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This means the event will have less programming as the remaining staff leans on the other parts of The Atlantic in order to pull off the four-day-long event. The festival will also need to be promoted widely across the internet in order to achieve the publisher’s ambitious target: The Atlantic wants a million people to “attend” the festival this year, up from the 2,000 in-person attendees it normally attracts.

The in-person version of The Atlantic Festival spanned three days with four to five hours of main stage content each day. This year, the “main stage” has been relegated to a 90-minute block of evening programming that will be live streamed to audiences on its site and via other platforms over the four nights of September 21 through 24. During the days, smaller forums and panels will take place as well. 

In past years, The Atlantic Festival capped its audience to 2,000 to 3,000 due to space limitations. This year, scale is the goal.

Just two months out, the publisher has run some house ads in its magazine, but Wyler said her team will be posting promos on its social media channels and sending them out through its email lists and partner email lists.

The Atlantic traditionally earns 20% of its revenue from events, according to the company, with the vast majority of that revenue coming from sponsorships.

This year, the company’s estimate is that events will account for only 5-10% of the company’s overall revenue while doing solely virtual events.

The publisher laid off the majority of its events team during a round of layoffs in May that resulted in 68 staffers, or 17% of its total workforce to be cut. Within that, its events division, Atlantic Live, dropped from 50 employees to 10.

The remaining 10 now work more closely with the company’s other divisions, including in-house agency Re:Think, in order to use that division’s creative, video and production skills. It is also using virtual event platform vendor Tame to host the event.

“We are looking at the outlook for [virtual] events and there is some possibility that we will grow again and bring more staff on,” said Wyler.

This year, the Atlantic Festival will be free to attract a larger crowd.

It will be monetized through the help of nine advertisers. Last year’s event, by comparison, had 16 total sponsors.

Wyler added that, commensurate with the reduction in production costs of the event, sponsorship fees have decreased a bit year over year, though she would not disclose by how much.

Last year, The Atlantic produced more than 100 events. Since going remote, it has put on 20, and Wyler said she anticipates that her team will eventually get to the point of having one virtual event per week. Some have been sponsored, but others were solely editorial products.

The virtual events that the brand has held so far are bringing in roughly five to 10 times the number of attendees that they would in-person.

While an in-person forum event might have had 50 to 150 in attendance, depending on the venue size, Wyler said the virtual events have on average had 750 to 1,000 registrants.

“The more interactivity you put into any of these [events], the better and the more effective it’s going to be,” said Ben Hindman, CEO of events marketing platform Splash. However, he added that he does not think that massive scale events, like the one that The Atlantic’s aiming to put on, will be able to achieve the required networking and interaction. 

To attempt to accomplish this, The Atlantic Festival will include smaller break out sessions and 20-person roundtables during the daytime portions of the festival to give attendees the chance to speak directly to the presenters and the editors, said Wyler.

The streaming wars and the coronavirus crisis have led to increases in streaming viewership. Those increases and the leveling of the streaming playing field between TV networks and digital platforms will lead to streaming accounting for a larger slice of the ad dollars committed in this year’s annual upfront negotiations compared to previous years, according to executives at advertising agencies and TV networks.

“This year is a tipping point where we’ll see a more significant shift in spend to [streaming],” said one agency executive. This executive estimated that 25% to 30% of dollars committed in the upfront market will go to streaming, compared to 10% to 20% in prior years.

The surge in streaming viewership since March has contributed to that shift. So has the maturation of the streaming ad market as platforms like Roku and YouTube step up their game against traditional TV by, for example, offering incremental reach guarantees and cordoning off their most prized inventory. Meanwhile, TV networks have enhanced their streaming sales pitches by acquiring ad-supported streaming services like Hulu, Pluto TV and Tubi that give them access to audiences of cord-cutters. 

“They are definitely now all in the same market and are now competing with one another straight up,” said Catherine Sullivan, chief investment officer for North America at Omnicom Media Group.

Last year’s TV upfront negotiations appear to have marked a milestone toward this tipping point. TV networks were already sell their streaming inventory, such as ads inserted within shows that people can stream through their connected TV apps, mobile apps and sites, as part of upfront packages. But that streaming inventory was usually seen as complementary role to the networks’ linear inventory and effectively a safety net for networks to ensure advertisers reach enough viewers. Historically, the networks’ have sold their streaming inventory at a higher price than their linear inventory, so advertisers have been less keen to allocate their dollars toward it. That changed last year as networks lowered the price of their streaming inventory to be more in line with their linear rates. 

“Networks were willing to strike more favorable deals [with advertisers] on digital. But the digital inventory from these partners was still more expensive than linear on the Nielsen age-sex currency of TV,” said a second agency executive.

Out from TV’s shadow

TV network executives acknowledged that they have had to enhance their sales pitches associated with streaming in order to hang on to ad dollars as they shed linear viewers. “There has to be a natural reduction of dollars on the linear side just because audiences are shifting. Even in the Covid environment, overall linear ratings are down 10% to 12%,” said a TV network executive.

