Data-Labor-Technology

The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

You were laid off recently due to coronavirus. What has your job search been like? 

It’s been very difficult. I’ve had loads of interviews with great places only to get to the end of each call and have them be like, “We’d really love to hire you but we’re just not hiring right now.” Even with recruiters, they don’t set you up straight away and say they aren’t hiring right now. Some agencies do say they aren’t hiring and that there’s no budget. Overall, the job prospects for those people who’ve been laid off, and there are lots of them, are really terrifying. It’s bleak. It’s like a desert. 

Does it feel more competitive than ever?

Yes. Absolutely. I’m confident in my experience and what I’ve done but even getting through the door is difficult when so many places are saying, “As you can imagine with Covid-19 we’re not hiring right now.” 

Why are agencies interviewing people if they’re not hiring? Seems like a waste of time. 

When I was laid off from my agency I saw job postings for a different office so I asked to apply for those open positions but they said they were fake job postings. Apparently it’s to show clients that we’re doing well. They also use the postings to get people to interview, show interest and then put them on the books so that later on they can recruit from that pool without having to hire recruiters and pay them. I’ve heard of multiple agencies doing that, using job postings to tell clients that they’re fine or doing well when they’re really not. It’s all fake. 

That seems like it would make it more difficult for people who are laid off right now to find legitimate opportunities to apply for. 

It does. You’re putting hours into applications and speaking with people and reaching out to people to hopefully get a leg up only to find out the job posting isn’t legitimate. It’s crazy. 

You’re also on a Visa. How does that factor into your current job search?

Europe in general is not taking people back. Australia and New Zealand are also not accepting flights from the U.S., so that makes it difficult for anyone. Agencies make cuts and don’t think about the impact it has on people. They say, “You’ve got awards, you’ll be fine” or “You’ve got a great book, you’ll be fine.” But when you’re on a job search in a time crunch you may as well have none of those things.

It’s so stressful when you’ve got 60-days to find a new job and submit a whole new Visa transfer application to a new agency. It takes weeks to go through the interview process in the first place. And then if your Visa transfer application is rejected you have 10-days from the rejection date to leave the country. Also, if you overstay you’re not allowed to come back. Agencies should really protect immigrants.

How so?

I had a contract with them that said I had to stay with them for a year otherwise I would have to repay my relocation fee. But they didn’t give me a contract that protected me from being laid off or anything like that. Most people don’t check those things when they move abroad. 

Even though we’re in a pandemic and entering a recession, there haven’t been any adjustments to the time constraints to get a new job?

No. Immigration is immigration. Obviously, you’re here legitimately but you have to prove once again that you’re legitimate. And now you’re up against people who are from the same country, same state who have been laid off. For immigrants, everything is put into flux. You look around at your home and you go, how am I going to pack all of this up? It’s even worse for immigrants who’ve moved their whole families and [they’re the sole provider.]

What do you wish bosses would think about when laying people off? 

It’s not as simple as saying, “Here’s your pitiful severance.” Laying off an immigrant impacts them, their children, their partners, their whole life. Bosses cannot go, “They’ll be fine, their book is great, they’ve got loads of work and they’re well known.” All of that means nothing when it comes down to it. We’re here to earn the country money with what we do and we’re doing that.

Following the protests over the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, companies across the entertainment industry are confronting the lack of diversity within their workforces and on their production shoots. They are conducting content audits to assess the diversity in their programming and setting quarterly and annual diversity goals, such as the percentage of on-camera talent and production crew members who are people of color.

Moreover, they are forming diversity committees and employee resource groups dedicated to specific marginalized groups, including Black, female and Latinx employees. And they are turning to organizations like diversity consultancy Women of Color Unite for help in finding members of these underrepresented groups to work at their companies and on their productions.

“Right now I have a brace on my wrist from carpal tunnel. That’s how much I’ve been hit up,” said Cheryl L. Bedford, executive director of Women of Color Unite and producer of films including the documentary “Dark Girls.” In February 2018, she organized an event to bring together women of color in the entertainment industry. That event led to the creation of The JTC List, a free, searchable database that currently lists more than 1,300 women of color in the entertainment industry that companies can hire to work on their productions. “So no one can say that they can’t find any women of color for any position,” said Bedford.

