pay with one tap.

“We looked at what and when they ordered and made it super easy for them to re-order at a similar time of day and week,” said James Washington, product manager of digital platforms at TGI Fridays.

It worked. TGI Fridays saw a 65 percent conversion rate when it came to users reordering from the push notification.

“Often brands have massive leaky buckets where they acquire people who download the app, but then never use it,” said Mike Herrick, svp of product and engineering at Urban Airship, which works with TGI Fridays on app retention. “On average, users that opt in to receive notifications have 190 percent greater retention rates than those that don’t opt in.”

TGI Fridays plans on taking the data it gleans from AI and applying it to customer service at its 500-plus restaurants in the U.S. With its app, TGI Fridays can detect when a customer arrives at any of the brand’s 500 U.S. locations. The brand hopes AI can provide more detail that can make the dining experience more personalized, like knowing a guest’s favorite drink and what the occasion is for their visit. That way, a bartender or waiter can be ready to wait on that person, keeping personal preferences in mind.

“Ideally, you go into your local bar, and the bartender knows you,” said Washington. “We want to be able to serve you at the same level.”

TGI Fridays is also using AI to generate the best responses for its Twitter and Facebook chatbots as well as its Amazon Alexa voice skill. Right now, said Washington, users can only ask specific questions like “Alexa, where is the nearest TGI Fridays?”

“With AI, we are opening up our chatbot to have a better understanding of what people mean when they ask things in different ways,” he said, “and connect it to our knowledge basis so we don’t have to write an exhaustive list of answers.”

Another emerging area for AI the restaurant chain has explored over the past year: media buying.

For example, TGI Fridays has used AI to identify guests who are low-frequency buyers and those who are high-frequency buyers across social media platforms like Facebook and then used that information to target similar audiences on Facebook and other paid media channels.

“AI enables these benefits without the need for additional time or resources, which is a big win for our entire organization,” Washington said.

TGI Fridays isn’t alone. Using AI to personalize ads and products is gaining momentum among marketers. According to a 2017 Salesforce survey of 3,500 marketers, 60 percent believe AI will have a “substantial or transformational” impact on their business’s programmatic and media buying in the next five years. Brands like Volkswagen and lingerie brand Cosabella have reported that AI is proving more effective than their media agencies.

The post TGI Fridays looks to AI for app retention appeared first on Digiday.

Today’s beauty brands have a new audience to win over when debuting their products: the ever-growing group of skin-care and makeup junkies that is burgeoning online. But with that has come increased competition, as these customers are surfing through social platforms crowded by other brands and influencers, all hoping to entice the same group of customers.

To solve for this, companies have started focusing on what’s trending online from the get-go, altering both their product formulations and outside packaging to better catch the scrolling eye.

The result is an uptick in products that emphasize texture, viscosity, light and color, often with special effects like glitter or foam added in. Products with unique application processes, like those utilizing water droppers and sponges, and all manner of masks, are also popular.

“This is a huge trend — we talk about it every single day,” said Rinat Aruh, the co-founder and CEO of Aruliden, a branding and product design consultancy that works with brands including Maybelline and Kiehl’s. Now, these brands are spending thousands more on product development, she said, thanks to a longer list of requirements for success.

Farsali’s gold-infused Rose Gold Elixir

And, although brand aesthetics may differ, no one brand in the category seems immune to the tactic.

K-beauty stalwarts like Glow Recipe and internet-born brands like Farsali have led the charge, but many others have followed suit, including the more traditional, artistry-driven brands like MAC Cosmetics and Too Faced, and the more minimalist, newer entrants like Glossier and Drunk Elephant. Even mass brands like Maybelline and Covergirl are taking part.

“There’s a big desire today to create something that results in an Instagram moment, where a product is very photogenic and encourages consumers to take a picture of it,” said Natasha Jen, a partner at the branding agency Pentagram, which counts Dr.Jart+ and Oliveda as clients. “Those moments lead to word of mouth and are huge advertising opportunities.”

