Category: Data-Labor-Technology Stories

In the scramble to serve Facebook, publishers have pivoted to video, with some disastrous results. Not Slate. It is betting big on text and podcasting this year, supported by new hires, ad strategy and site design.

“The big story is, we’re pivoting to words,” said Julia Turner, editor of Slate. “We’re going to be experimenting with all media, but we spent lot of 2017 looking at the fundamentals of the business of the written word and podcasting and found a strong case in investing in both.”

Slate has been doing podcasts for a dozen years and now has 24 under its belt, which it said account for 25 percent of its business. This year, Slate is doubling its dedicated podcasting staff from five to 10 with plans to launch a few more shows, including a second season of “Slow Burn,” its hit show about the history of Watergate; and a new one with star author Michael Lewis called “Against the Rules.” In 2015, it used its podcasting know-how to create Panoply, a podcast network for media brands, authors and personalities. This year, it will separate its Slate-branded podcasts from the rest of Panoply so it can fully control ad sales of its premium shows. Video, in contrast, makes up less than 10 percent of Slate’s content.

Slate is also increasing its text-based staff by 20 percent, contrary to a lot of publishers that laid off writers to staff up for video. These priorities will be evident in a new site design launching Jan. 16, which will feature new ways to promote podcasts (and eventually a player so visitors can sample shows without leaving the site) and stronger navigation to make it easier for visitors to see all the journalism Slate offers.

All these moves seem prescient now, given how the distribution landscape has changed. Legacy text publishers now realize that producing video people want to watch and monetizing it is harder and more expensive than it looks. Publishers’ video strategies have largely been driven by Facebook, but a solid monetization model from the platform has yet to materialize. Facebook just announced it would de-emphasize news in the news feed, which will be a blow to publishers that depended on the platform to help their content find an audience.

“There was a bubble,” Turner said. “Publishers saw distribution was free; they could get huge really quickly. You saw people scale up and suffer when Facebook decided to change the rules. In the wake of the Facebook announcement, [the redesign is] kind of perfect timing because we’ve been moving from the last few years to understand the depth of engagement with our readers. Everything we’re doing is around maximizing engagement.”

Slate has been moving in this direction for the past couple of years since it realized it was too dependent on Facebook traffic and started taking steps to optimize for reader loyalty. It made moves like producing more news-driven cover stories, revamping its newsletter to drive people to the site and doing more podcasts like “Trumpcast,” which help drive membership of its premium program, Slate Plus, because some bonus-segment podcast content is available only to Plus members.

In that time period, Facebook has gone from contributing around 30 percent of Slate’s monthly traffic to less than 10 percent, while Slate is offsetting that with increases in traffic from Google and Apple News. Direct traffic to the site, a proxy for loyalty, represents nearly 30 percent of visitors. It now uses engaged time as its internal yardstick for success and counted 2 billion minutes spent reading and listening in 2017, an 18 percent increase over the year before. Membership to Slate Plus, for which die-hard fans pay $49 a year to get perks like fewer ads and bonus content, grew 45 percent in 2017 to about 40,000 members.

Apart from benefiting reader engagement, Slate also sees a revenue case for text and podcasting. Audio and programmatic are its fastest-growing ad revenue segments, driven by the audience demographics and programmatic tweaks like adding demand partners and improving site speed.(The separation of Slate podcasts from Panoply means that direct-response advertisers that Panoply was calling on for all the shows will now be called on by Slate sales staff, too. Charlie Kammerer, Slate’s CRO, said the purpose of the new structure was so Slate and Panoply can each focus on what they do best, which for Panoply is selling audience across its network and which for Slate is creating and selling premium content for a premium audience.)

“Both text and audio attract a super-premium audience,” Kammerer said. “We know we can monetize the written word if we do it really, really efficiently just with programmatic.”

The post ‘We’re pivoting to words’: Slate says podcasts are now 25 percent of revenue appeared first on Digiday.

Bitcoin may be everywhere suddenly, but there’s little reason for everyday people or even merchants to start adopting it as an alternative currency or payment method.

The digital currency, whose price has exploded past $10,000 (and then back down some) in the last two months is expensive to get, complicated to use and by next spring they’ll need to figure out how to pay taxes on their bitcoin transactions and holdings. Using cash or cards is just faster and cheaper. And for retailers — like KFC, who added bitcoin support throughout its Canadian locations last week — entertaining the price fluctuation is just a marketing scheme.

“I don’t think using bitcoin [to pay] solves a problem that needs to be solved today,” said David Sica, a partner at Nyca Partners. “For retailers, it’s a way to get noticed, making an announcement that you’ll accept bitcoin will give you some press, but payment volumes won’t be high.”

Read it the full story on tearsheet.co

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When Rent the Runway launched the company’s Unlimited program, a monthly subscription that lets customers pay $159 per month to rent out four items of clothing at a time, the in-store experience didn’t play a big role in the business model.

“Our stores started as showrooms for nice dresses. Almost two years ago, we launched Unlimited. Then that was enabled in stores to let people exchange what they wanted for the next order, and that put a lot of pressure on our stores,” said Hampton Catlin, senior director of engineering at Rent the Runway. “We weren’t prepared for how many people would want to use it in stores. We’ve been investing in tech that lets you rapidly check out, self-service, so people can get in and out.”

In partnership with technology company Aila, Rent the Runway is transforming its stores from showrooms for rental items to logistical hubs for Unlimited subscribers to drop off items and check out new ones, all through self-service tablets.

Catlin joined us for an episode of the Glossy Podcast, recorded live at the National Retail Federation’s Big Show conference in New York, to discuss what role the store plays in the sharing economy, why convincing customers to rent instead of buy isn’t bad for brands and why customers are happy to hand over information.

Edited highlights, below.