Since the beginning of June, through the #StartWith8Hollywood initiative, Women of Color Unite and The Bitch Pack — a group promoting female screenwriters — have helped to organize meetings between 300 women of color in the entertainment industry and studio executives, talent agents, showrunners and executive producers that can help them in some fashion. “All they have to do is meet with eight women of color and do one substantive thing for their career. Read their script, make an introduction, help with their résumé, whatever the mentees need,” said Bedford.

What the mentees need is a foot in the door. The issue of diversity within the entertainment industry is not so different than in many other industries. The people in power tend to be white and male — and they tend to hire people who look like themselves. According to the 2020 Hollywood Diversity Report published by UCLA in February, 91% of C-suite executives at 11 major and midsize Hollywood studios are whiteand 82% are male. When including senior executives, 93% are white and 80% male.

While far from a new issue, companies are now taking actual steps to address the lack of diversity within their ranks and on their sets. That work starts with assessing the current level of level of diversity. From that baseline, they can identify the areas most in need for improvement and then reference databases like The JCT List and Black in Film to identify potential hires.

One entertainment company has started tracking what share of its production teams are members of underrepresented groups, said an executive at this company. This company has set diversity goals for each team to meet within the next 12 months, with quarterly targets and monthly assessments to gauge their progress.

For some companies, the focus is primarily on improving diversity within the company rather than the content it produces. “Diversity and inclusion in our content is far better than in the office. So our efforts right now are focused on our employees and our makeup in the company,” said a second entertainment executive whose company has formed a diversity and inclusion group within the past month or so.

However, the diversity of a company and the diversity of its content can go hand in hand. If the employees tasked with hiring on-camera talent and production crews are white and male and straight, they are more likely to hire straight white men. Bedford calls this bias “exclusion by familiarity.” People may not intentionally look to hire people who look like them, but they may do exactly that nonetheless.

A third entertainment company has a somewhat diverse leadership team, with 60% of its leaders being women and 40% being people of color. But, the racial diversity among its employees overall is low enough that the company has set the target of having 35% of its employees be Black and other people of color by the end of this year.

Additionally, the company’s content audit has so far shown a relative absence of Black actors and actresses. Taken together, the homogeneity of the company’s employees appears to be reflected in its content, and the company may not have seen the issue without taking a hard look at itself. “It creates a bias, even if you don’t see it at first,” said the executive.

Confessional

“On YouTube, we’re very focused on monetization. On Facebook, we’re still trying to figure out how to keep our video views consistent, so monetization on Facebook is nice to have when we get it.”

— Media executive

Stay tuned: YouTube’s new mid-roll ad rule

Apparently two minutes is a lot. By the end of this month, YouTube will lower the minimum length requirement for a video to carry mid-roll ads from 10 minutes to eight minutes, and video makers are pretty pumped.

“It’s huge,” said one media executive of the change. “It’s a massive change for the better, especially given that CPMs and RPMs are back up but obviously not growing the way they were before [March]. There are a lot of publishers and creators who are creating content and trying to stretch to hit that 10-minute mark.”

Indeed. Over the past couple years, publishers and creators have extended their videos’ lengths in order to carry multiple mid-roll ads and increase the revenue they can reap. Some publishers and creators may have worked to ensure their videos merited the extra length, but others have added filler, like extending their videos’ end cards, in order to meet the 10-minute threshold.

The news means that video makers won’t have to make such an effort to qualify for the mid-roll ads that can almost double the money they make per video. It also means they will be able to make more money from old videos that were just shy of 10 minutes long because YouTube will now turn on mid-roll ads for eligible videos between 8 and 10 minutes in length.

However, video makers may want to keep their celebrations in check. Audiences can get annoyed by the interruptive ads. YouTube fans have groused about the back-to-back mid-roll ads that YouTube began inserting over a year ago. Their tolerance may be lower when a video is shorter, which could compromise the money publishers and creators make from the shorter videos. While YouTube doesn’t seem to have put any limitations on how many mid-roll ads an 8-minute video can carry, viewers may be less willing to sit through multiple mid-roll ads in a shorter video compared to a longer one.

“What is the [mid-roll ad tolerance] threshold for a more condensed video?” asked the media executive. Guess we’ll soon find out.

