Author: rssmasher

The Instagramming and unboxing mass of inspirational lifestyle gurus known as influencers are only becoming increasingly central to the marketing strategies of fashion and luxury brands in 2018.

There are still frustrations, as brands figure out how to track the results of campaigns and sponsored posts, including conversions and the value in engagement. But as data tools become more sophisticated and platforms start to share more insight with both brands and influencers, brand strategies are maturing. The good news: As the space has become more established, power has shifted in favor of the brands, who have gotten smarter than to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an Instagram post from an influencer with a lot of followers.

“As influencer marketing continues to mature, it’s becoming more and more measurable,” said Mike Froggatt, director of intelligence at L2. “Brands are relying less on cherry-picking from a list of influencers with big follower counts, and throwing money at them to see what does and doesn’t stick, and starting to utilize more data to find the right fit and actual benefits.”

As brands continue to funnel money into this space (according to L2 research, the influencer marketing industry is estimated to exceed $2 billion in contract value by 2019), expect to see brands righting the power imbalance, and platforms like Instagram and Snapchat building tools to get a piece of the pie. What’s more, there will be a rise of the influencer roster — a group of social media personalities a brand keeps on rotation, in order to create more transparency and drive clearer results in the murky influencer marketing space.

The roster is the influencer “holy grail”
Brands have been burned by dropping a lot of money on one-off influencer partnerships that made little impact. The real value, brands are finding, is in recruiting a strong group of influencers — micro-influencers up to supermodel-caliber influencers, depending on budget size — who are repeatedly called on for long-term campaigns, event promotions and sponsored posts. The more recognizable the group’s association becomes with a brand, the better.

“That’s the holy grail: relying on a stable of influencers that have a closer relationship with the brand,” said Froggatt. “It benefits everyone to have a long-term relationship, not a series of one-offs.”

Froggatt pointed to Victoria’s Secret Angels as the most distinguishable influencer roster, but smaller brands can take advantage of this setup, as well. Microinfluencer Cyndii Yu frequently works with athletic apparel startup Alala, both appearing on the brand’s account and posting photos of herself in the brand’s gear.

“We work with a lot of NYC-based influencers, and that’s how we connect with people the most. We do a fair number of immersive events to get to know them better, like inviting them to take classes with us, where we connect with them one-on-one,” said Danise Lee, the founder of luxury women’s activewear brand Alala. “Everyone gets bombarded with so many product requests, it helps us stand out when they have a face to put to the brand. We spend a lot of time developing those relationships.”

Tonight’s plans? Alala and chill @milkcyndii #alalaallday

A post shared by Alala (@alala) on Jan 3, 2018 at 3:03pm PST

This strategy requires brands to play the long game and carefully vet the influencers they want to recruit on their teams. But the more time is spent on making sure the influencer is right with the brand, the higher lift in engagement and sales they’ll see down the line. Overall, brands might end up devoting more marketing dollars to influencer relationships, but they won’t be flushing a bulk spend on one influencer for one Instagram.

“Total spend might go up, but individual spend will go down,” said Gil Eyal, the CEO of HyprBrands, a platform that serves as an influencer directory for brands. “The audience wants to see that the influencer really likes the product and is using it in the long-term. So the brands that will win are the ones creating their own influencer rosters and activating those rosters again and again. Especially in the crowded world of micro-influencers, you want to build an ongoing relationship so you’re not starting over every time.”

Brands are laying out clear expectations before paying up
Measuring the success of an influencer campaign or post will become less murky as brands establish what they want out of their influencer partnerships at the beginning — and work to actually track measurements.

“Blindly following the number of followers an influencer has is over. Brands are focusing on the kind of return they’re going to get,” said Eyal. “We’re shifting from an economy of likes and shares, to cost-per-click and conversion.”

According to Eyal, Amazon is testing a tactic that only pays an influencer once they drive a certain number of purchases through affiliate links, not before. Eyal predicts more big brands will head in that direction. Smaller brands are managing expectations around the value of raising awareness with influencers, even if that doesn’t lead to sales.

