Less BS, More Facts, Some Opinions
“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Jon Mansell, vice president of programmatic solutions and partnerships at WarnerMedia. Connected TV (CTV) is at an inflection point, split between two competing measurement methodologies. Depending on the buyer’s vantage point, CTV is either a… Continue reading »
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Five months into the coronavirus crisis, the media industry has figured out that it can operate its key functions remotely almost entirely. But being a creative and collaborative industry, there are some jobs and projects that must take place in a studio or collaborative environment and those necessary in-person functions have media companies contemplating when and how its safest to do reintroduce those environments.
A lot is still up in the air. Depending on a company’s location, governmental restrictions are still in effect for nonessential business and whether or not they are allowed to have employees come into an office.
In a Digiday survey of media companies, BuzzFeed and Reuters had the earliest return estimates of October 2020 for when they will start bringing nonessential workers back into its global offices, if legal and safe to do so. Meanwhile, many other companies said they would not require employees to be back in office until at least January 2021, or they said they didn’t have a solid timeline at all.
Regardless of when companies are able to reopen their offices, the way shared workspaces will look and operate is likely going to be very different.
According to Natalie De Paz, manager of culture and engagement at agency Landor & Fitch, the expectations that employees have for their workplaces has changed.
“It’s not as simple as working X more days at home, but being more intentional in the office space,” said De Paz. “It’s not just for the sake of coming in, but being intentional with how you’re coming in.”
Therefore, companies need to “define the activities that would make the most sense in a workspace,” meaning the office spaces should be seen as collaboration environment versus a place where individual workers filter in and out on a daily basis to sit at a desk.
However, De Paz notes that some employees will still require that option if their home set up is not conducive to productivity and interacting with external clients or sources.
“There’s a lot of positives that have come out of working from home and hopefully they can be retained,” said De Paz, pointing to productivity and technology advancements.
There was an initial dip in productivity, De Paz said, that came from employees learning how to use technology that they were initially reluctant to learn. “A lot of people didn’t see the need to adopt new tech,” she said but not having access to whiteboards or manual materials forced them to learn.
Tech will also be playing a large role in the transition period where some staffers remain at home while others are back in the office, De Paz said. Conference rooms, for example, will need to be equipped with cameras and microphones that cover the entire room to keep people who remain remote connected to the in-person staffers.
Publishers have a lot to consider as they move staffers back into the office and it’s going to take time to make the proper adjustments from a safety capacity and a productivity capacity.
Here are the tentative timelines for some of the major media companies. This list will be updated and expanded periodically.
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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Nixby Samsung is negotiating a deal with Alphabet that would give Google products more prominence on its smartphones, Bloomberg reports. The Google Android operating system is already the default OS for Samsung Galaxy phones, but this deal would put Google’s digital assistant and the… Continue reading »
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With the launch of newly formed commerce practice, Dentsu Commerce, Dentsu wants to become the agency holding company that brands turn to for their expanding commerce needs.
The coronavirus pandemic has sped up the growth of brand commerce; with people stuck at home or wary of shopping in-person at stores they’re shopping online in droves. With that being the case, brands big and small need to quickly bolster and accelerate their e-commerce capabilities.
“We actually launched this practice in the middle of Covid-19 [because] all of our clients [have been] nervous about their ability to support their customers needs,” said Vikalp Tandon, global president of Dentsu Commerce. “The only way we could help them is to figure out how they could reach all of their customers digitally, engage all of them digitally and how they could be serviced digitally.”
With the new commerce practice, the holding company is working to beef up the capabilities of brands like Shiseido, Adidas and Procter & Gamble, among others. While the commerce practice was already in the works, the pandemic and changing consumer behavior it caused made it more important for the new group to go to market now.
The growth of Amazon and online retail in general has made commerce a more important discipline at agencies in recent years. Brands that had traditionally focused shopper marketing efforts on end-caps or shelves in stores have been looking for more holistic approaches to commerce planning to capture someone’s attention wherever they shop. To help those brands, other holding companies have built out new commerce practices; for example, WPP created Wunderman Thompson Commerce last March.
“The consumer adoption of e-commerce has exceeded our marketers’ readiness in most cases and Covid-19 has certainly accelerated that,” said Jacki Kelley, CEO, Dentsu Aegis Network Americas. “It’s heightened the importance of strong online transactions and proven brands with the strongest relationship with their customers are in a far better position to manage going forward.”
Tandon will lead the practice and work with Dentsu’s 3500 commerce experts who are employees of agencies across the holding company. Agency execs from Dentsu shops like Isobar, 360i and Merkle will also contribute to the practice.
