Data-Labor-Technology

The model will rely on the first-party data that Pinterest can provide about its users as well as insights into trending topics and brands to determine what content might perform well on the platform. The publisher is then responsible for creating content — particularly video content.

This first campaign with Fritos includes several recipe videos including one for a Frito taco casserole and sweet and salty Fritos cookies. They feature the overhead shot, “hand-in-pan” style videos that Tastemade uses frequently, with Tastemade’s and Fritos’ logos in the bottom corner. The pins are published to Fritos’ page on Pinterest but are promoted throughout the platform.

Neither Tastemade or Pinterest would disclose what the revenue split is, but both companies said the commission rates were competitive with industry norms, with the publisher earning less than the platform.

Tastemade currently reaches 87 million viewers per month on the platform, according to Meredith Guerriero, U.S. head of partnerships at Pinterest. And the publisher has received over two billion views on video pins since it first started posting videos two years ago, said Jeff Imberman, Tastemade’s head of sales and brand partnerships.

The publisher has also run campaigns on the platform in the past that allowed it to keep all of the earned revenue. But Imberman said that the appeal of entering into a revenue-share model was that Pinterest “knows more about its users than we could ever hope to know.” 

“Purpose built platforms like Pinterest have a treasure trove of knowledge about their users about how they react on that platform,” said Imberman. “And how someone acts on Pinterest is different than how they act on Twitter or Facebook or other platforms.” 

Imberman said that Tastemade and Pinterest both had relationships Fritos as an advertiser. But Pinterest noted that the brand had an increase in searches on the platform, which made it seem like the right fit for this experiment, in particular because it was already organically trending.

Guerriero said that from May 2019 to May 2020, searches on Pinterest for “taco bake with Fritos” had increased by nearly 400% year-over-year, while “Frito taco casserole” increase by 96% and “comfort food recipes” had increased by 165%. Beyond that, recipe searches in general saw a significant increase during the pandemic as people began cooking at home more.

Pinterest can also “drive performance by pulling levers” that Tastemade on its own does not have access to, he said. However, Tastemade can provide creative capabilities that Pinterest “as an organization is not skilled in,” such as video production, Imberman said.

So far, the videos are outpacing the expected benchmarks, according to Guerriero. In the week since the pins were first posted they have reached over 6.7 million unique users and have received over 37,000 saves to people’s accounts—two times the platform’s average save rate on pins. 

There is no definitive timeline for rolling out this ad model to other publishing partners, said Guerriero, who added though that there are plans to extend it beyond the food category into the lifestyle category. 

According to eMarketer, Pinterest surpassed Snapchat as the third most popular social media platform in the U.S. for 2019, with an estimated total of about 86 million users, compared to Snapchat’s expected 83.1 million. 

Pinterest earned over $1 billion last year in total revenue and is expecting to hit $1.5 billion this year, according to MarketWatch. 

And with the Facebook boycott gaining momentum, Benjamin Arnold, a managing director at social media agency We Are Social said brands are looking to shift their media budgets to other platforms, though Twitter, YouTube and others are also coming under pressure to change how they benefit from hate speech as well. 

“Pinterest looks set to be a major beneficiary [of the Facebook boycott] and new advertising features, such as the co-sell model, will only further increase its attractiveness to marketers,” Arnold said. 

The latest move to pause influencer marketing comes as marketers are not only reconsidering where their ads appear and the kind of content they appear next to, but as they work to figure out how they can better support Black creators and Black-owned businesses following the Black Lives Matter protests. Per agency executives, some marketers are asking agencies to prioritize Black influencers to follow up on their statements of support for the BLM movement in June. 

“Many influencer deals are being paused and/or adjusted,” said Brendan Gahan, partner and chief social officer at Mekanism. “No one wants to be insensitive right now. We’re seeing creators and brands re-evaluating each other. They’re asking each other questions [like], Where do you stand with BLM? What are you doing to support it? Are you participating in the boycott, why or why not?” 

As marketers do so, influencers are worried about taking another financial hit. In recent months, marketers pressed pause on influencer campaigns when the coronavirus hit the U.S. as well as when Black Lives Matter protests began. 

“Bloggers are really concerned that campaigns are going to be hard to get this month,” said Brandi Riley, influencer, blogger behind Mama Knows It All. Some influencers have already had campaigns paused, according to Riley, who also runs a Facebook group of over 6,000 influencers, Courage to Earn. 