Numbers don’t lie

1.5 million: Number of times NBCUniversal’s Peacock mobile app had been downloaded as of July 19, compared to 1.1 million downloads for Quite (Quibi?) and 11.5 million downloads for Disney+, according to mobile app analytics firm Sensor Tower.

10.1 million: Number of new subscribers that Netflix added in the second quarter of 2020, according to the company’s latest earnings report.

2.7 million: Number of households that had watched “Hamilton” on Disney+ as of July 13, according to TV analytics firm Samba TV.

What we’ve covered

How Hulu’s self-serve ad tool can widen streaming’s floodgates:

• Hulu is testing a tool for small advertisers to buy the streamer’s ad inventory on their own.
• If Hulu expands the tool’s availability to larger advertisers, it could do for Hulu what self-serve tools have done for Google and Facebook.

Read more about Hulu here.

The TV industry contemplates a changed buying process:

• Advertisers’ flexibility demands is remaking TV advertising’s upfront deal terms.
• However, TV networks have their own concerns in acquiescing to advertisers’ demands.

Read more about TV buying here.

Streaming advertising reaches a tipping point:

• Viewership has shifted to streaming and ad dollars are expected to follow this year.
• TV networks are making streaming a more central part of their upfront pitches, while streaming-only players’ pitches have matured.

Read more about streaming advertising here.

Facebook publishers see video ad revenue drop as advertisers boycott:

• Publishers’ Facebook video ad revenue in July has fallen 10% to 50% below the June mark.
• The drop coincides with the advertiser boycott, but there are other factors at play.

Read more about Facebook here.

What we’re reading

Discovery tries to straddle TV, streaming:
Like every other TV network group, Discovery is attempting to build up its streaming business. Complicating that move is its legacy TV business, as detailed by The Information. While the article is focused on the departure of the exec overseeing Discovery’s direct-to-consumer business Peter Faricy, central to that departure is Discovery’s planned streaming service and how much original programming it will carry. Per the report, Faricy wanted the service to have mostly exclusive shows, but Discovery’s distribution deals with traditional pay-TV providers caps how many original shows could be exclusive to the streamer. Now, Faricy is goneand Discovery has renegotiated some of its TV deals so its streamer could have more exclusive programming.

Political ad dollars target lifestyle TV shows:
News shows and programs attracting large audiences, like sports, are natural targets for political ad dollars. But this year, presidential campaigns have widened their purview to lifestyle networks like Food Network, Bravo and A&E, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Considering that many media companies are counting on political advertisers offsetting the reduced revenue from marketers hit by the coronavirus crisis, this trend could be a positive sign for those programmers and publishers that may not historically have been big beneficiaries of election ad dollars, which could be considerable with the presidential race in it’s last 100 days.

Google’s connected TV ambitions:
Amazon and Roku have become the duopoly in connected TV that Google and Facebook are on the web. But Google isn’t exactly sitting out the CTV market, as this report from LightShed Partners indicates. Through Chromecast and Android TV, Google has been quietly been building up its CTV hardware footprint, including striking deals with TV manufacturers to use its Android TV software. Google has a bunch of catching up to do, but then so did Amazon when it came at the Google-Facebook duopoly. As an agency executive put it to me recently, “Google is moving at glacier speed in CTV, but when they get there, they’re still a glacier.”

Indeed, the coronavirus and the Black Lives Matter movement have coalesced to allow for a moment of reflection at agencies, according to agency executives, who say that as remote work is starting to become the new normal there’s a possibility that agencies could in turn become more diverse. Put simply, without geographic restrictions, agencies could cast a wider net while hiring and, in doing so, find candidates of more diverse backgrounds, said agency executives who added that before the coronavirus they were less likely to approve of hiring remote workers. 

“Remote work has become an important part of our lives and has huge potential to bring more diversity into the fold,” said Andrea Diquez, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi in New York. “Major cities are expensive, and many people don’t have the economic opportunity to uproot for the job they want. Being location-agnostic would allow agencies across the board to hire more people from diverse backgrounds. It’s important that we use this moment as an opportunity to make that happen.” 

It’s not just agencies based in expensive cities like New York or Los Angeles that may be able to expand the candidate pool by allowing remote hiring. Agencies in smaller cities or more rural areas are also able to tap into potential employees outside of their area who are uninterested in moving but could still work for that agency. While agency executives haven’t fully committed to changing their hiring policies to allow for remote employees for positions, some are warming up to it. 