Dentsu Commerce has already worked with Shiseido to retool the company’s approach to its website design making it more about the consumer experience rather than specific technical specs, according to Thomas Wasser, global director of omni-channel marketing at Shiseido.
The holding company is also working with a snack brand to build out a direct-to-consumer venture as well as with a household CPG brand on “commerce-led” planning.
With this practice, Dentsu will work with CPG brands to create new brands to build relationships directly with consumers and “own the purchase journey from start to finish,” said Kelley, adding that doing so will help legacy CPG brands compete with startups.
Overall, Dentsu is looking to add a “commerce lens into the strategy planning efforts” of its agencies, added Kelley.
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Summer is usually a suboptimal time to sell advertising. But for publishers that rely on open exchanges for their programmatic ad revenue, the past two months have been among the hottest of the year.
The news and politics publisher Salon is likely to close out June and July with its revenues up year over year for both months, thanks to weeks of sustained highs in CPMs for its site inventory and RPM for its pages. Through the first 23 days of July, Salon’s programmatic revenues are up 25% year over year over the same period, chief revenue officer Justin Wohl said, though he declined to share specific dollar amounts.
“We saw some of the best rates we’d seen since the beginning of March in the last two weeks of June,” Wohl added.
Salon’s second quarter revenues are still projected to be down, year over year, because of the industry-wide plunge in ad spending this past spring. But its results the past seven weeks have Wohl feeling cautiously optimistic about the second half of the year, and they are far from atypical.
Thanks to a surge of spending by advertisers that had to cut back or pause their spending in the second quarter, demand in the open exchanges has leapt, according to sources at two different advertising agencies focused on programmatic advertising.
Ben Hovaness, the managing director of marketplace innovation at Omnicom Media Group, said that ad spending volumes were mostly back to where they had been in the first quarter of 2020, and that on some days in June, the volume actually exceeded Q1 peaks. July, while slightly lower, was “a lot stronger than when things were in the doldrums,” Hovaness added.
Still, there are signs that the recent good times may not last forever: some of the spending is coming in from sources such as NBC Universal, which is pouring money into promoting Peacock, and many buy- and sell-side sources worry that lawmakers’ failure to approve a new economic relief package to replace the one that expired this week could undo a lot of the progress the economy has made.
But for now, publishers and agencies have both benefitted from ad buyers acting according to an old adage.
“I joke around about it internally, but the thing that’s hurt marketing in the past is that old saying: ‘If you don’t use it, you lose it,’” said Tyler Bishop, the CMO of ad optimization platform Ezoic.
Publishers took a beating in the programmatic markets in March and April as traffic surged and advertisers paused their spending while they figured out how to respond to a looming pandemic. The result was traffic spiking to 30% while CPMs dropped by as much as 20%.
But after hitting the bottom of the trough at the end of March, programmatic spending has begun to creep back up. The Ezoic Ad Revenue Index, which tracks the value of online ad inventory relative to a historic high across thousands of websites, showed that the value of inventory has been trending back upward since, with values in June and July largely beating their 2019 counterparts.
Some of that spending has come from advertisers adjusting their media mix, siphoning money away from areas like out of home, which continues to struggle as consumers continue to work remotely and travel less.
“You have to look at where the eyeballs are,” said Ray Jenkin, the North American CEO of programmatic agency Hybrid Theory, who noted that some of his agency’s clients have been putting more of their budgets into programmatic advertising in the past several weeks.
Jenkin cautioned that the good times are unlikely to last. “I don’t think we can look at June and July and say it’s a forward-looking trend,” Jenkin said, noting that the expiration of the unemployment benefits paid by the federal government could cause a drop. “I don’t think we’re going to see a return to full-blown pause, but we will see some cautiousness,” Jenkin said.
Clark Benson, the CEO of Ranker, said CPMs for his site’s inventory on open exchanges are still down “about 10%,” year over year in July. But a flush of site visitors — Ranker’s traffic has risen every month since March, according to SimilarWeb data — as well as some cautious projections Benson and his team made earlier in the year, have left him feeling good about those results.
“I feel like that’s a godsend compared to what I was expecting,” Benson said. “We’re feeling relief that the sky hasn’t fallen.”
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Come August 1, the unofficial end date to the advertising and marketing boycott of Facebook by brands unhappy about the hateful speech and misinformation on the platform, most agencies will reanimate their marketing on the platform.
