Author: rssmasher

Facebook’s news-feed changes have already killed LittleThings and Cox Media-owned publisher Rare and are threatening other viral ones. But their knock-on effects are expected to reverberate past the publishers themselves to the companies that supported and enabled Facebook strategies that are ending.

These include companies such as Jukin Media, which provided the raw material that fueled many publishers’ news-feed video operations; The Social Edge, one of the companies that provided paid Facebook distribution; and talent-management companies that made money sharing publisher content through their Facebook pages.

“I don’t know what I’ll do for income on the platform, but I’m done trying to find out,” said Enrico Taylor, the owner of a Facebook page called I Discover Stars, who said he sued LittleThings, alleging the publisher owes him $50,000 for unpaid fees, fraud and further damages sharing its content. “I give it till April, or I’m gone as well.”

I Discover Stars is far from the only Facebook page LittleThings relied on to distribute its content. Until it closed, LittleThings had a distribution network of over 100 Facebook publishers, according to LittleThings president and COO Gretchen Tibbits. LittleThings was meting out over $500,000 per month to those partners in exchange for Facebook distribution, according to a separate LittleThings source with direct knowledge of the matter.

The Facebook changes, along with updates the platform made to its branded-content policy in late January, could erase not just an income stream for many of these pages but the jobs of seeding and managing them that some talent agencies created.

“Some of this talent, in their heyday, they were making [$50k to $100k-plus] a month posting links,” said Karl House, chief revenue officer of StackCommerce. “If you’re running a [talent-] management company that aggregates influencers who post content to Facebook, these changes mean there’s probably a team you can no longer afford to employ.”

The Facebook changes may also dent companies like Jukin Media and Storyful, which provided raw material for publishers looking to build distributed video operations. The two companies find user-generated content — think Pizza Rat or Chewbacca Mom — license it from creators, then sell the rights to third parties, including publishers, television broadcasters and ad agencies. Storyful declined to comment.

“I think Storyful and Jukin are really good at what they do, and they’ll continue to do it,” said Eric Gonon, a senior executive producer at NY1 News. “But they may lose business from the companies that were overly reliant on [Facebook news-feed video].”

Licensing videos is the largest individual source of Jukin’s revenue, though along with digital publishers, Jukin also has broadcasters and advertising agencies as customers, according to Mike Skogmo, Jukin Media’s vp of communications. It also makes money by selling original series to TV broadcasters and platforms like Facebook Watch, and by selling branded content and other ads on its own sites.

That branded-content business, like those of other Facebook publishers, could be susceptible to margin pressure, according to one media agency source, mostly because the organic reach of many of Jukin’s owned Facebook pages has been declining.

While Jukin posted a year-over-year gain in monthly Facebook video views in February, according to the company, Facebook video views on a number of Jukin’s core properties have declined over the past 12 months, according to CrowdTangle. Skogmo noted that some of those declines were offset by growth of spinoff pages related to those core publisher brands.

“When a [Facebook] announcement’s made, we’re listening closely, but we haven’t seen any significant drop-off in performance,” Skogmo said. “There’s no reason to change yet.”

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In order to grow its global readership, The Economist is targeting an underrepresented demographic in its audience: women. Less than 30 percent of its 1.4 million print and digital subscribers are women, according to the publisher.

Tying in with International Women’s Day on March 8, the publisher has launched in front of its paywall a content hub featuring 10 previously published profiles of inspiring women such as activist Betty Friedan. It’s driving readers to the hub through targeted social media marketing on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Posts on architect Zaha Hadid and mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani are performing three times better than The Economist’s median reach on Facebook, although the publisher wouldn’t share specific figures. Readers can also download the profiles as a package in exchange for registering with an email address.

People who visit the site have generally the same content preferences — international politics, education, health care, the environment — so the editorial tone and topics are not overly suited to one gender. But The Economist has a perception problem. People believe it only covers political and economic topics, when its scope is much broader, spanning topics like society and pop culture through an Economist lens.

“In the past, The Economist has taken a didactic and authoritative approach,” said Marina Haydn, evp of circulation and retail marketing at The Economist. “We want to be more open, inviting and welcoming when engaging with prospects in general.”

