Author: rssmasher

In 2018, talk about cryptocurrency moved beyond a niche area among finance geeks to a mainstream one that’s part of popular culture. It’s made it into dinner table conversation among families. Companies that mention blockchain have seen their share prices gone up. Bitcoin has stood in the way of friendships.

Now, publishers are getting in on the frenzy. Media companies from Business Insider to Investopedia are all creating new products, from newsletters to video — but the pressure is also on to differentiate. It’s impossible for them to cover everything, and finding a niche is the way to grow audience reach and keep loyal readers engaged.

Read the full story on tearsheet.co

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Commerce-focused publishers looking to deepen their ties with retailers and limit their dependence on Amazon are delivering more than just interested audiences these days.

Using conversion data from e-commerce transactions, commerce publishers are giving retailers recommendations on everything from discounting strategies to the look of retailers’ landing pages to the prices of the items themselves. They are also using site search and influencer data to help retailers know what products to promote to customers. Some are considering licensing this data, but for now, most provide it for free in hopes of benefiting indirectly because if the retailers’ sales improve, so will the publishers’ cuts.

PopSugar gives retailers data on which products and brands are most popular with its audience and 20,000 Instagram influencers.

Tech-focused publisher Purch uses audience data that tracks its readers across sites and devices to help retailers optimize everything from sales offers to the design of their sales pages.

Ziff Davis started advising retailers on how to improve conversions 10 years ago. It now provides data to certain ones so they can optimize the offers they make to customers. In the fourth quarter, it advised retailers on their mobile commerce checkout strategies. (The publishers wouldn’t give specific examples of retailers they’ve worked with.)

Such moves will become more common as e-commerce continues to eat into brick-and-mortar retail, customers get more comfortable buying products online and publishers search for revenue streams outside of advertising.

“It’s absolutely grown in sophistication,” said Doug Llewelyn, president and chief operating officer of Purch. “Way too many publishers think they can put affiliate buttons on their page and say it’s content and commerce.”

Publishers that have strong positions in search results and credibility with their audiences can do this kind of advising because they often have a more comprehensive view of the market than an individual retailer.

Ziff Davis, for example, recently convinced one of its partners, a “brand-conscious, boutique-y retailer” that it wouldn’t name, which seldom offered discounts, to try a discount offer it had never tried before.

The move, which was informed by conversion data Ziff had gathered from that retailer and others, led to a substantial increase in the average order size without affecting conversion rates, drastically improving Ziff’s payout.

“It’s almost like free consulting for them,” said Howard Schaffer, Ziff Davis’ head of audience. “Merchants are very good at saying, ‘We’re gonna do what we’ve done in the past,’ even though a lot of times they don’t even have good data to see how that’s performed.”

The collaborations can grow deep. Purch has enough best practices about what kinds of landing pages convert that it built its own template, which it periodically offers to retailers.

On multiple occasions, Purch has delivered so much information that improved conversions for retailers that the retailers put the publisher in charge of custom-designing those retailers’ site landing pages. Llewelyn said those retailers each pay Purch millions of dollars per year in affiliate commissions.

“Commerce publishers are literally a click ahead of retailers,” said Shirley Chen, Narrativ’s founder and CEO. “The best editors today act more like market researchers than just regular experts. You often see a lot of publishers pushing back on promotions their retailers work with because they know it’s not best in class.”

There are obstacles to working together. Retailers normally interact with publishers through their marketing teams, which are typically far removed from the product teams that have direct control over the sites’ look and feel. And retailers often get apprehensive about doing anything that might compromise their SEO efforts.

“It’s often a long game of telephone,” Schaffer said. “Marketing has to go to product, who has to go to engineering, who has to go back to product and so on. It becomes a hassle.”

And publishers have run into indifference from retailers that didn’t see much point in messing with a revenue stream that was growing anyway.

“Personalization has been one of the biggest things on our clients’ road maps this year, and publisher data is key to that,” said Matt Faulk, the CEO of the agency Basic, which has designed e-commerce strategies for clients including Beats by Dre, Ubisoft and REI. “You’ve got to get the use cases and distill it down so you can see what’s converting and what isn’t.”

While the data and assistance publishers are able to provide to retailers may help grow revenues, none of it will be able to replace Amazon. According to Narrativ estimates, a full half of the transactions that commerce publishers initiate are converted by Amazon.

But what the changes do offer is a chance to build durable relationships that will be key to long-term growth. “Way too often, [commerce content] becomes a tactic, not a strategy for publishers,” Llewelyn said. “We see it as our business model.”

The post How commerce publishers use their data to cozy up to retailers appeared first on Digiday.