Nadia McCarthy Kahane, the CEO of online jewelry retailer Stone & Strand, said that a partnership with two Instagram influencers paid off in brand awareness, but didn’t drive sales. That’s harder for a big brand with levels of executives to explain a budget to, but smaller brands are taking advantage of more nimble collaborations.

“If we measured success of the collection on response, it had a great reception,” said McCarthy Kahane. “We were looking to raise awareness, get feedback from these followers. It hasn’t done super well from a sales perspective.”

From the influencer perspective, knowing a brand’s intentions off the bat helps them comb through and find the best fits for partnerships.

“For micro-influencers especially, it all comes down to picking and choosing the right partnerships,” said Froggatt. “On the plus side, they have an actual live feedback loop with their audience, who knows them and will give their feedback. So if a partnership doesn’t work, they’ll know that right away. They can read the tea leaves of their audiences much better than a group of brand marketers sitting around, figuring out the next hottest thing.”

Platforms will be pulling more strings
As spend on the influencer marketing space continues to rise, the platforms that house these partnerships — like Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat — will look for ways to get a cut.

“It’s important to note that platforms are not neutral players in this space, and they are looking to innovate and make money from it,” said Froggatt. “I think we’ll see more platform strategies around this.”

Instagram inserted itself in the middle of paid posts when it gave brands and influencers the option last year to denote that an Instagram had been part of a paid partnership, with a geotag. That tag wasn’t just a disclosure mechanism: Posts using that paid partnership tag also pulled up data around engagement and click-throughs that both brands and influencers could access.

That can be valuable, as brands are still searching for the best data management tools for influencer marketing. But it also means that influencer marketing could end up costing more for the brands.

“Influencer marketing has grown a lot, but brands still haven’t fully jumped in with both feet,” said Evan Asano, the CEO of the influencer marketing agency Mediakix. “Brands are going to end up putting a lot more money into this space, in more creative ways.”

The post For fashion brands, 2018 will be the year of the ‘influencer roster’ appeared first on Digiday.

Digiday’s “Research in brief” is our newest research installment designed to give you quick, easy and digestible facts to make better decisions and win arguments around the office. They are based on Digiday’s proprietary surveys of industry leaders, executives and doers. See our earlier research on the European publishers preparing for the GDPR here.

The demand for advertising content has ballooned to a $10 billion market in the U.S. based on Forrester’s most recent report. Speaking on the importance of content, one anonymous source at a prior Digiday Content Marketing Summit said, “Content marketing isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s a must-have.” That pressure has been heaped onto agencies, and they are struggling to keep up.

The post Digiday Research: Agencies are struggling with demands for content appeared first on Digiday.

This content appears in the latest issue of Digiday magazine, a quarterly publication that is part of Digiday+. Members of Digiday+ get access to exclusive content, original research and member events throughout the year. Learn more here.

After a turbulent 2017 for media and marketing, 2018 looks to be one where publishers face up to lowered expectations and reckon with platform disappointments. Here are some bold predictions that could play out in the year ahead:

Facebook loses steam
Publishers have spent much of the last three years being pummeled by Facebook. First, Facebook kept tweaking its algorithm, causing traffic to careen. Then, it gave publishers a head fake with live video. Finally, it rolled out Instant Articles and gave it ambivalent support. All the while, Facebook kept eating the digital ad market, with even Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed’s CEO and Facebook biggest booster among top publishing execs, grousing Facebook needed to share more revenue.

Yet in 2017, Facebook showed its vulnerabilities, soft spots that will continue to pose a problem for the Silicon Valley giant. Nobody expects Facebook to go into a death spiral anytime soon, but markets tend to correct themselves when they become imbalanced — and 2017 made clear the digital media market is severely imbalanced. Expect 2018 to be a year of trials and tribulations for Facebook, as it finds itself under attack on varied fronts, from legislators incensed over its role in election meddling to power-hungry regulators in Europe to advertisers who are demanding more accountability for the billions they pour into Facebook’s coffers.

Facebook’s biggest weakness that will be exploited in 2018 is its sheer scale. The reason Russian propagandists were able to infiltrate Facebook’s ad system is that it is built for scale, not review. Facebook has already been in the preposterous position, which it has since walked back, of telling advertisers that Facebook ads will change hearts and minds while Mark Zuckerberg claimed Facebook posts and ads couldn’t have swayed an election. The sheer scale of Facebook makes it vulnerable to infiltrations, which have continued in other countries.

