Data-Labor-Technology

Its first foray onto the platform had all the “bells and whistles,” according to Kang. The September campaign was called “#makeitawesome” and was a part of a multi-platform relaunch of the EOS brand that ran more than three weeks on the platform. It collected more than 3 billion views, a 14.5% engagement rate and had 340,000 users using the hashtag in their posts.

But after that first test, its subsequent December and April campaigns were designed to be more experimental and test out all of the nuances of the social platform.

“A lot of brands are still thinking of TikTok as ‘that dance app.’ I encourage marketers to think about it more broadly because it’s really evolved significantly beyond that,” said Kang. 

As with any algorithm-based platform, Kang said “it’s hard to predict what will go viral.” However, the strength of TikTok is that by partnering with its top content creators and using an influencer model, marketers have the ability to tap into their creative style and platform knowledge as well.

In the latest Digiday+ Talk, Kang talked about the brand’s relationship with the platform’s more creative influencers and how her team has used its paid TikTok campaigns to drive organic growth on its own channel.

“Letting go can be good.”

EOS’s influencer strategy on TikTok has not deviated from other social media platforms and that’s because influencers “know the platform better than we do,” said Kang.

For the brand’s first paid campaign in September, she said the company worked with five influencers, while the December campaign and the April campaigns had 22 and 15 influencers, respectively. 

“TikTok as a platform is a lot more creative” than others because there are more tools for creative expression, she said. Therefore, the creators and influencers coming out of the platform tend to be more creative as well. 

“If you partner with a wide range of creators who have a lot of styles, they can create content that is incredibly diverse and creates a bigger spectrum of content than what we’ve typically experienced on Instagram for example,” said Kang.

• “Allow the creators to create,” Kang said. Her team initially was more prescriptive in telling influencers what they were looking for from the partnership, as they would be on other platforms, but now, she said that “letting go can be good.” After all, creators with millions of followers know how to milk the platform better than marketers do.
• Kang said that using an influencer agency is a great way to get in touch with TikTok influencers. This is because an agency’s main job is tracking the up and coming artists whereas taking the time to do that as a marketer would eat up much of your day. “There is huge value in partnering with people who know the platform,” she said.
• Longterm partnerships are the most authentic, because influencers’ followers will become more comfortable seeing your brand associated with that influencer over the course of time.

An owned account is just as important as a paid presence

It’s important for brands to have their own presence on TikTok as well, Kang said. Like with any other platform, the larger the built-in following a brand has, the more significant the baseline is for the number of people that will see and interact with the brand’s organic content.

“If you don’t have your own account, if you don’t work on creating that community, you’re not going to get that shot at having those impressions,” she said.

Not only that, but creating content for a main site is cheaper than paying for a campaign, and in some cases is altogether cost free outside of paying for labor. Kang said that the content that is presently being published on the EOS account is shot from her team’s homes on smart phones due to the pandemic and while the content is good, the production value is rather low compared to the brand’s content on other platforms.

In terms of producing this organic content, Kang said it takes “a lot of at bats” before making a viral video. And while her team does not have the bandwidth to post three times a day, Kang said that “it’s more about frequency than polish” for creating a successful TikTok content strategy.

She herself spends upwards of an hour a day on the platform in order to keep track of new audio sounds, meme formats and challenges that are trending on TikTok that will inform EOS’s own content strategy.

“Our content on TikTok looks unlike any other content on social platforms. It’s more authentic, it’s weirder — it’s real people doing real things,” she said.

Tapping a two-pronged approach

Kang said that her team’s approach is two-pronged, combining paid campaigns and a controlled, organic presence in the form of its own account.

Paid campaigns have proven successful for EOS, according to Kang. She said that during the September campaign, her team used a third-party study to measure its impact and found that EOS had a three times higher ad recall than average on the platform.

And while the main goal of paid campaigns are brand building and announce new products, she said other goals are driving engagement and driving people to EOS’s owned account. To do this, EOS gamified its most recent campaign around Easter time:

• EOS created a virtual egg hunt with its egg-shaped lip balms by telling 15 influencers to hide the lip balms in the background of their videos. The goal of this was for the audience to not only be “laser focused on the product and our brand,” but to also watch and rewatch the videos, which, in TikTok’s algorithm, helps to boost a video’s performance.
• The viewers were then instructed to find all of the lip balms in the video and guess the total number in the comments. To find out if they were right, they had to go to EOS’s channel where the answer was revealed in a EOS-created video, making them engaged directly with the EOS brand.
• This campaign had the highest percentage of engagement of all three of the brand’s TikTok campaigns to date.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Sum up what it’s like being the most senior black exec where you work?

It’s tugging at me in different ways. I’m grateful for having an opportunity to influence how my company becomes more diverse and inclusive, but it sucks that it’s taken such a bad situation to create that interest. So many white people — both internally and across the industry — have reached out to me asking for advice on what they can do. That’s the really frustrating part. Black people didn’t create these systemic prejudices, so please don’t expect us to resolve them alone. It would be great if the white people I talk to come to me with their own ideas on how we all move forward after having done their own research. 

What sort of questions are you being asked by white people?

