Data-Labor-Technology

Not every show or format has rebounded in the same way — news shows, for example, have driven a disproportionate share of the listening in the first half of the year.

And some of the problems that arose in March remain in place; coronavirus-created supply chain problems, for example, are still curbing ad spending among some DTC brands, which are trying to avoid driving sales they can’t fullfill in a timely fashion.

But with the second half of 2020 underway, podcasters are allowing themselves to feel optimistic.

“I was really pessimistic in March, and I was wrong,” said Dave Zohrob, the
CEO of podcast analytics and ad attribution measurement firm Chartable. “There’s
still a lot of excitement among media buyers around this stuff.”

When coronavirus first upended American business back in March, people stopped commuting, and podcasting took a big hit, with downloads declining about 10%, according to Chartable.

That slide turned out to be short-lived. Even though people still aren’t
commuting, data suggests that listeners found ways to fit shows into different parts
of their day as they’ve crafted new daily routines.

“We’re back to where we were pre-covid,” said Marshall Williams, the CEO of
media agency Ad Results Media. “Now the downloads spike around lunchtime.”

Chartable’s Zohrob said he saw the same increase in his own company’s data, adding that while categories such as sports remain down — “It’s tough to maintain interest for six months with no games,” he said — on the whole, consumption appears to have returned to normal levels.

Ken Lagana, svp of digital sales at Entercom, which got into the podcast business last year by buying Cadence13 and Pineapple Street Media, said the first half revenues of both businesses finished up year over year, though he declined to provide specific numbers.

Podcast believers like DTC brands powered much of that growth.
“Performance-driven advertisers have continued to be the stalwarts throughout
this whole tumultuous time,” Lagana said. “Every dollar that’s getting spent
right now really almost has to have a performance element to it.”

But brand dollars, which have come on strong in recent years, have held up too, Lagana said. Even branded podcasts such as Mailchimp’s “Going Through It,” a pricier investment that tends to drive engagement rather than quick sales, are doing well. “Not only are we seeing new business come in the door, but we’re seeing renewals and we’re seeing in some cases either brands further extending their commitments or adding episodes to commitments,” Lagana said. Lagana declined to share the names of specific advertisers, but said that tech, financial services and even retail were among the best-performing categories.

That emphasis on proving the value of the investment has been good for other
companies too. Chartable, for example, has beaten the revenue estimates it set
at the beginning of the year in each of the past three months.

The podcast advertising market grew 48% last year, to $708 million, according to an IAB/PwC report published last week. Even after four months of economic upheaval and uncertainty, the space is still expected to grow 15% this year, down from an original projection of 28% growth, the IAB/PwC report showed.

And while that projected growth falls short of the target laid out last year, the final dollar figure — $814 million — is just 6% off what last year’s IAB report predicted podcasting would generate in 2020, as Westwood One CMO Pierre Bouvard observed in a note published Monday.

“The realities of the global pandemic have shown us that we’ve probably gone a little too far when it comes to the over aspirational inspirational, picture-perfect content produced by influencers,” said Bose. Instead of solely working with those types of influencers, General Mills will also target those who are better equipped to convey authenticity with self-awareness when promoting its products, said Bose. Often, these people won’t actually be full-time influencers, or paid for that matter, he said. 

For example, the advertiser is working with peer-to-peer software marketing platform Zyper to build communities of superfans to promote its Betty Crocker and Fibre One products in Australia, the Middle East and the UK. These are the natural brand advocates excited to work with their favorite brands and aren’t going to want cash to do so. Instead, they will receive gifts like personalized products and one-off experiences in exchange for their endorsement. 

Finding fans that have the influence and appetite to work in this way has been tricky to date mainly because influencer marketing is geared to incentivize advertisers to work with those influencers who guarantee reach over actual influence. Furthermore, it’s hard to identify those people who are genuine fans of brands, which is why General Mills is using software to do so. Aside from their loyalty to a brand, super fans will be picked by General Mills based on several factors including the content they share, the reach of that content, the demographics of their audience and whether those people frequently engage with what gets shared. 