In the wake of Facebook’s announcement that it would deprioritize publishers’ content in its news feed, the need for publishers to diversify their traffic sources has never been more urgent. In the U.S., HuffPost hasn’t let the Facebook feed changes deter it from growing niche communities through Facebook groups and pages. HuffPost UK is taking a different approach, expediting a newsletter strategy that targets engaged groups of people on specific topics.

“We’re seeing a trend in deepening engagement through richer formats that reach people, not necessarily through Google and Facebook,” said Jack Riley, international strategy director at HuffPost. “Our aspiration is to create deeply engaged communities of people around specific topic areas.”

The most recent example in the U.K. is Gym Buddies, a fitness-focused daily newsletter featuring three links to HuffPost UK content around workout advice, fitness jargon explainers and interviews with athletes and fitness fanatics. Newsletters account for nearly 8 percent of HuffPost UK’s desktop referral traffic, while social accounts for 18 percent of referral traffic, according to SimilarWeb data.

HuffPost UK has 10 newsletters, including The Waugh Zone, a daily political briefing written by politics executive editor Paul Waugh; a weekly Brexit briefing newsletter; and weekly and daily news newsletters. The newsletters feature a mix of content from HuffPost and links to content from other publishers, with the exception of The Waugh Zone, which is a standalone editorial product similar to Quartz’s newsletters. The Waugh Zone, which started in June 2015, has almost 21,000 subscribers and one of HuffPost UK’s highest open rates, according to the publisher.

HuffPost UK plans to add more topic-specific newsletters in the coming months, although the topics still need to be decided.

“We’re testing out what the engagement benefits are of having a more developed newsletter strategy, whether that means more branding, more resource, and how this affects metrics,” said Riley. “We have to make sure the engagement metrics are nuanced enough to show how people are deriving value from it.” Newsletter measurement can be tricky, as some publishers use them as standalone editorial products, rather than to drive readers to their own sites where they can track more elements of user behavior.

For topic-specific newsletters like Brexit and Gym Buddies, the content is published on-site, tweeted and sent through push notifications on Apple News. “Key for us in creating engaged communities on specific topics is acknowledging that readers are open to receiving content in multiple channels,” said Riley. “It’s more reflective of media consumption across multiple media.”

Riley said HuffPost UK has seen referral traffic from sources outside of Facebook climb over the last year, noting news aggregator platforms like Axel Springer’s Upday, Flipboard and Apple News as the fastest growing. Combined, these three platforms now drive significantly more traffic for HuffPost UK than Twitter does, he said.

News aggregator platforms have evolved from being purely algorithm-driven to building large editorial teams that are charged with selecting which content to showcase. Now, they use a combination of algorithms and editorial teams to prioritize content in their feeds. “You couldn’t really talk about specific editorial decisions,” said Riley. “Now, you can talk editor to editor. It’s a bit of a shift from guessing the Facebook and Google black box and a healthy one for the news ecosystem.”

While plenty of publishers grumble about poor monetization from Apple News, HuffPost UK has seen traffic and monetization on the platform grow in the last six months. The publisher, which sells the ads that appear in its Apple News content, said clients are repeatedly booking campaigns. “It’s not just engagement we’re seeing; we’re driving value from it,” Riley added.

The post HuffPost UK plans more topic-specific newsletters appeared first on Digiday.

Marketers have realized that influencer marketing is not going away anytime soon. As they spend more and more ad dollars on it, many brands have started creating internal influencer marketing teams to take more control over their relationships with social stars and campaign performance.

“Brands building in-house influencer marketing teams is probably the No. 1 trend in the industry right now,” said Gil Eyal, CEO of influencer analytics platform Hypr. “It started around last year and is really taking off this year, especially in the fashion and beauty categories. This is largely because more and more brands want to nurture long-term relationships with influencers.”

Much like ad tech, two models exist for moving influencer marketing in-house: Brands either assemble a team to manage influencer campaigns independently, from influencer outreach to campaign setup and execution to measurement; or they hire an in-house influencer czar to strategize influencer marketing, using tools to manage influencer relationships, but those brands still rely on agencies to execute campaigns, according to influencer marketing executives. And since many brands want to at least control influencer relationships — if not the full campaign — themselves, many influencer marketing platforms are pivoting to call themselves “influencer relationship-management platforms,” according to Eyal.

Either way, brands seem to be aggressively hiring for influencer marketing roles. For instance, HelloFresh is looking for a senior associate for influencer marketing to support its “rapidly growing influencer marketing efforts,” while L’Occitane seeks an influencer marketing manager with “extensive knowledge of the influencer marketing landscape,” existing relationships with content creators and the ability to execute campaigns and analyze results. Nike, on the other hand, is recruiting a brand manager responsible for identifying influencers.