The questions vary but so far they focus on things that they should already be doing. I’ve been asked a few times about how to hire more Black people because they’re hard to find. That’s just not true. Others are asking me where to find Black execs to speak at their conferences. If those execs applied the same mindset they use to fix problems in ad tech then we wouldn’t be having these conversations. These are people building a global business on the back of data. We need to apply that same data-centric mindset to address racism as a company. Publishing diversity numbers would be a start, but not the complete answer. Those numbers, however, could create pressure that could help us to make better decisions when it comes to hiring.

Has being Black hindered career progression for you?

I can’t necessarily point to a concrete example and say I didn’t get a promotion because I’m Black. And yet, from an early point in my career, I knew I was going to have to work twice as hard as most of my colleagues and be on my game all the time if I wanted to get ahead. People tend to hire and promote people who make them feel comfortable. Go to the ‘About Us’ section on any site for an ad tech vendor and you will see a lack of diversity, particularly at the exec level.

If it’s that tough, how have you been able to get as far as you have?

There is no replacement for hard work. Regardless of your color or gender, if you want to progress in your career you have to work for it. With that said, there have been times throughout my career where I felt I definitely had to “play the game” and make sure other people felt comfortable with me in the room (because of the color of my skin) even if that meant sacrificing my own level of authenticity and comfort. This is often referred to as code-switching….which, unfortunately, is something that black people often do in a white-dominated industry. I’m happy to say though that as I’ve moved up in my career and have gotten older, I no longer feel the need to code-switch and truly bring my full self to work every day.

Do you not worry that as you become more senior, opportunities start to become fewer — have you seen this happen?

It’s definitely a concern. The higher you climb the ladder the tougher it gets because there are fewer opportunities available and more competition for those opportunities.

Do you experience unconscious bias through microaggressions within the ad-tech community on a regular basis? If so can you explain how?

Yes definitely and here are two examples:

There has been plenty of situations where I will be out with my white colleagues, and we will be joined by another white male … he will great my white colleagues with a “hi” or “how you doing?” … but when he greets me he will say “my man” with a bit of awkward slang to it.

Earlier this year I was at an industry conference that was being held at a fancy hotel. I was attending a client meeting in the lobby which included 4 white guys and me. During the meeting, a random hotel guest (older white gentlemen) came up to just me and asked “Is this the concierge desk?”

Having just raised a $47 million round — part equity, part debt — in April, FaZe Clan CEO Lee Trink said the company is in the process of fundraising for its Series B as it readies further international expansion and moves to diversify its ranks. Trink also discussed how FaZe Clan is working to root out divisive language being used by the gaming community, improving the category’s diversity and why marketers looking to associate with youth culture also need to accept its “edges.”

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What does your international expansion involve?

A test market we tried in December was in Thailand where we made the decision to lead with an esports team. We recruited a PUBG Mobile team [and FIFA Online players] in Thailand and content is starting to follow. We’re developing a really great social media footprint inside Thailand.

The concept is that FaZe Clan should feel as home-grown or local as possible within a global brand. You have the ability to take a brand like FaZe Clan and have it represented locally around the world so it doesn’t feel like an American import.

Last year you signed your first female FaZe Clan member. Do you plan to diversify FaZe Clan’s ranks further?

Without a doubt it’s something we’ve been having not only more and more conversations [about] but some action behind bringing more females in. Frankly, it’s a challenge at times. But I think as leaders in the space, we need to lead in terms of bringing in more women and bringing in more diversity.

There’s recently been a reckoning on social media about bad behavior within the gaming community. What are you doing to encourage better behavior?

It is important for us to take a leadership role in that. 

Gaming is a little bit late to the party. Gaming has been siloed away in a corner where a lot of traditional players just left it alone and didn’t see the value. If you look at  a lot of the things we’ve done — building bridges to the traditional entertainment space and also starting to bring in significant sponsors — a couple of years ago that really didn’t exist. What that meant was this was a large, bustling community but really left on its own in a corner with not a lot of sophisticated operators on the business side that were tending to it.

Now we’ve been able to build those bridges, we can fix that, but then the other part of it: We have to grow up. We have to be good citizens within the business community. It maybe painful at times for some people but it’s a positive and necessary process to go through for us to take a rightful place alongside all these other businesses who went through it a few years ago. 

Can you give specific examples?

A big thing we are leading the charge on is the …  language that’s been used in gaming that has been tolerated.

We have stated to our fans that we are not going to tolerate any type of divisive language. We have started to employ AI tools to help with that. We are discussing whether it will be “a one strike and you’re out,” or a suspension and kick someone off from being one of our subscribers and followers. We are engaging conversations with some of the other parts of the gaming community to help do the same. 

We have started a diversity council within FaZe Clan that is a volunteer group that is working on actionable items in this area.

You announced a partnership with Quibi for a reality show. How’s that been going?

It looks like that’s not going to go to fruition. That announcement was a little premature before the deal was papered and, at the moment, it’s not going forward. Might that change? Perhaps. I don’t think so. 

There were two parties involved in that deal. One deal was executed, the other deal wasn’t and we just weren’t able to come to agreement on terms with the other party.

Was it Quibi you couldn’t come to an agreement with?