On in-store inventory:
Part of making its stores as convenient as possible for Unlimited subscribers includes ensuring that the inventory that’s stocked in stores is relevant to the customers who visit. This means using customer data, combined with stylist insight, to choose inventory. But figuring out how personalized a store’s merchandise can be is part of the challenge. What’s in store at a Rent the Runway location on the Upper East Side should be different than what’s in the Flatiron store, but nailing down the difference is still a work in progress.”

“This is an area where we’re still figuring it out,” said Catlin. “We have the data and machine-learning algorithms, but what we haven’t exactly figured out yet is the scale of that personalization. If we want to fill a store with things that people in a certain neighborhood like, how micro can we get? Wherever we decide where to hold inventory, that’s costing us money.”

On customer data:
Customer data is central to Rent the Runway’s store strategy, whether it’s determining what’s stocked in a certain store location or what the mobile app looks like when an Unlimited member walks in. And a lot of that data is sourced directly from customers themselves.

“Our customers give us a lot of information about themselves — they’re happy to,” said Catlin. “They review, rate, post pictures. It becomes a community feeling, especially with the subscription business.”

On brand relationships:
While Rent the Runway shares customer data back with the brands it works with, the company is training customers that, rather than buy, they can rent. That has to be bad for brands, right? Catlin argues that’s not the case, due to the type of inventory Rent the Runway buys from brands. In most cases, it’s the louder, bolder pieces that subscribers gravitate toward, since they’re not investing in the items long-term. And according to Catlin, Rent the Runway’s physical stores further promote risk-taking.

“Most high-end brands make their money off extra licensing, stuff like that — not from the clothing itself,” said Catlin. “Fast fashion companies that rip off what designers do, very quickly — those are the companies that are actually hurting the designers. We buy stuff from designers in volumes they are not used to selling. And we’ve noticed people will take much bigger risks in real life than they will when shopping online.”

The post Live from NRF: How Rent the Runway’s Unlimited subscription model changed its in-store strategy appeared first on Digiday.

Last week, Facebook unveiled its biggest news feed algorithm change to date, favoring content from friends and family over posts from companies. But while publishers are panicked by the loss of Facebook’s referral traffic, media buyers think brands will be relatively unscathed by the algorithm change.

For starters, brands have treated Facebook like a pay-to-play platform for a long time, and Facebook said the new algorithm won’t affect paid posts on the platform, although CPM rates for Facebook ads may eventually increase, according to agency executives. However, they think the new Facebook algorithm will filter out clickbait-style promotions (“Like our product if you think this dog is cute”), which will pressure brands to create more meaningful content over the long term.

Brands already know that they get little visibility from unpaid content on Facebook, said Brittany Richter, head of social media for iProspect. Most brand content on Facebook is in the form of posts that don’t necessarily show up on a company page and are distributed through ad filters, and ad ranking won’t change under the new algorithm.

Organic content doesn’t work as well as paid posts on Facebook, but Mike Dossett, vp of digital strategy for RPA, thinks many brands still use it to communicate with their fans. “Losses here could impact if and how brands continue to invest in organic, non-boosted content within their overall content strategy,” he said.

Steve Buors, CEO and co-founder for digital marketing agency Reshift Media, believes Facebook’s new algorithm will push brands to think less about what the company’s point of view and focus more on what their audience cares about, which will create opportunities for advertisers.

“Facebook is forcing people to create quality and relevant content,” said Buors. “Social was a means to one-on-one communications, but over time, people were becoming lazy. Those changes won’t impact brands that purchase quality content, but will hit those who chase viral, meme-like posts.”

Buors thinks brands can also surprise and delight offline — a pizzeria can give each consumer a free soda, for instance — to encourage people to share their experience online. Or in a Facebook post, a brand can ask questions like, “What feature do you think we need to add to our product?” to generate interaction and debate, he said.

It’s unclear if Facebook’s new algorithm will deprioritize Facebook Live. If it doesn’t, brands could use it to get into the news feed, Buors and Richter said. (Facebook was not available to comment at press time.)

Agency executives say it’s too early to determine the effect Facebook’s algorithm change will have on paid media. But James Douglas, svp and executive director of social media for Society, said CPM and cost-per-click rates for Facebook ads will likely increase because inventory on the platform will probably decline if publishers take a hit. Facebook CPMs vary based on ad formats and targeting parameters, but they can range from $1 to $15, according to Douglas.

“We will keep an eye on Instagram if we need to move clients’ [Facebook] ad budget around,” said Douglas. “We will also look at other alternatives like Snapchat.”

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If you thought Sophia the Robot was creepy, check out Saturday Night Live’s My Drunk Boyfriend–a life-size doll whose artificial intelligence has mastered the art of having no intelligence at all. The parody infomercial from this weekend’s SNL pitched My Drunk Boyfriend as the perfect facsimile of your real boyfriend–which is great for when he’s…

The move was being pushed by Shari Redstone, vice chair of Viacom and CBS, and president of the privately held National Amusements, which controls both companies.

The campaign features a number of films including some labeled for each day of the week. Each of these stories will be featured on their respective day in both offline and online channels.

Consumers are embracing over-the-top video services, but are overwhelmed by the number of options in the marketplace, according to Ooyala’s 2018 State of the Broadcast Industry report.

The company restored Bitcoin payments for its online store, but with the introduction of blockchain technology to support several types of industries the question becomes will Microsoft begin
accepting bitcoin, or other types of cryptocurrency, payments for media buys on Bing Ads.

Digital media spend will overtake offline media and marketing spend for the first time this year, a Winterberry Group analyst says. Measured media spending is estimated to reach $117.4 billion in
2018; offline media and marketing spend, $97.8 billion; and digital media spend, $100.8 billion.