As part of its effort to grow its female readership, the publisher started conducting research with semiotics and language analysis research firm Ipsos Connect last June. This research, led by a global team of 16 women across The Economist’s marketing, advertising, product and editorial departments, informs the marketing copy for its ad campaigns. Eleven staffers within the marketing department ensure marketing campaigns incorporate the research findings — and Economist coverage. For example, an article on the gender pay gap informed the copy for its outdoor ad campaign launching this week that advertises International Women’s Day.

“We’re talking about nuance here,” Haydn said. “There are societal elements that people have that mean they perceive communications differently, and we’re adjusting that to improve our relevance among female prospects.”

A more even gender split in The Economist’s audience would appeal to advertisers, according to John Thomson, head of media at 360i Europe. The Economist said it’s having ongoing conversations with ad clients, but this push to target women hasn’t yet helped to win new business. “The world of business changed beyond all belief over the last 25 years; however, many publications look and feel like an old boys’ club,” Thomson said. “There is a big untapped audience here.”

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The media world, seemingly perpetually in flux, is in the midst of what appears a more significant period of upheaval, with tech giants sucking up the majority of ad dollars, digital advertising plagued by a lack of transparency and controversial content, companies taking a hard look at their role when it comes to workplace fairness and cultural impact, and the need to stake out a global claim taking on new urgency.

For our cover of the new issue of Digiday magazine, we turned to early video games and Donkey Kong. We wanted to show, in a tongue in cheek way, the current mood of publishers as Facebook continues to shift its often awkward and overbearing relationship with media. We carried the theme throughout the issue: Look for tributes to Frogger, Qbert, Pac-Man and Punch-Out, among other classics.

Of course, fixing massive industries isn’t as simple as hitting a button and starting the game over. But as we show in our ninth issue, media and marketing are in ways large and starting anew from an era where scale trumped loyalty, reach obscured impact and the short term dominated the long term. We see the media and marketing world becoming less reliant on Facebook, more transparent, increasingly globalized, and belatedly more inclusive and representative. These themes run throughout the issue, with a “Master Mechanics” section highlighting those in the trenches mastering the tactical expertise that will define what comes next.

In media, our focus is on how publishers are attempting to cobble together a sustainable, independent future, free, as much as possible, from the whims of the duopoly. As the recent demise of LittleThings shows, very little in digital media has proved lasting. One day, LittleThings was boasting how it shot to 50 million users; months later, it was winding down operations. Nothing speaks to this more than Jonah Peretti, once Facebook’s biggest booster, pleading publicly for more money for publishers from the sprawling platform. Peretti and other media executives are finding their voices in vocally opposing platforms like Facebook, a turnabout from their recent acquiescence to the whims of Facebook. (See video, pivot to.) Joanna Coles, head of content at Hearst Magazines, takes the long view, telling us the recent travails of fake news only prove the necessity and power of editing.

We also profile the unsung heroes of the modernization of the media, from the newsletter editor to the subscription czar to the head of data protection.

But for change to happen, it must follow the money, and in media, that means the marketers. Shareen Pathak spent time with Norman de Greve of CVS Health, who is at the forefront of the trend of chief marketer as politician, intent on making purpose-driven marketing not just a gimmick. Change will also come externally, as detailed in the shadowy pressure groups springing up to force marketers to clean up their acts. For agencies, change is always afoot, with the current disruptors coming in the guise of the big consulting firms.

For our part, at Digiday, we’re embracing change by building out our premium membership program, Digiday+, which includes exclusive benefits like this magazine, research, Slack town halls and live events. If you’re a member, the digital version of your magazine will arrive via email later today. We will be publishing the digital version of articles throughout the next two weeks. If you’re not a Digiday+ member, please consider joining. It’s $395 a year — and if you don’t like it after the first 30 days, you’ll get a full refund. If you join before Friday, we’ll send you a print copy of the 68-page issue of Digiday magazine.

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Just under eight weeks since Facebook’s algorithm change, which many expected would hike ad prices, things are mostly business as usual. That’s according to a group of top media buyers who gathered in New Orleans this week for the Digiday Media Buying Summit.

“We’ve literally had no changes happen because of this,” said Merkle CMO Adam Lavelle.