While it might sound like this is less an alternative to influencer marketing and more of a short-term tactic to save marketing dollars, Arjoon said the move aims to use community engagement to bolster its influencer marketing.  And General Mills will continue to work with higher profile influencers on larger brands like Häagen-Dazs, said Bose.

In general, working with advocates and influencers of varying profile has real cost efficiencies. Despite the challenges of working with influencers—from lack of authenticity to dramatic price increases—they are generally able to produce content more cost-effectively than agencies. So much so that Bose said General Mills would continue to pay influencers to promote its brands as part of a wider increase in spending on digital media. Last year, the advertiser spend up to a third of the digital budget for some of its brands on influencer marketing. Bose declined to reveal how much the advertiser spent.

“We’re going to continue to spend where the consumer is and focus on experimenting with new activations during these times,” said Bose. 

Over time, Bose expects these advocates will have a wider influence over General Mills’ marketing than traditional influencers. He expanded on the point: “Working with these types of communities allows us to elevate those relationships into what could eventually become the next level of co-creation, insight generation or even digital commerce.”

There are challenges, however, to balancing community engagement with influencer marketing. 

“By avoiding working with paid creators and influencers, General Mills will be losing all the known and established benefits of a pool of people who know and understand how to talk to their audiences effectively,” said James Silverstone, account director, at influencer agency The Projects*. “Community engagement shouldn’t be in place of paid campaigns but should be used to support and compliment them.”

The coronavirus recession hit the local news industry hard at a time when it hadn’t even recovered from the previous crisis in 2008.

“We’re certainly coming up on or in the middle of something even bigger,” Lion Publishers executive director Chris Krewson said on the Digiday Podcast. “So I don’t see much hope of them recovering from this one either.”

Krewson obviously isn’t rooting for a slow recovery, even as he predicts one. “That’s what we’ve identified as the trend that we need to be ready to help on,” he said.

Lion — which stands for local independent online news and has staffers outside Philadelphia and in Vermont, Washington State and Kansas — is aimed at helping small news organizations, whether for or not-for-profit, reach sustainability.

To that end, it encourages experimentation and a break with the staid business models that lost out to the ad dollar dominance of Google and Facebook.

“There’s a lot of ways that the future of news is going to look, and we just have to be more forgiving and open and able to see more of these experiments so that we can see which of them are worth continuing and adding fuel to,” Krewson said.

In Memphis, for instance, two Lion members are adopting different approaches. The Daily Memphian has set up a traditional shop, betting on a subscription model and hiring a few dozen reporters to challenge the Gannett-owned incumbent with broad coverage of metropolitan news, from education to the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies.

In a nutshell, “the overhead is high,” Krewson said.

Not so with MLK50, a smaller team focused on covering “poverty, power and public policy,” in its own words. It recently teamed up with ProPublica for high-impact reporting that led to large-scale debt forgiveness in the city.

“I’m not saying either approach is better than the other. I’m just saying there’s a lot of ways to slice the ways that local news can have an impact,” Krewson said. “And it doesn’t necessarily have to be with 30 plus people replacing what the newspaper used to do, just without print.”

Here are highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarity.

Smaller newsrooms, and many more of them

“One of the things I love about my previous employer, the Philadelphia Inquirer, is that it’s trying to figure out a way to keep 200 journalists or so employed in a major metro area. But an argument I think to myself all the time is ‘why do there need to be 200 in one place? Why wouldn’t there be a whole bunch of two to three people operations in neighborhoods and make up actually more coverage of what exists than one 200-person operation, which kind of evolves and defines an area as it decides it needs to?’ I think the definition of what the future of local news is going to be has been defined by gatekeepers who assume they’re going to see a news-paper-like structure.”

Sharing best entrepreneurial practices for its members

“Some of the work we’re doing is very much aimed at gathering best practices: things like pitch decks, branding kits, job descriptions and HR policies — gathering all that up into one place and publishing it all for our members and aspiring members. We’ll have a database and let you be able to see that X project in Y town used Z pitch deck to raise this much money or find this much from investors at the local level, or had this much runway from somebody’s buyout, which is the path for a lot of typical ‘Lions.’ They will have received some kind of severance money and walk across the street and start a publication. I think this work is increasingly urgent because that’s what we’re going to see continue to happen to the news industry in this country, is a lot more out of work journalists. I think we’re here to help meet that need. That’s what we’ve identified as the trend that we need to be ready to help on.