David DeMuth, CEO of Detroit-based Doner is among the agency executives changing his tune. Before the on-set of the coronavirus, the agency hired a new director-level employee who was planning to move to Detroit but has yet to do so as the virus hit around the time he was hired. The ability to on-board a senior employee remotely as well as the agency team working remotely has DeMuth warming up to remote hiring. 

“We’ve proven that remote work is working,” said DeMuth. “That opens up the talent pool which opens up diversity. If you open up the geography, you decrease the confines of ‘in order to work here you must move here’ that opens up more talent for your company. Moving can be a dealbreaker for people; now we might not require someone to move.” 

Agencies are now starting to look at “programs and recruiting strategies they have not tried before” to hire remote talent, according to Simon Fenwick, executive vice president of talent, equity and inclusion at the 4A’s. “However, there is still a concern about how talent will be on-boarded, engaged and ensured that their agencies are inclusive while remote — and especially if they are the only person of color,” said Fenwick. “More than ever, work being done around inclusivity and culture is on the agenda of agencies.”

Create new systems

Even so, some are skeptical that simply allowing agencies to hire remote candidates will make a true dent in agencies diversity issues. Caveat co-founder and managing director Josh Greenberg doubts the ability to hire remotely will have a “significant impact on diversity” as, in his estimation, the “only thing that’s going to drastically impact the issue of diversity is putting more focus on the problem and companies of all sizes being held accountable.” 

In recent weeks, Black agency employees and new organizations like 600 & Rising have worked to put that focus on the problem of diversity at agencies. Doing so has led to holding companies as well as 30-plus independent agencies revealing their diversity numbers and committing to make a change to improve those numbers. 

While a commitment to hiring remote candidates has not been part of that pledge, agency executives and industry observers believe that remote hiring could help agencies improve the diversity of their agencies. 

“This is an opportune time, albeit one that was completely unforeseen, to truly create new systems that support diverse work spaces and cultures, by offering remote and hybrid options, developing anti-biased systems that allow talent vulnerable to ‘other-ism’ (ageism, sexism, sizeism, racism, etc.) an equal opportunity,” said Ericka Riggs, foundation and inclusion director at the Ad Club. 

Riggs continued: “If there is a silver lining to come out of this tragedy, it will be that companies gain competitive advantages by intentionally rebuilding with the guiding principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion, which has been proven to drive greater outcomes for profit and for the culture.”

Publishers will take bright spots wherever they can find them. But the budgets that have been unlocked are more focused on driving outcomes, publishers said, and some say they expect the recent trend of fashion brands doing bigger campaigns with fewer partners to accelerate this year.

“The Italians are back,” said Joshua Brandau, the chief revenue officer of the Los Angeles Times, “Fashion houses are asking about big, bold executions, section buyouts, and robust multi-platform packages. I’m very bullish about the vertical.”

For context, apparel and retail apparel advertisers spent a combined $4.75 billion on advertising in 2019, according to Kantar.

The coronavirus hit the fashion industry with a tough combination of punches. Lockdowns around the world, not just in China but in Italy and France, shut down production at many fashion houses’ factories and retailers, suddenly unable to sell online or in person, summarily canceled wholesale orders they’d placed with brands, leaving them millions of dollars’ worth of product they had no way of selling.

Adding insult to injury, social distancing regulations in cities like New York and Los Angeles meant brands and their agencies couldn’t assemble the crews needed to create the slick, stylized ads they were used to showing consumers.  

“You had a lot of brands that took creative [assets] from last year that they had to figure out how to revamp and repurpose,” said Addia Cooper-Henry, the founder of creative agency VMGroupe.  

Consequently, ad spending among fashion brands plunged in March, and kept going; on the whole, ad spending in the category declined 45% year over year in the second quarter. Much of that was caused by declines in print ads, which account for 64% of spending in the category, per Mediaradar.

But other kinds of ad buys slid precipitously as well. Excluding print ads, year-over-year spending in the category slid from being up 6% in mid-March to being down more than 15% in the space of about a month, according to Mediaradar analysis conducted for this article. By mid-June, spending was down more than 20% year over year, that analysis showed.