Prices were expected to rise after the change. Agency buyers Digiday spoke to said they expected brands would have to pay more for advertising in order to get the same number of views. The idea was that there would be less “inventory” available, raising prices. But agencies say this hasn’t happened — yet. “We aren’t seeing any significant pricing differences for standard brand advertising,” said Noah Mallin, head of social at WPP’s Wavemaker.

Kerry Perse, who heads social at OMD, said the biggest difference to her has been “as a user” — she sees fewer publishers. Prices haven’t gone up, she speculated, because for now, publishers are paying more money to be on Facebook, which still lines Facebook pockets. Ad revenue is up, but CPMs haven’t increased.

In some cases, Facebook ad prices have gone down. Epic Signal founder Brendan Gahan said that might be because brands had already reallocated social budgets in anticipation of CPMs increasing, which means there’s less demand, and prices are relatively low as a result.

The other big change buyers expected was “authentic” content — from friends and family, but also influencers — to become more important. When done on its own, influencer content essentially mimics content from friends and family. But the problem is that the news-feed change came on the heels of Facebook demanding that brands use the handshake tool to label influencer posts and “link” them with the brands sponsoring them. Since the news-feed change, organic reach of posts has decreased, as Facebook creates a pay-to-play scenario with influencer content because it’s now more easily identifiable, thanks to the handshake tool, said Perse.

Buyers, however, also said the news-feed changes have shifted their strategies away from publishers like LittleThings that use Facebook as a distribution channel. Those publishing partners have to either diversify platforms or, like in the case of NowThis, re-establish a website.

“I don’t think Facebook becomes a no man’s land for publishers, but there will be a steeper slope from publishers who do well on the platform and the mediocre middle who didn’t necessarily design content specific to Facebook’s environment,” said Mallin. “It also means that the cost of branded content may go up as organic contributes a smaller share of views. Some publishers may choose to absorb this cost for the time being.” 

The biggest effect, of course, is in organic reach. Epic Signal, which crunched numbers across its client base, found brands are seeing organic reach on Facebook decline about 60-70 percent since the changes.

Even in cases where CPMs are slightly higher because of organic reach dropping, things are still business as usual because “dark posts” — those that don’t appear in the news feed — aren’t affected. Michael Dobson, who heads social media at Crossmedia, said Facebook’s updates did not impact bid delivery or audience targeting, which is why none of these changes are having much of an impact.

“This change was made to re-engage users who are disconnecting from the platform to allow people to connect with ‘friends and family’ content being priority, what Facebook feels users are most interested in seeing,” said Dobson. “The delivery of ads remains the same.”

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Marketers are finding their voice in publicly sharing their frustrations with digital media, in particular with its biggest players: Facebook and Google.

At the British advertiser trade body ISBA’s annual conference in London this week, marketers took several pot shots at digital media for being opaque, lax on brand safeguards and slow on stamping out fraud. The message: Thanks for being upfront about the issues, but get moving on fixing them.

In sign of the general unease with the normal happy-happy-joy-joy talk from tech platforms, Geoff Seeley, Airbnb’s director of global connections and media activation, drew applause when he said Facebook “lived in a bubble” after Facebook vp of Northern Europe extolled Facebook’s efforts at being responsible platform. Another executive, who spoke to Digiday on condition of anonymity at the event, expanded on those frustrations with issues closer to his wallet: “To be frank, I’m far more concerned by Facebook’s attitude and commitment to cross-industry initiatives, from verification to audience measurement.”

Royal Bank of Scotland’s CMO David Wheldon said Google’s and Facebook’s fixes “hadn’t been good enough, but were better than nothing.” While marketers may not always get it right — one senior marketer conflated ad fraud and brand safety onstage — they’re more willing to express frustration digital media isn’t solving problems it created.

“We’re here to run businesses, not to create nirvanas of imperfect measurement,” said Zaid Al-Qassab, BT’s chief brand and marketing officer, who prefers the U.K. adopt its own viewability standard rather than rely on an eventual global standard. “I’d love to get to where Unilever wants [with a global viewability standard], but I feel that’s being used as an excuse by publishers to kick the can down the road.”

Al-Qassab is working on implementing BT’s own viewability standards, though he won’t rule out having higher thresholds for brand campaigns versus slightly lower ones for direct-response ads.