“I’ve encouraged influencers to reach out to brand contacts, agencies, and networks to let them know other options for getting their content seen,” said Riley, adding that influencers can use newsletters, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn and even SEO for blog content to continue to promote campaigns during the Facebook and Instagram boycott. “The only thing brands need to remember about that is that the timeline for ROI might need to be pushed a little. But there are options.” 

While influencers post content on a number of platforms as well as on their own personal blogs, Facebook-owned Instagram is still the one of the most popular platforms for branded influencer posts. A December 2019 report by Klear found that influencer posts were up 48% on the platform in 2019 with a little over three million #ad posts compared to just over two million in 2018. Typically, when working with brands, influencers will post content organically to their Instagram Stories or to their Instagram feed. From there, marketers will use paid advertising dollars to give that content a boost so that it is seen by a bigger audience (often a specific target demographic) than the influencers’ followers. 

The majority of the ad dollars for an influencer campaign will go to an influencer, however, a percentage of that ad spend will likely go to Facebook or Instagram’s paid ad support of that content. For influencer marketing agency Sway Group’s clients, roughly 80-90% of the campaign spend goes to influencers while 10-20% of that goes to paid ad support of the content, according to CEO Danielle Wiley. 

“The algorithm has shifted so much that we rely on that boosting to meet those metrics and KPIs for influencer campaigns,” said Wiley, adding that while several clients have reached out to ask about pausing, just one food brand has officially done so so far. “When that boosting gets paused, there’s an impact on the metrics and adding more influencers. or pushing to other channels, won’t make up for that reach.” 

That said, some influencers and marketers are moving or retooling influencer marketing content that was earmarked for Facebook or Instagram to other platforms like TikTok. Doing so allows them to continue to produce content and still participate in the Facebook advertiser boycott, according to agency execs. 

Of the influencer marketing content that’s still planned for the month of July, the focus is on working with Black influencers, according to Ryan Detert, CEO of influencer marketing platform Influential. “We are finding ways to reallocate the budget and, per the request of our clients, we’re moving to Black creators,” said Detert. 

“Marketers are using this month to continue to follow up on on BLM statements of support,” said Kristin Maverick, vp of  social and influencer marketing at 360i. “They are using this month to spotlight Black creators as well as [evaluate their influencer line up]. It’s about giving space to the movement in July.”

At the beginning of 2020, after seeing no data suggesting positive lift from resellers, the publisher trimmed any supply-side platform partners that delivered less than 5% revenue. Of the nine SSPs remaining, down from 15, it cut loose all ad resellers from those partners so any deals are done direct with those exchanges. 

“We were told as publishers that resellers were so important,” said Emry Downinghall, vp of advertising at Chegg Inc., “but no [publisher] has communicated to me they removed resellers and lost X% lift.”

Programmatic ad revenue is a “small but meaningful” slice for the publisher, which wouldn’t say exactly how much. While the majority of its revenue comes from subscription services, most of its ads are sold on the open exchange and non-guaranteed. Downinghall said it delivers between 20 and 25 billion impressions a year. In April, Chegg, based in the U.S., had 9 million monthly unique users, according to Comscore.

Ad reseller activity is one theory accounting for the lost 15% of revenue within the programmatic supply chain, according to the transparency report by the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers, the Association of Online Publishers, carried out by PricewaterhouseCoopers and released early May. Additionally, a cross-industry task-force has been set up to improve transparency but the AOP and others have recommended publishers scrutinize contracts and reduce intermediaries to potentially reduce the 15% gap. Examples of publishers cracking down and untangling the mess will likely continue to grow. 

But given the murky nature of the programmatic ecosystem, it will difficult to pin down every single reseller in a given impression sold and it’s also hard to track the reseller fees throughout the chain.

“Publishers are asking more questions of SSPs about ‘why does this reseller exist,’” said Ari Lewine, co-founder of exchange Triplelift. “It’s the indirect paths that are being questioned.”

Chegg gradually removed resellers from its ads.txt file, while keeping a close eye on the data, because there’s no clear way of A/B testing SSPs with and without resellers.

“I never heard a fully compelling reason why resellers were there,” said Downinghall. “In some instances, I was told they were required to be in the exchange in order to run some [private marketplaces], I was never able to prove that out. It’s up to publishers to decide what they will and won’t run.”

Other publishers, like Bloomberg Media, are taking a closer look under the hood through demand-side optimization, analyzing how impressions are being bought rather than sold. Similar to supply-path optimization, DPO-minded publishers collect different data sets—like win rates, response time, page load and ad quality— to work out exactly which partners make sense for it to work with.

Bloomberg Media has been on this route since the end of 2019 and pegged this summer as when it should have worked out which SPO and DPO options make the most sense. 