Shayna Kossove, the chief revenue officer of the fashion and lifestyle publication WhoWhatWear, said most of her clients paused, rather than canceled their spending as they tried to figure out what to do. But even as her clients formulated new plans, Kossove said she and her team went weeks without pitching new business because buyers were so hesitant. In some cases, there was no one to pitch.

“In many cases, our clients’ [contacts] were furloughed or even laid off,” Kossove said. “It was like, ‘Who do you even call?’”

Yet by May, conversations began taking place. “The fall conversations have
happened,” Kossove said. “They’ve really picked up in the last month.”

Some of the recent spending seems designed to capitalize on pent-up consumer demand. Early returns from big box stores opening up last month suggest that there is some measure of pent-up consumer demand for brands to capitalize on.

Publishers that are able to offer an affiliate or performance component to their campaigns are better positioned than those who purely offer media. Yuriy Boykiv, the president of DentsuX, said that while some fashion brands are “still calibrating” their spending, spending on digital and e-commerce have increased. 

The bulk of the conversations, however, are focused on the fall season, Brandau said. While publishers remain wary of retail as a category, they are eager to have conversations about the back half of the year. And fashion advertisers, for now, seem open to having them — despite the rising threat of coronavirus in America’s sun belt.

“I’d say in Q4, we’ll be back to the numbers we were hoping for,” Kossove said. “We’ll probably be even closer to the old forecast.”

It’s, as they say, a perfect storm.  

Fortunately, with that storm comes some green shoots. While COVID-19 has challenged all parts of the media business, it’s also acted as a forcing function for the industry. Many have been forced to get creative. They’re moving faster, thinking longer-term, and coming up with creative, new ways to serve client needs. The virus may be bad for the industry in the short-term, but it may make publishers far stronger and more resilient in the long run.

Digiday’s Deep Dive: European Publishing is a collection of videos, presenter slides and a guide of key takeaways produced by our editors from the Digiday Publishing Summit Europe Live that provides valuable tips and key insights so you’re prepared for what’s to come in publishing.

The last few months have been marked by contrasts. With the world in lockdown, publishers are seeing more interest from readers, but more mixed interest from advertisers. 

• Readership is up. The Telegraph, for example, drew 28.4 million visitors in March, its biggest ever digital audience, thanks to increased interest in news about the pandemic. Surprisingly, that increased traffic was joined with increased engagement and time spent. (Publishers typically see a “see saw” effect during times of increased traffic. Higher viewership typically means lower engagement.) More readers meant more subscribers. From April to June of this year, The Telegraph grew its number of registrants to 6.6 million, and its subscription revenue surpassed its advertising revenue for the first time in its history. 

• So is COVID keyword blocking.  With the pandemic touching nearly every part of daily life, from sports to politics to shopping, every story is ultimately a coronavirus story. That means an ever-increasing number of stories have been caught up in brands’ block lists. In March, The Telegraph found that keyword blocking had reached 64% of its inventory, according to Karen Eccles, senior director of commercial innovation. 

• But advertising is down. The New York Times saw its advertising revenue drop 50% in the second quarter of this year. Those declines don’t extend to all sectors. There have been a handful of industries that have “had spend transcend the pandemic,” said Robins. Tech technology has been strong, and so have healthcare and pharmaceuticals, and even some CPG brands. 

Further Reading:

‘Still dreadful, but trending in the right direction’: Digital ad spend began recovering in May 

Digiday Research: Coronavirus-related keyword blocking is a problem for 43% of all publishers

Just as COVID-19 is giving people the time to cook and garden, it’s also given publishers the opportunity to experiment, plan, and serve clients in new ways. 

• Future Publishing, which runs enthusiast sites such as Tom’s Guide and TechRadar, created an 8-person team of senior-level decision-makers to ideate and experiment with new product ideas specifically during the pandemic. One of the unique products to emerge from the team during lockdown is the Future Games Show, a digital event that took place the week of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the biggest gaming event of the year. Asadi said that millions of people turned into the coverage and that the company plans to bring the event back again later this year and in 2021. 

• With Amazon’s Prime Day postponed to later in the year, Vox Media has created its own version of the consumer holiday for The Strategist, which plans to host two days of 30 hand-picked deals in late July. “It’s something we’ve wanted to do for a long time,” said Camilla Cho, Vox Media’s e-commerce SVP. 