Kudos were given to early efforts byProcter & Gamble’s top marketer Marc Pritchard praised the so-called walled gardens for their attempts to provide greater transparency over data and metrics a year after he lambasted them. He pointed to how quickly P&G’s brand Tide was protected by online media’s power brokers earlier this year amidst the detergent’s involvement in a dangerous series of video dares. Within a matter of hours YouTube had swept the entire platform free of those videos, revealed Pritchard, and had tweaked the algorithm to show a safety video in place of the controversial viral post. Both Facebook and Snapchat did the same, he added.

At the same time, actions speak louder than words. P&G reduced waste by 20 percent last year and actually increased reach by 10 percent. There’s still work to do, particularly for VOD measurement and MRC accreditation, concluded Pritchard, but P&G “has the objective third party data that we need to make good media spending decisions.”

Marketers often shy away from publicly discussing how agencies spend their money. Based on what he’s heard as president of the World Federation of Advertisers, Wheldon suggested this may be due in part to concerns about those strategies reflecting poorly on them. At the event, however, two examples illustrated what a transparent relationship between advertiser and agency might look like. Both Barclays and the U.K. government outlined their new agency models, which pay closer attention to audits, contracts, talent, process, remuneration and performance incentives.

Barclays’ media strategy with agency Aperto One isn’t just about understanding the return on investment of its media, said Tom Corbett, group head of sponsorship and media at Barclays. It’s about the “value of your media agency partnership,” he said. Until you understand that value, he added, “you can’t put a price on what it’s worth,” which is why for Barclays, “certain remuneration models that are out there in the marketplace simply don’t work.”

For all the talk of taking responsibility of media at the conference, few marketers openly discussed their programmatic strategy. When Nigel Gilbert, vp of strategic development at AppNexus, asked marketers at the event how many of them had a direct relationship with their demand-side platform, just three hands went up. Advertisers in the U.K., it seems, would rather scrutinize the devil they know — agencies. Ad tech companies almost get a “free pass” from senior marketers, Gilbert said. AppNexus has been to “see some very large brands who you would argue do not put us in the same position that they would their agency.”

 

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Tough Mudder is one brand that is seeing its Facebook Watch investment pay off.

In October, Tough Mudder’s first Watch show — in which an instructor taught a live workout class — saw 37,000 views. Now, Tough Mudder is seeing hundreds of thousands of views on every video, with its latest video of another workout class generating 684,000 views. Tough Mudder’s most viewed show occurred in November when 1.2 million people watched the final moments of Tough Mudder’s Toughest Mudder race in Las Vegas.

The fitness brand has seen an average of 477,000 views on its 18 Watch shows. In total, the shows have generated more than 8 million views, according to Jerome Hiquet, CMO of Tough Mudder.

Hiquet calls the shows a “success” and said the number of views on Watch reaffirms Tough Mudder’s decision to put more focus on delivering its message of teamwork. “It’s videos consumers are seeking out,” he said. “The new generation wants to be connected to brands through emotion.”

Tough Mudder’s two Watch series cater to two types of audiences. “Tough Mudder Championship” livestreamed four events in which runners tackled Tough Mudder’s most difficult 10-mile obstacle courses. Tough Mudder used head cams, aerial drones and backstage commentary to capture the action.

The other series, “Tough Mudder Bootcamp,” is tailored to active lifestyle enthusiasts, who might feel more comfortable doing workouts from their own homes. In these weekly 45-minute live fitness classes, instructors walk viewers through different workouts.

The fitness classes are also meant as previews to Tough Mudder’s new boot camp studios. In February, Tough Mudder announced it would open its own line of workout studios in Massachusetts, Nevada and Texas in the fourth quarter.

Tough Mudder began in 2010 primarily as an events company that hosted military-style obstacle courses where people run through fire, ice, electric fences and, of course, plenty of mud. Since then, it has evolved into a lifestyle and media brand that is not just for the hardcore athlete. Tough Mudder claims 3 million people have finished its races. To diversify its audiences, it had to diversify its messaging.

“The main point is to become more accessible,” said Hiquet.