The result is going to be a major political battle. Politicians are going to remind Zuckerberg he once called Facebook a “utility” in its early days. Lawyers eventually told the then-callow CEO to quit it lest governments get ideas. Now, governments will seize on that notion, since utilities are regulated for the common good.

Scale will also work against Facebook as advertisers scrutinize more closely just where their ads are running and to what effect. The drumbeat of measurement errors Facebook experienced in 2017 are bound to continue as it looks to operate a massive ad platform with some degree of precision. Publishers are also finding their voice on these issues, aggressively pressing the issue that Facebook needs to be treated like a media company and held responsible legally as one. It’s one issue The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal can agree on.

None of this should cause anyone to rush to short Facebook shares. In the near term, Facebook’s position is nearly impregnable, but 2018 will at least bloody the giant. — Brian Morrissey

Vice gets sold
When Vice Media received a $450 million investment from private equity firm TPG, which valued the digital media company at $5.7 billion, Vice CEO Shane Smith told CNBC the company was considering going public. The new funds would allow Vice to build subscription businesses, increase spending on TV and mobile video production operations and create other opportunities for revenue that would make the company look sexier if it went public, Smith said.

Trouble is, the TPG funding came a year after Smith himself was talking about a potential sale to Disney, which has invested $400 million into Vice (across two funding rounds) but did not participate in the TPG round. With the TPG investment, many industry insiders said a potential sale to Disney was no longer on the table.

Still, Vice’s best option for an exit remains a sale. With a $5.7 billion valuation — which is more than the $4 billion each Disney paid for Lucasfilm and Marvel — Vice faces a steep climb to prove that its business — which is almost entirely reliant on advertising revenue — is worth all of that money. “You have to be comfortable with the future of ad-supported media, which people are increasingly not, and you have to be comfortable with the staying power of the brand, which Vice probably has,” says one banker. “I’m impressed by what they’ve built, but is it worth the risk? I’m not sure.”

But traditional TV giants are still struggling to adapt digitally, and as they look for upstarts to help them do so, they’re likely to look to Vice, which continues to be seen by many as one of the few reliably relevant digital media brands. (Of course, with Vice now mired in its own sexual-misconduct controversy, would-be buyers might be even  more hesitant to consider a purchase.) — Sahil Patel

Go90 shuts down
It’s not been an easy road for Go90, the short-form video streaming platform launched by Verizon in 2015. Verizon has spent hundreds of millions on the product, including commissioning original series and video libraries from digital and traditional media companies, to get people to watch. But there’s scant evidence that people have adopted the service — or even know that it exists. Verizon has already cut back spending and focused its content strategy, and it might pull the plug entirely on Go90 in 2018.

Ultimately, the issue is not whether Verizon spent enough money on content for Go90 or even properly marketed the streaming platform. Go90 has been trying to become a premium platform for the best of web video — which, as recent failures such as Vessel and Watchable show, consumers aren’t actually demanding.

Verizon maintains that it’s still committed to the platform, but several of its content partners express doubts about whether Go90 will be around in a few years. Video sellers say Go90 is spending less on original content as it tries to chart its next steps under ex-Hulu and Vessel exec Richard Tom. One partner says he believes Go90 will eventually become its own channel on Verizon’s upcoming internet TV service, which itself has been delayed.

In the end, Verizon remains committed to building a video business, but that doesn’t mean Go90 will be the way it does that. — Sahil Patel

Facebook’s Watch fails
Facebook is reportedly willing to spend up to $1 billion on content as it tries to lure users to Watch, its new section for live sports and hundreds of video shows from digital publishers, TV networks and other video creators. But according to multiple original content partners, Facebook’s first round of shows has not moved the needle among users or advertisers, and the company is already going back to the drawing board.

Building a YouTube-like user experience inside Facebook was always going to be a gargantuan task. People have long grown accustomed to going to YouTube to watch videos, but that’s not the case on Facebook, no matter how much the company is willing to fund and boost video content through its algorithm.