Beware the grant

“What I’m dedicated to building in programs and support for my members to do is help them get something started that generates enough money on its own. Some of that can be can be grant funding, but most of it should not be. I think an over-reliance on grants, especially in public media, is a whole bunch of coverage of the watershed and nowhere near enough coverage of City Hall. The grants have skewed its coverage in one direction. And that’s the danger with that model.”

Join us on Friday, July 31 at 12 p.m. ET on The New Normal, a weekly interactive show focused on how publishers are adapting their businesses. Allure editor-in-chief Michelle Lee will talk with Digiday editor-in-chief Brian Morrissey about how the newsroom defines diversity in its coverage — including its magazine covers. Register here.

(A TikTok spokesperson said it was “interesting” Facebook was talking money for a political ad attacking a competitor “just as it’s preparing to launch a TikTok copycat,” referring to Instagram Reels. The company has also refuted the suggestion it has shared or would share user data with the Chinese government.)

For advertisers, however, the nationality of TikTok’s ownership places fairly low down the rankings in their risk assessments of the app. Of the dozen or so industry experts — agency executives, marketing executives and consultants — I asked about the topic last week, none suggested advertisers were making any dramatic shifts in their TikTok strategy as a result of the recent political headlines. 

For many of the experts I spoke to, some of the reason was simply that TikTok itself isn’t high up on advertisers’ agendas. While the app has ballooned in popularity, with more than 2 billion downloads to date, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower, advertisers are a cautious bunch and adoption of new platforms tends to lag user growth by some distance. For advertisers who are spending on TikTok, for most, it still sits in the “experimental” bucket for now.

Part of that can be explained away simply by the fact that TikTok is new: It only launched its first ad units at the beginning of last year. And while advertising industry experts have praised the pace at which TikTok has launched new products and announced integrations with third-party measurement and verification firms, it’ll take time to meet industry gold standards and become a mainstay of the media plan.

The most important bar to meet? Brand safety and suitability, according to the experts I spoke to. As a user-generated content platform, it’s an issue that’ll linger even if it changes its corporate structure to distance its operations from China.

To counter that concern, TikTok said it removed 49.2 million videos for violating its community guidelines or terms of service between July 1 and December 31 last year — 89.4% of which were removed before they had received any views. That still means more than 5 million pieces of violating content were seen by at least somebody. As with all user-generated content platforms, the game of online content moderation cat and mouse is never ending.

A TikTok spokesperson said the company is working with third-party partners to test its viewability and safety solutions for advertisers. The company has previously confirmed partnerships with firms like Moat, Integral Ad Science, Doubleverify and Openslate.

“We’re in the early stages of working with these partners and will be able to provide more information at a later date, but we can say that advertisers are excited by these partnerships and the controls that we are seeking to provide for their campaigns,” said the spokesperson.

Another key issue for many of the buyers I spoke to is the age of TikTok’s audience. TikTok was the most downloaded app among users aged between 6- and 18-years-old in 2019 in the U.K., according to U.K. communications regulator Ofcom. During lockdown, 14% of 3- to 12-year-olds and 31% of 13- to 18-year-olds in the U.K. used the app. 

One ad buyer told me TikTok’s early violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, back when it was known as Musical.ly, hiked that caution. In 2019, TikTok agreed to pay $5.7 million to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations that the app illegally collected personal information from children under the age of 13 without getting parent consent. The settlement also required TikTok to remove all videos on the app made by children under 13. 

“That’s a bad way to introduce yourself to a new market,” said Brendan Gahan, partner and chief social officer at digital agency Mekanism. 

Mekanism and its clients reviewed the details of the violation when it was first announced — the news put “planned activations under the microscope” Gahan added. Ultimately the agency proceeded after determining the lawsuit and fine were results of mistakes Musical.ly, rather than TikTok, had made. (ByteDance acquired Musical.ly in 2017 and in 2018 transferred its users to TikTok, which launched in 2016.)