• In an effort to help brands understand emerging and evolving trends, The Telegraph has started collecting and sharing audience insights with advertisers. For travel brands, for example, the site has shared intel about how long subscribers spend on travel content and how likely they are to book a trip in the near future. “For brands, what’s important about this is that it lifts the lid on what’s going on, which helps them communicate with their potential customers in the right way,” said Karen Eccles, The Telegraph’s senior director of commercial innovation. 

• The Washington Post has run a series of marketer-focused “master classes” since April, bringing in members of its product, data, research, and editorial teams to answer important questions about shifts in consumer interest and spending. 

• Being agile also means adjusting creative to suit the times. The Washington Post, for example, realized that highly produced branded content is increasingly at odds with how people today are living. “We’ve seen those campaigns be a little less attainable in this new reality,” said Washington Post CRO Joy Robins. “If we’re just working with a dropcam and interviewing an executive, that feels more relevant at the moment because those highly produced campaigns feel out of place in so many ways.”

The Bottom Line: There’s a premium on agility in 2020, and that’s unlikely to change anytime soon. “We need to recognize we will not have a clear picture of things for some time, but setting your teams up and making people comfortable with flexibility and some degree of uncertainty is going to make you that much stronger on the other side,” Robins said. 

Revenue diversification has always been important, and crises like COVID-19 prove why. According to Digiday Research from May, 85% of publishers expected to see declines in ad revenue, which is bad news for any company that relies heavily on it. Put another way: Publishers looking for a way out of this crisis aren’t going to find it through advertising. Where will they find it? For many, through commerce. 

• Meredith, for example, has explored ways to leverage data from its affiliate business into helping brands design and develop new products. Knowing both what readers are interested in (via content) and what they buy (via affiliate links) opens up opportunities to help partners identify niches for new products. One example is the company’s partnership with Scotts Miracle Grow on a plant subscription product called Knock Knock. 

• Likewise, for Vox Media, users’ COVID-19 has been a boon to its commerce business, as more consumers turn to online shopping for staples, comforts, and luxuries. From March to June, The Strategist saw a 70% increase in net revenue compared to the same time last year. (May was one of the strongest months in the site’s three-year history.)

• On the other hand: Commerce, too, comes with challenges. Early in the crisis, skittish brands quickly began cutting their affiliate commission rates, or in many cases, shut off their affiliate programs entirely. 

The Bottom Line: As publishers continue to see payoffs from their investment in commerce, their efforts are evolving beyond just affiliate programs. 

Further Reading:

How Meredith is investing in tech to connect ads to sales 

As the third-party cookie heads for the exit, publishers and brands are desperate to develop its replacement. Fortunately, there are signs that the first-party data movement is picking up steam. The Telegraph, for instance, announced during the Digiday Publishing Summit Europe that it’s ceased using third-party data for targeting, and will instead rely on its first-party data. 

• For most publishers, the first-party data switch can’t be flipped overnight. At The New York Times, the process for reducing its reliance on third-party data began a year ago, and there’s still some work ahead of it before it can fully cease using third-party data entirely in 2021, as it announced it would earlier this year.
• While brands tend to be six months behind publishers on these issues, there are clear signs they’re feeling the pressure to move faster. Sasha Heroy, senior director of ad platforms at The New York Times, said that the Times now gets RFPs that include requests for information about first-party data capabilities. 
• While Heroy said that the Times has received “a great deal of excitement” from some advertisers in response to the offering, the switch to first-party data also involves educating advertisers on its data capabilities. 
• Embracing first-party data also makes testing and data validation more important than ever. For this reason, The Times has tested campaigns using its own first-party segments against those using third-party data. 
• The Times plans to refresh its data sets on a regular basis. This includes soliciting at least 10,000 new survey responses each quarter to make sure its audience data is up to date. The Times is in the process of building out best practices for always-on data collection to make sure it has the proper feedback loop to keep its models accurate. 

The Bottom Line: While the first-party data shift seems to be going well at the Telegraph and The New York Times, buy-side challenges remain. With many advertisers still making sense of the shift away from third-party data, elsewhere “struggle is all there is,” according to one event attendee. “Unless you have a tried and true dataset that’s large and well-known advertisers won’t take a risk on it.”