In a new survey conducted in July, Digiday found that 41% of respondents will return at the end of the July boycott, while 26% will spend again by the end of the third quarter and 13% by the end of full-year 2020. Others will wait for more action from Facebook with 17% of respondents saying they won’t advertise on the platform until it males meaningful changes.
Underlining the agency desire to return to Facebook — and its power as marketing vehicle — is that according to the survey, a full 75% of respondents said return on investment (ROI) is more important than brand optics.
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Upday — the news aggregator app from German publisher Axel Springer which comes preloaded on Samsung phones, tablets, smartwatches and fridges — is fresh off the back of two of its most successful quarters. In some cases, the platform has tripled daily traffic, and, what’s more improbable, grown ad revenue by over 30% this year.
Upday’s stated aim is to deliver relevant news taken from 4,000-plus publishers using editors and algorithms. While all publishers have seen traffic hikes, not all have benefited from corresponding ad revenue lifts, which have been thwarted by overwrought keyword blocking and direct ad deals on hiatus.
“The combination of having trusted journalists on one side — I don’t know an aggregator investing so much in journalists — and technical algorithms which aggregate personal tastes on the other makes us so strong,” said CEO Peter Würtenberger.
As people have craved trusted sources through the rampant news cycle of the past four months and ongoing coronavirus crisis, the platform has established itself as a preferred destination with its own users and third-party platforms: More than 90% of its users said Upday is one of the main platforms they get coronavirus news from, 50% said it is the main platform for this purpose (according to internal research). For the last few months, Facebook, keen to look like it’s working with credible publishing sources, has paid Upday journalists to populate its Coronavirus Information Center.
Germany accounts for less than a quarter of revenues, the U.K. is its second-largest market followed by France, Italy and Spain. In the U.S., 3% of people use Upday in a given week, according to Reuters Digital News Report, (Google News and Apple News command 17% and 11% of the U.S. market respectively). But there are other competitors springing up. Six months ago, publisher News Corp launched its own aggregator, Knewz, and has grown to nearly 5 million monthly site uniques according to the platform.
Upday has above 25 million monthly active users globally, per the company’s stats, usually netting 11 million daily visitors. During the heights of the coronavirus crisis in Europe between March and May, daily visitors tripled.
App analytics firm Sensor Tower doesn’t track the Samsung app ecosystem but estimates Upday has been installed approximately 1.3 million times globally from Google Play, 24% from Germany alone. New installs of the app from Google Play were up nearly 76% year over year in the first half of 2020.
Upday, now 140 people strong, reached profitability in 2018 generating revenues over €10 million ($13 million). In 2019, annual revenue grew by 50%, so far this year ad revenue has grown by over 30% compared with the first six months of last year, the company said.
The majority of its revenue comes from programmatic ad sales traded on the open exchange from inventory sold within each article which are displayed in card-like formats. Since last year it’s had a dedicated team laser-focused on managing yield, resetting floor prices, introducing new formats and managing placement based on campaign objectives. It views future revenue growth in open exchange, although does sell some campaigns direct and through private marketplaces. Digital trading also helps now that it sells in 34 countries across 28 languages, with eight editorial hubs in Europe.
In May, the platform also launched an affiliate strand, Upday Choice, a daily changing portfolio of recommended products, after seeing the boom in e-commerce spurred by the coronavirus. Early details are scant but revenue contributes to single-digit percentage to its total revenue, the company said.
Some publishers choose to release stories exclusively with Upday. One global news publisher released one of its paywalled articles on Upday, making it freely available, several hours before opening it up on its own and other platforms. The story ran one recent Saturday morning as the lead story on Upday U.K., leading to 66,000 clicks and a click-through rate of 15.6%, according to Upday. A story at the top of its news feed typically gets 10% click-through rate back to the publisher, said Würtenberger.
Analytics platform Parse.ly network data shows Upday referral for mobile and tablet traffic is seeing an average of 74% month-on-month growth, but in aggregate, that’s pretty slim as referral platforms go.
“Double-digit growth like this is common with platforms that are small,” said Kelsey Arendt, data insights lead at Parse.ly. “While it’s important that publishers and platforms (and venture capitalists for those platforms) don’t get distracted by the law of large numbers, these stats are a positive signal. Unlike search or social domains, the aggregator category is increasingly diverse and nimble enough to meet the needs of consumers. Upday may be small, but it has nowhere to go but up.”
The platform has big ambitions of international growth and more native video operations, helped by Samsung’s recent investment. As of two weeks ago, it’s integrated on Samsung browsers to increase its audience pool and Würtenberger expects this to account for more than 10% of its traffic.