Facebook might be willing to spend money beyond 2018 to make Watch work, but the company has already said that eventually, it wanted to fund shows through advertising. So far, its mid-roll ads have brought in scant revenue for Facebook and the shows’ creators. It’s unlikely that in 12 months Facebook engineers such a dramatic turnaround that it truly competes with YouTube where it hurts: watch time. Facebook’s greatest contribution to the digital video ecosystem might be the silent news-feed video format, not shows. — Sahil Patel

Google kills Adblock Plus
Google’s relationship with Adblock Plus is complicated. On one hand, the tech giant pays to have its ads whitelisted. On the other, Google is on a crusade to clean up the ecosystem: It’s a founding member of the Coalition for Better Ads; it launched its own ad-blocking program, Funding Choices; and it’s about to roll out ad filters in its Chrome browser.

In 2018, Google will finally move to marginalize ABP, winning friends in the publishing industry that still views ABP as a shakedown scheme and establishing Google as the main arbiter of how digital advertising balances the user experience with monetization. The question isn’t whether the two can coexist, but how much longer Google will let it.

Earlier this year, Google reportedly found that 0.5 percent of sites in North America and Europe (amounting to thousands of sites) violated the tech company’s standards of acceptable ads, which are based on guidelines from the Coalition for Better Ads. After issuing warnings, Google said 25 percent of the offending sites are looking to improve. A Chrome ad filter is a warning for sites that motivate people to block ads to clean up their act, Google claims.

Once Google figures out how to deal with ad blocking on its own, it won’t need to pay ABP to do it. Losing Google as a customer would hobble ABP. That might cause a lot of publishers to rejoice — until they consider that it means Google is setting even more of the terms online. — Lucinda Southern

The post Facebook loses steam, Vice gets sold: Bold calls for 2018 appeared first on Digiday.

Roles focused on the overall customer experience across multiple channels, including designing experiences for emerging technologies like voice, augmented reality and artificial intelligence, are still nascent in the marketing industry.

Howard Pyle took on the role of svp of customer experience and design at MetLife in January 2016, just as the company started its first brand refresh in 35 years. He manages a team of 70 people responsible for the MetLife experience across channels. Pyle spoke to Digiday about why companies need to focus on designing customer experience.

The conversation has been edited and condensed.

How do you define your team’s role at MetLife?
We stitch together all of our experiences in a way that makes it cohesive to the customer, making sure everything remains on-brand. It’s a balance between setting the vision and making work that’s actually practical for people.

Is this how all companies envision the customer experience role?
No, we are in a place where the term “customer experience” is used so differently in different companies. It’s still very vague for people.

What do you mean?
When I go to customer experience conferences, the topics are still all over the place. I also interview a lot of people, and the first thing I have to do in an interview is set the definition — what I mean by customer experience. You don’t have to do that when you talk about digital marketing. You don’t have to do that when you talk about brand design or marketing strategy. Those things have been around for a while. I’m curious to see if the term sticks, to be honest with you.

Why?
There are days when I feel like it’s the wrong phrase because everyone in every company is, in some way, responsible for the customer experience. It’s a collective activity. It’s not something that one department can own. So what does it mean to have somebody with that title?

Why have a team dedicated to CX across all channels?
Today, brands are actually collections of experiences. We’re not in an era where people remember logos or advertisements. We’re in an era where people remember that Warby Parker has these beautifully designed stores, and you can buy online and they have killer customer service.

Should all companies have CX teams?
Companies that are very mature in their customer experience may not need a head of customer experience. I think there’s a similar question that people are asking with chief digital officers. Is it something that every company needs, or is it something that a company in transition needs? I see those roles as very bespoke to the organizations. For us, we’re clearly in transition.

At MetLife, we have hundreds of different technology systems that are still being integrated. It’s a 150-year-old company. Some of the policies that we service may have been written by hand in the, say, 1920s. Digitizing them, it’s a huge technical and operational challenge. How do those customers have an experience that’s modern, that’s engaging the digital world. We’ve got to work with those teams to figure out the right way to shape that customer’s experience.

The post CX is the new UX: MetLife’s first head of customer experience on building brands through personal interaction appeared first on Digiday.