It could yet get worse for TikTok on the COPPA front. Reuters reported earlier this month that the Federal Trade Commission and U.S. Department of Justice are assessing allegations that TikTok broke the terms of that agreement by failing to delete the videos and data, “among other violations.” TikTok has said it takes “safety seriously for all our users” and that it offers a “limited app experience” to U.S. users under 13, which includes extra safety and privacy protections. TikTok also has a 12+ app store ranking, which allows parents to block the app from their children’s phones using parental controls.

One agency executive also said TikTok’s creator marketplace, which provides data behind influencers’ audience demographics, has also been a helpful tool with their targeting. Still, TikTok is found to be in any way harmful to children — or even just perceived to be — things could start moving very quickly and out of its control.

To be sure, it’s not like TikTok’s advertising business has been a slow starter. The Information reported last month that TikTok is aiming to pull in $500 million in U.S. revenue this year and it’s hiring sales people at a clip. Ad buyers have credited the full-screen, sound-on, creative ad experience and the potential for which videos and fun challenges can go viral on the platform. Multinational companies also already have plenty of experience in working with Chinese media companies. And, right now, some advertisers boycotting Facebook are looking for alternatives to reroute their social spend.

TikTok’s core appeal is the size and loyalty of its growing global audience. Ban aside, if users become spooked and flee the platform, advertisers will follow.

“There’s a cautious tone but there’s not a big concern for brands right now,” about TikTok being caught in the political crosshairs between the U.S. and China, said Amy Luca, chief executive of influencer marketing platform theAmplify. “At the end of the day, advertisers will want to be where their audience is spending time and right now, if you are looking to engage a young audience, TikTok a good strategy.”

“The mentor and mentee relationship needs to be restructured, it’s about making an investment,” she said. “If people think of their mentees as they do their paying clients, things would change. Both people need to view it as a wonderful opportunity for a cultural and value exchange.”

Her experience of mentorship through third-party organizations like the Creative Mentor Network, however, have been much more constructive, and she still has relationships with two mentors who she was paired with. Now, with fewer internships and placements available and more time to reflect, Annor-Owiredu is freelancing as a writer and cultural strategist.

The coronavirus gap

Mentorship helps people progress in organizations, narrows the opportunity gap and reduces diversity churn. It plays an oversized role for people from minority backgrounds by having someone who can vouch for you in rooms that you can’t access or didn’t know were available. People from lower socioeconomic backgrounds make up 12% of the workforce in the creative industries despite being 44% of the U.K. population, according to the Creative Mentor Network. 

But fewer people going back to an office limits face-to-face interactions and puts a strain on relationships. More junior staffers will miss out on the expertise and guidance of their seniors. Others with poor professional networks may find it difficult to strengthen them, points out economist Tyler Cowen, George Mason University. Coronavirus and the economic downturn has forced deeper inequalities, and those who feel them the sharpest are women, the young and immigrants, he adds.

And remote work could further the racial divide. But the positive desire for change since the Black Lives Matter movement has led to an increase in companies looking to commit to programs — the number of companies contacting the Creative Mentor Network has grown by 80%, said founding director Isabel Farchy.

“The ad industry hasn’t historically been good at making progression available to people from minority ethnic backgrounds,” said Alex Quicho, associate director of cultural intelligence at consumer behavior consultancy, Canvas8. “Much of this is owed to pre-existing prejudice. And the pandemic has the potential to further set that back, for example, new Black and Latinx college graduates in the U.S. are 145% [according to WayUp] more likely to worry about finding remote work.”

Louise Laugenie, communications manager at agency Universal McCann was put forward for two one-off mentor sessions with different organizations over video calls, one session specifically with people from diverse backgrounds. Both were helpful and worthwhile, said Laugenie, who is mixed race and also considers her manager a mentor. But speaking with people outside of her organization gave a broader view of her career options and progression. 

“It can be hard to find a mentor, I wouldn’t have known where to look,” she said. “It also relies so much on the managers to have daily check-ins with the wider team, formal and informal catch-ups.”