No.

Marketers sometimes have an uneasy relationship with influencers. What do you say to reassure them?

A lot of the power we have is social influence power because it’s connected to the brand of FaZe Clan and there’s IP there, there’s identity there and there’s something other than the ups and downs of individual talent. 

We are not just a sports team. We are a sports team and a lifestyle brand that pushes culture. If you’re breathing that rarified air of being able to drive culture then that’s typically done — especially if you’re talking about youth culture — by people who have edges. It’s about authenticity. It doesn’t mean unbridled, you can’t use that word ‘authenticity’ to cover up everything. But if you want to participate in something as powerful and as compelling as FaZe Clan it’s going to have some edges to it. 

We work very hard to make sure there’s brand safety. Even with the ups and downs of individual talent, it’s always about how the company reacts more so than what happens with individual talent. If we try to sandpaper every rough edge off, we’re not going to be as compelling as we are.

That segment can be targeted on the publisher’s site to show offers or different creative to Telegraph readers who are already customers of the brand. Or to suppress a certain group so the brand can target lapsed or unknown customers. Over the last few weeks, The Telegraph has had dozens of conversations with brands, although it was too soon for them to name them, about running these types of campaigns.

“[This is] changing the conversation, now it’s about deeper, richer partnerships with advertisers and how we can work together to support the power of their audience,” said Karen Eccles, senior director, commercial innovation at The Telegraph. “It’s about moving from third-party to first-party and from anonymous to known audiences. It’s an opportunity that sits squarely under our reader-first, subscriber-first strategy.”

The Telegraph has been moving towards subscriptions-first over the last two years. In May, it had nearly 500,000 subscriptions across print and digital, with an average revenue per subscription of £198.63 ($248.75). It also has 6.6 million registered users who have entered details like name and email address. Now, subscriptions are the company’s dominant revenue stream, overtaking advertising. Last week, the publisher cut its branded content team, Spark, in order to focus on bigger ticket ad partnerships that dovetail with its subscription strategy. 

There’s a wealth of data showing that targeted ads are more effective than non-targeted. In tests from October 2019 to March 2020, before coronavirus, The Telegraph used its own first-party data segments to target audiences on its site. Targeted versus non-targeted ads led to an increase of 43% on average in engagement rate, measured by time in view and time spent.  

Previously, publishers and brands have been rightly nervous about sharing their unique selling point — their first-party data. The Telegraph tested the match rate of two of its own data sets through Infosum and scored a 99.9% match rate. The 0.01% arose from the tech provider’s added statistical error.   

Over the last three weeks, the use case that’s generated the most interest from ad buyers has been the insights of existing advertiser customers who are also readers of The Telegraph. Since coronavirus upended consumer behavior — people’s life, hobbies, what they care about, who they are with, is all in flux — advertisers are groping for information on new and existing audiences. 

“More questions, more richness and more definition of who the customer is we’re going after allows us to get closer to an efficient way of spending and investing the funds,” said Isabelle Baas, managing director, digital, data and technology, Starcom Publicis, which completed its acquisition of Epsilon last July indicating its first-party data ambitions.

Aside from the pending cookie collapse, mingling data sets has not gained pace because many advertisers don’t have large enough first-party data pools, especially post-GDPR, which has put a crimp on information collection. The Telegraph is taking each campaign on a case-by-case basis in terms of data-set size: Some segments need to be broad to be effective. Others, like targeting only CEOs, are smaller and richer. For scale reasons, it’s offering Unity only to campaigns costing more than  £15,000, ($18,788).

“I’d be lying if I said every single client had well-structured databases,” said Baas. Indeed, brands that are not direct-to-consumer have a long road ahead of them to build up data point reserves across all channels, like connected TV.

Moreover, agencies are keen for an alternative solution to spending in the walled gardens of Google, Facebook and Amazon, where one-to-one audience matching at scale has always been available. Another benefit is Infosum’s tech lets agencies carry out custom audience planning, compared to working with managed services, which limit buyers by defining audiences by taxonomy.

“This will make audience planning grow up,” said  Dan Chaman, managing partner, products and solutions at Havas Media Group. “Agencies have to bring in good strategy and hypotheses that you can test, that’s the essence of what we used to do. If it’s just the programmatic team doing this, you won’t get to the point you should, it needs to involve the strategy and planning community.”

Like all publisher-specific tools or partnerships, it will live or die by its scale with publisher and advertiser partners. The sell-side has been quicker to adopt alternatives to third-party cookies: Channel 4 and Immediate Media are also working with Infosum and agency Infectious Media and live campaigns are imminent. There’s an opening for agencies to show their worth and collate other data sets, said Chaman. Otherwise, and as The Telegraph found, brands can easily, and are willing, to work with the publisher directly. 

Whether IDs will connect across properties and within walled gardens in a compliant way is the next hurdle in trying to re-architect a digital ecosystem without third-party cookies.

“I’m hoping there won’t be any scale issues, but that depends on how each publisher ultimately monetizes its audience and is happy to share information that is associated with that ID,” said Baas. “That allows a new stream of revenue coming into publishers’ business and gives power back to those players in the market.”