Google’s ad-blocking version of Chrome is going live next month, whether publishers are ready for it or not.

Publishers initially expressed fear when news of Chrome’s ad blocker broke last April. Premium publishers now publicly embrace the initiative because they think it will pressure competitors with a bad user experience to clean up their sites. But privately, it’s a different story.

“We still have anxiety with it,” said an executive at a legacy news publisher, speaking anonymously. “People got used to the model of loading the site with ads and driving pageviews, but Google is telling us we need to prioritize digital experience now. It is distressing, but they are Goliath, and I don’t feel like throwing stones at them.”

Google created an Ad Experience Report to help publishers see if their sites would fail its forthcoming standards. One issue is that warnings for having bad ads can linger in Google’s tool even after a publisher fixes the problem. One of the sites this exec oversees got flagged for having sticky video ads run in the upper right corner of the screen. The site removed the ads, but the warning label persisted in Google’s publicly available tool for several months.

A Google spokesperson said warning labels aren’t automatically removed. A publisher has to request another review of its site before its status is changed in the Google ad experience API. Typically, a publisher’s status is altered within two days of its request for another site review, the spokesperson said.

Publishers typically don’t have a lot of direct contact with Google’s Chrome division, said Zack Sullivan, director of operations and marketing at tech site TechRadar. Google reps have been explaining the upcoming changes to publishers and why they are happening, which has assuaged publishers’ fears, he said.

Given Google’s immense ad business and the fact that it pays the popular ad blocker Adblock Plus to ensure its own ads aren’t blocked, Chrome’s move smacks of hypocrisy to some. But others appreciate that Google is one of a few organizations powerful enough to force the ad-supply chain to clean itself up. Chrome’s ad blocker is just Google’s way of forcing positive change in digital publishing, said Nick Flood, product and commercial ops director at Dennis Publishing.

Advertisers similarly embraced Google’s power over the ad industry when the search giant pressured companies into adopting the Interactive Advertising Bureau-backed ads.txt, which is meant to curb the ills of domain spoofing and unauthorized reselling.

Matt Minoff, chief digital officer at Meredith Corp., acknowledged it would be better for publishers if these moves were driven by trade groups that represent advertisers and publishers, like the IAB or Digital Content Next. It’s easier for a browser to enforce change across the open web rather than coordinating across a large group of disparate companies, he said.

Said a programmatic vet at an entertainment publisher, requesting anonymity: “While we don’t love Google being the ones to mandate this, ultimately it’s a good thing.”

The post ‘Distressing, but they are Goliath’: Hard-hit publishers brace for Google’s ad blocking browser’s launch appeared first on Digiday.

The good times are coming to an end for many programmatic middlemen. Thanks to brands’ and publishers’ improved governance of ad tech fees, programmatic will get a cleanup in 2018 — for real this time.

Programmatic buying has been a lucrative business for media agencies and ad tech companies. But as brands and publishers are pushing for transparency, learning more about ad tech and trimming the vendors they are working with, programmatic — that is largely built upon ad fraud and opaque tech costs — will experience a reshuffle this year. Ad tech consolidation is also on the way.

The post 2018 will be a year for programmatic cleanup appeared first on Digiday.

The disclosure of security flaws in computer chips dealt Intel Corp. what seemed like a sudden crisis, but behind the scenes it and other tech companies and experts have been grappling with the problem for months.

It seems a little a paradoxical to have streaming services say, “Yeah, go ahead and share our content” then say they want more revenue — especially from advertising. I suspect there’s no easy
technical way for them to stop password-sharing, so they just pretend to shrug it off.

Experiential marketers have a lot to celebrate. At a time that’s seen predictions of declining advertising spend, marketers have shown an interest in growing their experiential budgets. According to a 2017 report from Rakuten Marketing, 80 percent of global audiences say that online advertising hasn’t got any better with time, on any device or platform,…

Just a couple of days into the new year, YouTube already has another brand safety crisis on its hands. Logan Paul, a YouTube star with 15 million followers who has inked marketing deals with Walmart and Dunkin’ Donuts, uploaded a video over New Year’s weekend in which he visited Japan’s Aokigahara, a forest known as…