Organizations’ taking on new mentor programs, graduate recruitment or training schemes have been put on hold as time and focus shifts to keeping existing employees. U.K. tabloid The Sun and The BBC have halted programs because having so many remote workers makes bringing on new people difficult. 

Others have leaned into more mentoring while people are dislocated. ViacomCBS brought forward the launch of its mentorship program, Pop-Up Mentoring, before the company went into full remote-working mode, to help employees feel connected during a restructuring. Virtual mentoring programs during the pandemic have helped combat feelings of loneliness and dislocation.

Jill Kelly, GroupM’s global chief marketing officer, sees several accelerated shifts in how mentorship is used in a virtual environment. A less formal and more flexible approach with higher frequency snackable interactions, such as 15 minutes around best practices when interviewing. It’s becoming more acts-driven, rooting mentorship in specific gestures, like endorsing five female colleagues on LinkedIn (where men tend to endorse each other more, she said).  

“For younger generations, Black and people of color, remote-working conditions have surfaced other areas that mentorship needs,” said Kelly. “Those notions of validation and feeling of relevance are harder to come by when you don’t walk past you manager who says ‘hey good job, why don’t I get you lunch.’’’

Maria McDowell, head of mentorship at accelerator program for the creative, media and marketing industries at Brixton Finishing School, notes that remote working has made connecting mentees with their mentors easier, but in-person nuances might not be coming through. “How strong that contact is is still yet to be seen,” she said. “Sometimes you need to see mannerisms, see the whites of their eyes, to help build rapport. This could be a case of frequency over quality.”  

McDowell has her worries about the newest generation of staffers joining companies. “When you are young it could be harder to get motivated when not in the office,” she said. “‘How do I show enthusiasm through a Zoom call? If I’m intimidated or shy or, from a political point of view, don’t know how to navigate myself?’ [Some managers] don’t like difficult conversations or aren’t great communicators. It’s a tricky dance.” 

Setting up spaces to thrive

Industries outside media and marketing, like finance and law, view mentorship through a more formal lens, with scheduled meetings and progress tracking. “The ad industry has a tendency to make work very casualized, which means some people can feel left out. Employees from Black, Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds are much more likely to say they have to change their behavior to fit in with company culture. [Companies] struggle to get that balance,” said Canvas8’s Quicho. This partly stems from the view that too much formalized corporate process threatens creativity. Creating a mentorship program is unlikely to inhibit anyone’s ability to be creative, she added.

Even so, most media and marketing industries haven’t been set up for people from minority backgrounds to thrive. 

“[Once you get in] it’s like a microaggression maze you have to go through,” said Annor-Owiredu. “If you call out [a microaggression], you end up becoming the racist sense-checker, being known as that doesn’t serve you. I came here to be a strategist.” 

Most opportunities, like a robust business network or sense of fitting in, are taken for granted by people who are in a dominant group. Business acquaintances are made — and hiring is based — on social circles and forming friendships. 

“Since the 1970s [diversity and inclusion] was funneled into [human resources] and seen as anti-discriminatory, but it didn’t acknowledge structural racism and why that discrimination exists,” said Quicho. “Class and race structures interplay in the U.K. and many of the people in power do not want to relinquish it. Hiring a friend who you know is good doesn’t sound like nepotism to you but it narrows the field.”

People from minority ethnic groups are much more likely than white British employees to say that ‘seeing people like them achieve progress at an organization’ as something that would boost their own careers, according to a 2017 study by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

Yet organizations’ more recent interest in creating equal opportunities for people from diverse backgrounds is not without some wariness.

“There’s skepticism,” said Annor-Owiredu. “We always think how long will we be top of mind for before we get disregarded again and we’re all fighting for one role, and if one of us gets it, is the environment good enough to help sustain a long-lasting career?”

Diverse workforces are proven to be good for business. Beyond woke points and mercenary interests, brutal honesty about intentions and an emotional investment are needed to make mentoring meaningful, said Annor-Owiredu, who added “companies can think about “how we can make this a space where Black candidates feel amplified and want to be part of.”