Further Reading

Inside The New York Times’ first-party data play 

Reducing cookie reliance, The Telegraph rolls out ways to share data directly with advertisers

These are challenging times for leadership at media companies. With employees being tested both professionally and personally, leaders increasingly need to help their teams make sense of the crisis and lead them through it. 

Here’s Future’s Aaron Asadi’s advice for leaders dealing with the crisis today:

• Accept change. The most effective way to respond to change is to embrace it. For Future, which announced the acquisition of TI Media last fall, change and reorganization have been a constant in recent years. Asadi said this gives the company an advantage in the current crisis. “In a crisis there isn’t once change, there are multiple, so you have to embrace that. Get used to the changing, not the change, because the change won’t last very long before the next one comes along.”

• Be cool. If accepting change is one constant of managing out of a crisis, accepting ambiguity is another. This doesn’t always come easy to leaders, who assume that they always need to have all the answers. But for employees, who are paying close attention to the news, that’s not what’s important right now. “Your teams aren’t expecting you to have everything planned out, but what they do need to see is that you’re unshaken and ready and collective enough to make logical decisions as you need to,” Asadi said. 

• Communicate early and often. When it comes to crisis, more change demands more communication. When Future closed its offices earlier this year, one of the first things it did was schedule weekly calls with management to brief the team on how the business was performing. Leadership also listened closely to common themes in the team’s concerns, which would suggest areas where communication could improve. “We upped our internal comms enormously, making sure that everyone had a digest of what was unfolding,” Asadi said. 

• Love your customer. When times get tough, empathy tends to be the first thing to go. Not so at Future. As the crisis unfolded, the company started to think about how the crisis had changed life for its customers. What new problems were they facing that Future could help with? The result: The company adapted its content to be more about what its customers needed, and less about what they wanted. This meant more guides, online talks, and virtual events. 

• Be clever. In the end, one of the surest ways a company can escape a crisis is by engineering that escape itself. Future took this to heart, challenging its team to be clever and creative to solve customer problems. “Some of the ideas didn’t work out, some were good, and some are probably going to be here for a long time to come,” Asadi said. 

The Bottom Line: A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor. Leaders should take Franklin D. Roosevelt’s quote to heart as they navigate the 2020’s choppy seas. 

Further Reading

How Future adapted commerce content to drive 1m transactions in March

“There is definitely some apprehension on our side and we’re very much not counting on there being long-lasting change. We’d loved to be proven wrong, but at the same time having looked at people’s pattern of behavior over time, we wouldn’t be surprised if things don’t really change in the long run.

Bola Awoniyi, Black Ballad Co-founder and COO

Black Ballad, a subscription-first site for black women, has seen its numbers grow in the wake of the surging Black Lives Matter movement following the police killing of George Floyd. In April, it’s subscribers climbed 100% year-over-year, and it’s fielded interest from brands looking to align themselves with its message. But there’s also some trepidation over how long the interest will last. 

 “Clients today are less likely to want to chit chat. Even though we seemingly have more time than ever because we’re not commuting and many of us are staying home, it still feels as if our days are full. When you book time with a client, it really has to mean something.” 

 Joy Robins, Washington Post Chief Revenue Officer

COVID-19 has changed all parts of how sales teams work, including how they relate to clients. With clients strapped for time and resources, time is scarce, and publishers need to justify every second of the day they take up. 

We’re turning flexibly from a fear word into an opportunity word. When our clients come to us saying they want to be flexible, they’re reacting to the need for flexibility from consumers as consumers dodge and weave and try to figure everything out. We’re trying to be the best possible partners in that context. 

Corbin de Rubertis, head of innovation at Meredith

With brands increasingly seeking out more flexible relationships with publishers, and with even direct media buys becoming increasingly easy for them to get out of, Meredith has sought out ways to build stronger relationships with their partners. This means embracing their role as consultants, not just sales people. 

“When you’ve got virtual space, you don’t have physical limitations, there’s no end to what you can do provided you have the customer interest.”

Aaron Asadi, CCO of Future

COVID-19 has made life very challenging for publishers who run events businesses, but it’s opened up new opportunities as well. With virtual events comes the potential for a wide variety of “long tail events” that publishers wouldn’t have the time or resources to run physically.

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There are five steps that marketers can take to achieve this goal, each helping to ensure that ad spend generates maximum revenue. 