At Birchbox, its senior manager of brand marketing oversees influencer efforts, with assistance from the company’s social content and PR teams. This is because Birchbox’s business model is complex and the brand actually resonates most on social with women who are not into beauty, so finding this group that is not inherently looking for Birchbox is challenging, according to Jenna Hilzenrath, director of public relations for Birchbox. “Managing influencer marketing in-house allows us to be nimble and take a really hands-on, nuanced approach,” she said. “That said, we do occasionally work with agencies or other platforms on a project basis.”

Eyal said that around half of his clients are bringing influencer marketing in-house. Small companies typically have one person, while big brands have a team of six to 10. “Don’t feel surprised if you see a 25-year-old be in charge of a brand’s influencer marketing that represents a pretty significant amount of the company’s ad budget,” he said.

Adam Rivietz, co-founder of influencer marketing platform #Paid, has also noticed an uptick in brands bringing influencer marketing in-house. He said that in Canada, 80 percent of his clients are agencies and 20 percent are brands, while the split is 50-50 in the U.S. “Brands in the U.S. have a bigger budget,” said Rivietz. “They are more willing to test influencer marketing on their own, and they want to take more control.”

Rivietz said brands like Nike and Mars have run influencer marketing internally for a while. One big benefit of this for brands is the ability to curate their own lists of top performers and then maintain longtime relationships with those individuals. “Influencers are more interested in long-term partnerships — like traditional sponsorships — than one-off deals. And they look more genuine to their followers this way,” he said. “On the flip side, brands don’t need to go out and find influencers every week or every month. They can also get a better price with long-term deals. Economies of scale apply here.”

Eyal and Rivietz both believe the cost of an ad campaign for a brand could skyrocket when an ad agency is involved. “Sometimes, our proposal for a brand gets lost in translation when an agency relays our message to the client,” said Rivietz. “Of course, for us, a big advantage of working with agencies is they introduce us to many other clients.”

Steve Buors, co-founder and CEO of digital marketing shop Reshift Media, thinks that while brands could use a variety of self-serve influencer marketing tools, agencies have more in-depth knowledge of measurement, as it’s hard to calculate the return on investment of influencer marketing.

“When you work with the right agency, you bring in another level of sophistication,” said Buors. “Influencer marketing is not the same as a Facebook ad where you can draw a direct line between your messaging and sales, but marketers always want to create some degree of connection of, if I do this, what can I get from it?”

The post Brands are bringing influencer marketing in-house appeared first on Digiday.

Since launching “TommyNow,” a series of fashion collections made immediately available for purchase worldwide as they sashayed down the runway on co-designer Gigi Hadid and her crew of models, designer Tommy Hilfiger has never moved faster. For one, the collection goes from design to market in six months, a clip three times faster than traditional collections.

“If you fall behind, catching up isn’t an option,” he said during the NRF Big Show conference last week in New York. “Listening to the customer is very important, and what the customer wants is immediate gratification. I want them to see something on the runway, click and buy it. I want the fastest delivery and the most incredible experience. If there’s no risk, there’s no reward, and our risk was changing our entire design and production process.”

With the exception of Burberry, other designer brands have failed to launch see-now-buy-now collections on Hilfiger’s scale, but the need to speed up the production process is industry-wide. As brands work to eliminate inefficiencies in the production process, artificial intelligence, in particular, is playing an increasingly critical role in not only manufacturing and supply chain logistics, but in the creative design process as well. It’s a tool that’s catching on among legacy brands, technology providers, student designers and retail startups alike.

“How can data make us smarter?”
For Tommy Hilfiger, AI serves as the launchpad that gets the creative process off the ground.

Recently, the brand announced a partnership with IBM and the Fashion Institute of Technology that uses IBM Research AI tools to decipher real-time fashion industry trends, ongoing customer sentiment around every Tommy Hilfiger product and runway image, and resurfacing themes in patterns, silhouettes, colors and styles. Using AI, this massive library of visual and textual content is drilled down into decipherable data and served back to the human designer on the other end, who can then use it to make informed decisions around the next collection as it’s designed.

Questions like, “How did this shirt style perform five seasons ago?” “What color schemes are trending now?” “Is this trend close to being over?” and “What was our most popular piece in the last three runway collections?” can be answered in a matter of minutes. AI is essentially drawing informed inspiration from past and current fashion trends, inside and outside of the brand, immediately — a task that would take a human on a design teams days or weeks to achieve, and on a much less scientific level. Certain information scraped by the algorithms would be impossible for a human to acquire at all. For instance, the machine gathered Amazon and Zolando reviews for Tommy Hilfiger items to understand not just positive or negative reactions, but customers’ views on items’ fit, color options, price and quality.

“The goal was to equip the next generation of retail leaders with new skills and bring informed inspiration to their designs with the help of AI,” said Avery Baker, the chief brand officer at Tommy Hilfiger. “AI can identify upcoming trends faster than industry insiders to enhance the design process.”