Tough Mudder began building an in-house content team in its early days, but started to put more emphasis on doing so in 2015, said Hiquet, when the company realized this would help it be more cost-efficient. Today, Hiquet said the in-house content team is made up of 50 people between its New York and London offices. Out of those 50, 18 people focus on content and social media, and three people focus entirely on video. Hiquet added that Tough Mudder also hires several freelancers at one time to work on video content.

“We have a broad content marketing ecosystem from social media to TV, to ensure we can reach our existing and potential customers in multiple ways,” said Hiquet.

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If you thought conference panels were all about a group of experts gathered to enthusiastically agree with one another about a given topic, the panel from Adweek’s Elevate: AI summit on voice-powered discovery and ecommerce was would have dissuaded you of that notion. Think voice is the future? Not so fast, said Tom Goodwin, evp…

Artificial Intelligence is here, yes, but it’s important to remember that the current capabilities of AI are a small part of what it can and probably will look like in the future, according to a panel gathered today for Adweek’s Elevate: AI summit. “This tech is still in its infancy,” Conversable CEO and founder Ben…

Today at Elevate: AI in New York, Adweek gathered industry experts and executives to discuss the future of marketing as it relates to artificial intelligence, chatbots and other emerging technologies. The panels and presentations sparked lively discussions in The Boston Consulting Group office along the Hudson River–and on Twitter. Here’s a look at the event’s…

Bustle Digital Group is looking to capitalize on the lack of female voices in the streetwear industry with a new video series called “Blaze,” which will spotlight female entrepreneurs, influencers and sneaker enthusiasts.

The series — which will be produced in partnership with SNKRINC, a streetwear-centric media company and content studio launched in November 2017 — will debut this summer on BDG’s Elite Daily site. The videos will air weekly and vary in duration from 5 to 8 minutes. Guests will include Jade Chynoweth, a streetwear influencer and the first female dancer to sign a sneaker endorsement with Puma, graphic artist and painter Allison “Humean” Torneros, who has partnered with Nike, and sneaker influencer Jazerai Allen-Lord.

Though media and e-commerce sites are increasingly catering to women in streetwear — Complex occasionally features female guests on its video series “Sneaker Shopping,” Hypebeast launched its spinoff site Hypebae, and Zappos created a destination exclusively for women’s sneakers — it still represents a small percentage of overall coverage. SNKRINC founder Ivan Dudynsky said the video series was created in response to the persistent void of editorial coverage for women in streetwear.

“We developed this specifically because we looked at the sneaker space and felt there were a lot of stories being told around male influencers,” he said. “We looked at all the blogs doing this, and they were completely under-serving females. It’s oversaturated with stories about resale and traditional unboxing. Nobody was telling these stories of these women.”

While Elite Daily may not seem like the obvious choice to debut a sneaker series, Kate Robinson, BDG’s svp of business development, said traffic to streetwear-related content has been on the rise, as has demand from women for sneaker style stories. When Dudynsky approached BDG — which in addition to Elite Daily, also includes the women’s interest vertical Bustle and its parenting site, Romper — she said the team was already in the midst of brainstorming ways to beef up its streetwear coverage.

“We were starting to see sneakers pop up as a trend within our trends research group,” she said. “We also polled our audience using The Bustle Hive, our community membership program, and we started to hear a lot about sneakers. Our audience was really hungry around sneaker culture.”

Though BDG is an attractive partner, thanks to its robust audience of young millennial women — which will both build a viewership and entice ad partners — Dudynsky said its tone felt like the right fit to house a series intended to to move beyond the boys’ club of streetwear. In addition to the video series, Robinson said BDG will ramp up sneaker-focused coverage and social content leading up to the video series and complementing it during its summer-long run.

Ultimately, Dudynsky said the goal is to use the videos as a springboard for a full-fledged media platform that caters to women with an enthusiasm for streetwear, working collaboratively with BDG to build momentum. He said it was too early to share details about whether this platform would function autonomously or as live within a site like Elite Daily, but it will likely expand subject areas to include topics like music, culture and sports.

“What’s great about sneaker culture is it’s an amazing starting point for a conversation,“ he said. ”If you look at what MTV did, it started in music, but it bridged out into culture, fashion and travel, and we want to do the same thing with sneakers.”

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