1. Pull performance data by exchange in the DSP

Buyers need to analyze performance on an exchange-by-exchange basis to understand how to optimize at the exchange level. DSPs — surprisingly — don’t tend to optimize by exchange (since, historically, banner performance didn’t vary by exchange). But this is a powerful step that buyers can take manually. 

Looking at a typical campaign result set, the volume of spend often doesn’t go to the best-performing exchanges. In our analysis, we’ve seen that typical campaigns can see as much as 60 percent of display allocation heading to environments with lower-performing click-through rates. (Google, for instance, has a click-through-rate just north of 0.1 percent —  significantly lower than several other exchanges.) In many campaigns, only 8–10 percent of spend goes to exchanges with click-through-rates higher than 0.6 percent. Meanwhile, an exchange overperforming at nearly 1-percent CTR might be getting the lowest allocation of display spend overall.

When marketers miss these outcomes, it’s often simply because they haven’t taken a close enough look at how their exchanges have been performing. Here’s how to pull performance by exchange in The Trade Desk, DV360 and Xandr.

2. Run small tests

When buyers are stuck with old or insufficient data from past campaigns, or when there are concerns that existing data won’t be applicable, it’s always an option to run small-dollar, broadly targeted tests to understand performance by exchange. The most effective method is to run tests for the creative format the buyer actually plans to use (banner, video or native), and on roughly the site list, if there is one, that they plan to use. During these tests, it’s best to leave exchange targeting wide open (or, at most, to block specific unwanted exchanges). Whether running a PSA or — ideally — a potential or past creative asset, a $1,000 buy will yield enough data for an effective first test. Once finished, return to the first step, above, to look at the results.

3. Path optimize at the exchange level 

Once buyers have assessed performance by exchange, they can use that data to think further about what to do with their ad spend. One effective option is simply shutting off their worst-performing exchanges, particularly if they aren’t critical to the advertiser’s ability to scale. 

On the other hand, as buyers consider some of their larger but poorer-performing exchanges, they may find the best tactic is not to turn them off entirely, but simply to deliver more budget to higher-performing exchanges. The techniques for this option vary by DSP, with some platforms like The Trade Desk offering a way to prioritize spend to some exchanges but still spill over to others if needed for scale. Here’s how to do it in The Trade Desk, DV360 and Xandr.

4. Be smart about resellers

When buyers assess performance by exchange, their data will bundle both resale and direct relationships from those exchanges — and almost every exchange has a mix of both. At a high level, buyers can simply let the overall performance serve as a guide and not worry about the downstream path from the exchange. However, they may have an opportunity to increase the performance of the exchange even more by looking beyond the first hop. Unfortunately, right now, this isn’t easy to do with most DSPs. But that is changing fast due to new supply transparency initiatives.  

For exchanges on which buyers intend to heavy-up spend, it may be worthwhile to ask DSPs, or the exchange itself, to provide information about performance, divided by direct pubs and each reseller. If some paths have poor performance, it’s wise to ask the exchange to remove those from a PMP the buyer intends to spend on, or else to speak with the DSP about the possibility of disabling those paths.

5. Buy direct

After determining which supply sources are performing best, it’s a good idea to set up a direct buying relationship with those exchanges via a PMP. Of course, there are many approaches to buying on a PMP, so buying through ones that seem similar from multiple supply sources is likely still worthwhile. 

For instance, PMPs are especially effective when the inventory is selected and included by the exchange at the placement level. This approach enables buyers to assess performance at the exchange level, gain critical insights into each individual placement, and develop a rich understanding of which tactics and partners meet a campaign’s performance goals. Direct buyers that work with such exchanges often see dramatic increases in click-through-rate (sometimes as much as 100 percent) and they tend to see steep declines in cost-per-click as compared to open exchange buys. 

Advertisers have no margin for error

Digital advertisers have never faced a more precarious moment. Revenue streams are shrinking, and even many successful brands are narrowly clinging to profitability. Yet the vast majority of advertisers are leaving money on the table, neglecting to take simple steps to make sure their investments are achieving maximum ROI. 

Advertisers simply need to take a look under the hood — sometimes as little as once a week — and assess which of their exchanges and resellers are actually their top performers. It’s no more onerous than flossing or maintaining a healthy diet. Yet in a time of upheaval for brands, it can mean the difference between success and failure.