A light-reflecting highlighter from Anastasia Beverly Hills

Indeed, given social media’s impact on consumer purchases, this phenomenon is not surprising. In 2016, a Facebook IQ report found that 53 percent of beauty purchases are influenced by what beauty experts share on social media, while 44 percent of them are influenced by what brands post on these platforms.

Setting the scene
That beauty brands care about the way their packaging looks isn’t new, but today, they’re approaching it from a different angle.

“We used to use the lens of: How do we design to create an impact on shelves?” said Aruh. “But now, we design for the thumbnail, which really changes some of the choices we make.”

Where once tactility might be essential to a product’s outer packaging, for instance, light and color now take its place. Shiny glass and plastics, colors that pop and all manner of sparkle are common.

Palettes decorated in metallics or graphic patterns — which also allow shoppers to capture various textures and colors in one snap — have also seen success, with brands including Tarte Cosmetics and Gigi Hadid for Maybelline putting their spin on the format.

When Glow Recipe founders Sarah Lee and Christine Chang chose the glass container for their brand’s Watermelon Glow Sleep Mask, its resemblance to ice was intentional, they said.

In planning the product’s debut last May with Sephora, its launch partner, the multi-retailer had specifically requested it involve “social media–worthy packaging,” said Lee.

Glow Recipe’s Watermelon Glow Sleeping Mask

As K-beauty practitioners, they’re used to the idea. The skin-care category is known for brands like Tonymoly, Too Cool for School and Ultru, all of which incorporate packaging that’s louder and more fun than its American counterparts.

“It’s such a saturated market, and packaging designs today are so beautiful,” said Lee. “Everything is screaming for attention and you definitely need a point of difference.”

Even product mailers are being transformed in the hopes of garnering online attention.

In 2017, the subscription service Birchbox — already known at the time for its rotation of patterned beauty boxes — redesigned their shippers to a shade of salmon-pink, with positive affirmations like “Yes!” sprinkled across them. Each shopper’s name on the mailers is now also preceded by adjectives like “The Tenacious….” or “The Clever….,” to add personalization to the overall effect. It increased not just social mentions, but brand loyalty, too, said Fran Gaitanaros, the company’s vp of creative.

Bringing the inside out
It’s not just the outside packaging that counts. Glow Recipe’s Watermelon Glow Sleep Mask may not have performed as well (it sold out seven times) if the actual product wasn’t a pretty pink, gel-like substance.

“Korean beauty is uniquely suited to Instagram because the textures are unique and the experience is very sensorial,” said Chang. Whenever the brand posts images or video clips of the watermelon mask online, she said, followers go nuts and like the posts more than any others.

Korean beauty sheet masks sold on GlowRecipe.com

And the idea has spread beyond K-beauty.

Glossier has played up the texture of its products, including its thick Cloudpaint blushes and its sticky Haloscope highlighter. MAC Cosmetics and Too Faced have popularized the “baked” product look, championing bronzers and eyeshadow palettes that evoke tightly-packed, shimmery sand. Others, like Farsali and Dr. Jart+, have emphasized the liquidity of their products using water droppers, mists and sheet masks.

“These unique approaches to beauty have really been able to thrive visually and have helped to bring skin care out from behind closed bathroom doors, so that it’s now a social sharing moment,” said Chang.

While branding and product consultants like Aruh and Jen once only focused on the packaging aspect of a product, they’re collaborating on the actual formulations more and more.

“It’s less about the chemistry behind it and more about the so-called ‘goop,’” said Aruh. “We’re helping to bring the inside out and make the overall brand story [more tangible].”

Assorted Glossier products

The efficacy question
But not everyone is convinced this emphasis on social media appeal is really serving the consumer, as the ingredients that create buzz aren’t always good for skin, and the “effects” seen in a well-crafted photo or video aren’t necessarily easy to replicate (or truly important, for that matter).

“I think we’re losing sight of what is actually good for consumers, product-wise,” said Jen. “There’s a strange shift in priorities happening where things are very surface-driven, even for beauty.”

Lee and Chang agreed, noting that they’ve made a point not to include things like parabens, synthetic dyes and phthalates that are often responsible for some of these Insta-worthy effects — but they’re an exception.