The purpose isn’t to replace the creative process — that gut feeling, human eye or impulse — with a series of objective 0s and 1s. The purpose is to reduce the “brain clutter,” as Baker called it: the laborious tasks that delay the creative process, like trend and archive research.

“We wanted to know: How do we eliminate the repetitive tasks? Once you do, you can focus yourself elsewhere, instead of manually scanning Instagram and Pinterest. We’re pulling insights that brands can use again and again, from massive data pools,” said Chris Palmer, the global cognitive offerings lead at IBM. “This is not the same as the creative process, and it’s not replacing it. It’s answering: How can data make us smarter?”

Robot, meet designer
Tommy Hilfiger’s new partnership with IBM and FIT is a small step of progress toward a fashion world that fuses artificial intelligence into the design process. While it’s a leading move in the traditional contemporary and luxury designer spheres, which can be slow to adopt new technology, it’s happening in much fuller force elsewhere.

Online styling service Stitch Fix, which went public in the fall and is projected to bring in $1 billion in revenue in its financial 2017, used troves of personal customer data and feedback (Stitch Fix members are asked to review every piece of clothing they receive in a style box, whether they buy it or not), plus artificial intelligence to design its first in-house line of clothing last year. Called Hybrid Design, the line is made from a series of algorithms that combs the visual and textual data to determine what styles don’t already exist in Stitch Fix’s inventory and are positioned to perform well.

A Stitch Fix Hybrid Design top

The items made with Hybrid Design are entirely cultivated by a machine. The humans on the design team at Stitch Fix only approve them, to make sure nothing “wonky” happens, as Stitch Fix chief algorithms officer Eric Colson phrased it.

“Most of our styles have had volumes written about them, thanks to customer reviews,” said Colson. “It’s next to impossible to parse all of that by a human, but algorithms distill it down: Here’s how to make sense of these reviews, who will love what and who won’t. In the same way, we match what other people have said about something to a client’s preferences, and new styles are curated based on that learning. You can reduce variants by aggregation and end up with a blouse that’s made up of the most popular style, color and silhouette.”

Stitch Fix, which was built on the pervasive idea that data science could improve retail, has made strides in AI that most brands haven’t yet touched. It’s also not designing algorithm-based fashion with the goal to set trends or become a fashion tastemaker — quite the opposite. These Hybrid Designs are meant to blend in with the inventory from the other 500 brands Stitch Fix works with. But the underlying value of AI remains: Set the machine in motion so humans are freed up to do more creative tasks.

As Italian lingerie brand Cosabella wanted to move more into other categories like loungewear, sleepwear and swimsuits, artificial intelligence played a role in deciphering a customer’s life cycle with the brand. Becoming a “lifestyle” brand is a risky move, so Cosabella CEO Guido Campello wanted to navigate the transition in the smartest (read: data-backed) way possible.

“Each time a new customer starts and stops shopping with us, we learn a little more. Does she want boyshorts? Lace? No lace? We can design better and faster with all these customer preferences and demographics in mind,” said Campello.

Cosabella’s design process used to work 24 months ahead of its sale schedule. Using AI, that’s been reduced to six weeks for some items.

“All designers and brands would benefit from adopting this technology into their design processes, and eventually, it’s going to change the way all brands go to market,” said Ed Gribbin, president of apparel consulting company Alvanon. “If you had the chance to get better product that your customer is more likely to buy to the market faster than competitors, I don’t know why you wouldn’t do it.”

Vetting the next generation
FIT student designer Grace McCarty won the design contest hosted by IBM and Tommy Hilfiger with her Tommy Hilfiger-branded raincoat. The contest asked students to design a product they thought could fit into Tommy Hilfiger’s arsenal using AI and wearable tech.

Image: Grace McCarty

McCarty’s raincoat included a removable bottom layer that was threaded with color-changing fabrics that responded to an analysis of voice and social media feeds, using AI. But it wasn’t the futuristic, wearable technology aspect of the design process that opened McCarty’s eyes to where fashion is headed.

“I believe that AI and technology will eventually change people’s lives through fashion,” said McCarty. “But it also taught me that technology in fashion isn’t only wearables. It can play a role in the design process that doesn’t actually change the design process at all; it just makes it easier. It made me approach things differently.”

Michael Ferraro, the executive director of the Technology Lab at FIT, said collaborative efforts like the IBM and Tommy Hilfiger partnership, which bring together students and staff across marketing, manufacturing and design departments, will serve as the blueprint for where FIT’s program is headed.

“AI is a tool that augments your existing toolset and mindset. It’s designed to inform your decisions,” said Ferraro. “That’s going to be incredibly powerful.”

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