Similarly, brand advertisers have been pressed to spend more money on streaming inventory in order to reach the audiences that are increasingly difficult to get in front of on traditional TV. “Without streaming, it’s very difficult for advertisers to get the reach they had a few years ago, so they have to adopt streaming,” said Catherine Warburton, chief investment officer at 360i. 

In addition to new and enhanced reach, streaming also provides advertisers opportunities to reduce waste. And the TV networks and streaming platforms are pouncing on that point in their sales pitches this year.

TV network groups, such as Disney, NBCUniversal and ViacomCBS, have each taken steps to connect the inventory across their connected TV apps and other digital properties so that an advertiser can manage how often an individual viewer is exposed to its campaign across that streaming footprint. 

Meanwhile, Roku and YouTube are touting their abilities to deliver audiences that advertisers cannot find on traditional TV. YouTube, which is selling its connected TV inventory as a standalone option in this year’s upfront, has told advertisers that two-thirds of its viewership is incremental to TV viewership. “What we started to do last year, and leaned into more aggressively this year, is the emphasis on the TV screen,” said Tara Walpert Levy, vp of agency and brand solutions at Google.

Roku is guaranteeing that upfront advertisers will only pay for ads that are shown to viewers who were not exposed to their ads running on linear TV. “Since the day we started the advertising business, we have always been preparing for this moment, for helping brands out of linear and into [streaming],” said Alison Levin, vp of ad sales at Roku.

Upfronts upended

As the playing field levels between the TV companies and the streaming platforms, the hierarchy for upfront negotiations has the potential to be upended. 

Traditionally, advertisers and agencies strike deals with TV networks first — usually in July and August — and then the streaming platforms like Hulu, YouTube and Roku once the network negotiations are over. But this year, some advertisers plan to wait until the fourth quarter to sign deals with the networks so the advertisers can have a better sense of their own ad budgets and the networks’ programming schedules, given TV upfront deals’ historically rigid cancelation options. That has created an opportunity for the platforms offering more flexible terms to move earlier into the negotiating window.

While TV networks typically require advertisers to provide 60 days’ notice before canceling a percentage of their quarterly commitments, Roku will only require advertisers give 14 days’ notice and allow advertisers to cancel 100% of their commitments at that time. That makes it easier for advertisers to commit to spend money on Roku because they are not as locked into their deals.

“We’ll look to probably do some of those deals at, if not earlier, than 2020-21 broadcast deals primarily because it is flexible,” said Stacey Stewart, evp and managing partner of integrated investment at UM Worldwide.

Publishers cited various factors that could be contributing to the July revenue drop. For starters, the coronavirus crisis continues to weigh down ad dollars. Additionally, July marks the start of the third quarter, and the beginning of any quarter generally sees weaker advertiser demand compared to other periods, the publishers said. And then there’s the advertiser boycott. Many of the companies boycotting Facebook are major brand advertisers like Coca-Cola, Ford and Levi’s that are considered by publishers to be more likely to spend that money on video ads than the small- and medium-sized businesses that make up the bulk of Facebook’s advertiser base.

“I don’t think you can draw any clear conclusions from this moment about the decline in ad spend. You can still see the effects of the pandemic and some of that is now converging with this boycott,” said one publisher.

In some cases, publishers have been able to draw a direct connection between the Facebook video ad revenue decline and the advertiser boycott. A second publisher said they have had advertisers redirect upwards of a quarter-million dollars from the media company’s Facebook videos to its YouTube videos because of the boycott. 

Meanwhile, one of the publishers has joined the boycott itself by opting not to run ads on Facebook to promote its videos and increase viewership, though it is still uploading organic videos to the platform and receiving ad revenue from them. Another of the publishers had considered joining the boycott but opted against because of the potential impact doing so could have on its overall revenue, such as its commerce business that generates more revenue for the company than its Facebook videos.

Publishers’ social video ad revenues bottomed out across Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat in early April. Since then, they have rebounded, and some media executives thought the trajectory could lead to a full recovery back to pre-crisis levels as early as July. Publishers were disabused of that hope by the first week of July, though. 

After the first week of July, one of the publishers saw that its Facebook video ad revenue for July was on pace to be 35% lower than the June figure, with Facebook video ad CPMs down 18% in July compared to June. But it seems that the initial downswing may have had more to do with the Fourth of July holiday than the advertiser boycott. As of mid-July, this publisher saw its Facebook video ad CPMs rebound to be $1 higher than they were at the beginning of July and 10% lower than their June average, with revenue on pace to be 16% lower in July compared to June.

While the publishers did not welcome the revenue decline, they had feared it would be worse than what they are currently seeing. “It’s a little bit lower than June, but not that bad. I was predicting we would be back to where we were in April,” said a third publisher. Of course, July is only half over.