“There are a lot of Instagram-popular beauty products that have catchy hooks and can be visually satisfying to watch, but that doesn’t always mean they deliver results,” said Lee.

The post Instagram appeal: How social media is changing product development in beauty appeared first on Digiday.

NBC Sports plans to air original episodes of BuzzFeed’s “Worth It” and Complex Networks’ “Hot Ones” on TV, as part of the company’s broad video game plan leading into the Super Bowl.

For NBC’s Super Bowl coverage — the game will air on NBC’s broadcast network on Feb. 4 — NBC Sports commissioned new episodes of “Hot Ones,” a video interview series from Complex Networks’ First We Feast food site, and “Worth It,” a food and travel show from BuzzFeed. In “Hot Ones,” host Sean Evans interviews celebrities while they eat 10 increasingly spicy chicken wings. “Worth It” follows hosts Steven Lim and Andrew Ilnyckyj as they travel to different cities and try local food at different prices.

For the Super Bowl, NBC Sports commissioned a “Hot Ones” episode with Von Miller, Denver Broncos linebacker and former Super Bowl MVP, as the guest. The episode of “Worth It” will feature different eating spots in Minneapolis, where the game will occur.

As part of NBC Sports’ deal with Complex Networks and BuzzFeed, both episodes of “Hot Ones” and “Worth It” will also be available on YouTube and other platforms.

NBC Sports has worked with other publishers before to make original social content for major sporting events. In addition to broadcasting the Super Bowl every three years, NBC Sports also has the U.S. rights to the Olympics. During the last Summer Olympics, NBC Sports recruited 12 BuzzFeed producers to program a daily Olympics channel for Snapchat Discover — which NBC Sports and BuzzFeed plan to do again for the coming Winter Olympics. Similarly, NBC Sports also used BuzzFeed’s Tasty for digital and social videos for last year’s Kentucky Derby.

NBC Sports parent NBCUniversal is a BuzzFeed investor, which has opened up all sorts of content partnership opportunities between the two companies over the past year.

But NBC Sports has also worked with publishers and video creators that it does not have a stake in, including Complex Networks this year, and Whistle Sports and Dude Perfect the last time it aired the game in 2015.

“Across both the Super Bowl and the Olympics, we’ve done a great job of aggregating audiences on social, on our website and on TV,” said Lyndsay Signor, senior director of consumer engagement at NBC Sports Group. “But because these events are so huge, it’s been part of our strategy to go outside of our own footprint and work with partners [such as BuzzFeed and Complex Networks], who can help us reach people who aren’t necessarily football fans.”

Beyond these content partnerships, NBC Sports will have 25 people from its social, digital and marketing teams creating, editing and distributing video for NBC’s sites, apps and social pages, Signor said.

Ten of those staffers will be in Minnesota throughout the week shooting video features and interviews. The rest will be based in NBC Sports’ broadcast center in Stamford, Connecticut. Planned segments for the week include a feature on the Juicy Lucy burger (a Minnesota staple), interviews with ice-fishing shack owners and interviews with athletes on roller coasters inside the Mall of America. Some of these segments might also make it on the air on Super Bowl Sunday, Signor said.

NBC Sports has also embedded a social team member in the on-air production team this week to produce additional athlete interviews and segments with NBC Sports on-air talent, including Al Michaels, Cris Collinsworth and Michele Tafoya. Planned segments here include a “Minnesota slang video” with Minnesota native Tafoya and a “Super Bowl newlywed game” with Michaels and Collinsworth, according to Signor.

During the game, two staffers will roam around the stadium and field to capture interesting footage from the game and the stands.

All of this points to a bigger staff for Super Bowl Sunday, especially compared to regular-season NFL Sundays when NBC Sports might have three or four social and digital staffers covering football.

“We get the Super Bowl every three years,” Signor said. “This is something where we want to make sure we are on top of every moment possible — and there’s a lot more things to cover during the course of this week, and it’s all hands on deck.”

The post NBC is airing BuzzFeed and Complex shows before the Super Bowl appeared first on Digiday.