Since Apple’s crackdown on in-app tracking by making IDFA opt-in last month, tighter data policies could put off some advertisers from spending in Apple’s ecosystem, where Google Play and Samsung could pick up market share.
“The opportunity for Upday is attracting more advertising and taking a bigger part of the revenue pie,” said Würtenberger.
The post Investments in journalism, algorithms has Axel Springer’s five-year-old aggregator app Upday up over 30% in ad revenue appeared first on Digiday.
By TJ Adeshola, head of U.S. Sports Partnerships at Twitter
Live sports are back and sports fans couldn’t be more excited.
It’s no surprise that communities across the country are welcoming their teams back with open arms. For many, the return of sports brings a sense of normalcy — 67 percent of U.S. fans see sports as a way to engage in something familiar.
Without the roar of packed arenas or the sound of busy sports bars, however, social media will be the place where sports’ most passionate fans go to get an experience. Whether it’s following trending topics or tweets, following the latest news, enhancing their viewing experience or just staying connected to the game, this shift represents a significant cultural moment: action-starved sports fans are talking about every major sport in a once-in-a-lifetime online frenzy, and it creates a powerful opportunity for brands to join the conversation.
New sports landscape — same passionate fans
With content from every league flooding fans’ feeds, there’s a conversation for every moment. Fans on Twitter are part of the action — and they’re engaging with each other — a lot.
For example: when the NWSL returned to the pitch, tweets shot up 244 percent. And with the return of NASCAR and UFC — both increased 254 percent and 272 percent, respectively.
Even though the NBA season was put on hold, #NBATwitter never stopped the clock. With no live games, the conversation shifted to classic highlights, old rivalries and documentaries like ESPN and Netflix’s The Last Dance. Fans and athletes alike couldn’t get enough of the series, tweeting their reactions and reigniting debates about who’s really the greatest of all time. Twitter was the number-one platform for The Last Dance announcement — 5.9 million daily video views of the preview for the highly anticipated documentary, and 4 million more than the second-place platform.
Is it 9:00 Sunday yet?!?
#TheLastDance
— Michael Fishman (@MJFishman) April 29, 2020
The NBA isn’t the only league mixing it up. The NFL did something it’s never done before, broadcasting the NFL Draft as an online-only event. Twitter was the number-one platform for NFL Draft content, generating 171 million monthly views for draft-related videos, more than any other leading platform.
Absolutely losing my mind watching Goodell slowly get more and more relaxed as he announces picks. Fully expecting him to announce the final pick of this round in a robe and slippers #NFLDraft pic.twitter.com/t5N1GUnMAq
— Conor the Mick (@TheNJMick) April 25, 2020
Turner Sports also reimagined live events, bringing together sports legends for a totally unique charity golf challenge. Athletes live-tweeted from the golf course and wore microphones throughout the match, creating mayhem on the platform. Conversation on Twitter for the charity match was 12 times larger than the last PGA Tour event before the lockdown in March 2020 as fans raged about every moment, including this mind-blowing shot.
That’s why he is still the GOAT!!! Great shot!
— Sharon (@shafish63) May 24, 2020
Social platform choices drive brand relevance among brands
Sports are already one of the biggest opportunities to build cultural relevance — and with its historic relaunch, the opportunity is greater than ever. Brands that are on Twitter are 41 percent more likely to be seen as culturally relevant than those not on Twitter.
So while stadiums might have been quiet on opening day, in 2020, social media certainly wasn’t. For the rest of the season, brands that step up to the plate will stay top-of-mind for fans who aren’t going anywhere, despite the challenges of our times.
Y’all I’m so ready for live sports to be back.
— Jake Noah (@j_noah53) June 29, 2020
Source:
1. Tokyo 2020 Twitter Insights study conducted by Sparkler and commissioned by Twitter, Nov. 2019. Global.
2. Twitter Internal Data (Semantic Core). Daily Tweet volume average comparing May 1, 2020 – May 31, 2020 vs. June 1, 2020 – June 30, 2020. US Only. Data retrieved July 8, 2020.
3. Twitter Internal. May 2020 vs. April 2020. Global.
4 The ESPN Coronavirus Lockdown Fan Study. April 2020. US.
5 Tubular Labs. Daily video views from #TheLastDance content. March 31, 2020. US.
6 Tubular Labs. Video views from NFL Draft content. April 2020. Data retrieved July 7, 2020. US.
7 Twitter Internal. March-May, 2020. Global.
8 Kantar & Twitter cultural relevance research, total population,100 US brands tested, Dec 2019; Maru, Twitter Insiders Event Research, US, Dec 2019
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