“Unquestionably it will improve yield, more revenue will be back in the hands of the publisher, clients will have full transparency of where the money is being spent,” said Simon Baker, Bloomberg’s head of programmatic Europe, the Middle East and Africa. “Bloomberg is a data and tech company with transparency at its core, that’s why DPO makes so much sense. Ads.txt has gone a long way, but not far enough.”

Earlier tight economic market conditions forced publishers to incentivize short-term gain over longer-term health. As demand became more scarce and the ad premium fell when marketers pulled ads out of the open exchange, the temptation would be to plug in more demand sources in order to increase bid density. That could drive short-term revenue but makes for a more complicated picture of buyer is bidding on what inventory. Also, for publishers, managing multiple relationships takes up time.

For Chegg, having direct relationships with SSPs and confidence in their solvency was imperative to protecting its ad business for the long term.

“I couldn’t say resellers are bad, but I can say they haven’t helped drive up lift in 2020,” said Downinghall. “In 2018 or 2019 that might be different. Now with further emphasis on SPO, this is at least putting you in the best position to succeed, especially when removing resellers did not hurt performance.”

Original sins never go away. These will not either. But there is now an opportunity, thanks to both the Facebook ad boycott and moves to rein in ad tracking, for quality publishers to steer advertisers back to caring where their ads run. Last week, I expressed skepticism that a group of brands would suddenly become social justice champions and stomach a fight against Facebook that would seriously impact their bottom lines. I still have my doubts, although the number of advertisers joining the effort has surprised me. Unhappiness with the status quo has built for some time. Facebook is currently using its typical playbook of “listening” without budging much. Zuckerberg is reported by The Information to have told employees yesterday that advertisers would return “soon enough.”

That insouciance likely come from a stark reality: the leverage isn’t on the advertisers’ side in a battle with Facebook. They’re addicted to the scale, performance and ease of buying Facebook provides. The idea of recreating that through individual publishers is far fetched. What could be possible, however, is a rebalancing. Publishers from the start of the Internet have advocated for greater weight being paid to quality and trust — admittedly two squishy concepts. (I remember when YouTube CEO Susan Wojicki was asked about “premium content,” and she talked instead about “premium audiences.”)

In the early days, publishers trotted out the lure of a “clean, well-lit place” rather than the anything-goes world of ad networks. Then the watchword became “brand safety,” which ended up being the digital media equivalent of “fake news,” turned into a tool to be used for all kinds of purposes. Witness how “brand safety” was used to block ads on news coverage of Black Lives Matter. One publisher told me their coverage of BLM and protests against systemic racism generated 40% less revenue than pages on other topics.

My former colleague Lucia Moses had an homage to our long-running Confessions series with an anonymous interview with a top marketer who said “half the CMOs out there are sincere.” My snarky retort was to parrot the probably apocryphal John Wannamaker quote: The trouble is you don’t know which half. When the summer ends and the fourth quarter looms, that is when we’ll see who is posturing or playing to the crowds, including upset employees, and who is truly committed to forcing Facebook to change.

What’s unclear, to me at least, is what exactly these marketers want. The idea that Facebook is suddenly a platform with all manner of ugliness is farcical. Advertisers are famous for their “gambling in Casablanca?” reactions to an obvious reality: There are dingy parts of the Internet, and their emphasis on “efficiency” and blasting ads to hundreds of thousands of places means they will sometimes end up surrounded by squalor. Spare us the shock. Back in 2017, advertisers loudly harrumphed over YouTube carrying jihadi and other harmful videos. Who in their right mind wouldn’t expect that?

“This narrative isn’t really anti-Facebook, it’s anti-aggregation, anti-platform,” said Jarrod Dicker, vp of commercial at The Washington Post. “The publisher landscape is built on ethics and trust.”

The opening here is advertisers moving beyond myopic views of brand safety and considering the overall trust level of the platform or publisher. Facebook can assure advertisers it will keep their ads away from hate content, but advertisers are now asking whether being on a platform that has so much hate messages disseminated is really one to do business with since it will carry a broader risk to their brands. In the end, if this protest is to result in lasting change, it needs to align with business goals of brands. 

Advertising budgets are “not going to rebalance because content adjacency is morally good, but because I don’t think Facebook really sells as much stuff as people think it does,” said the media buying exec. 

Facebook is going to remain a behemoth alongside Google and Amazon. For meaningful budgets to shift, publishers must narrow the gap on performance. “You have to at least get close,” said a digital media CRO. “What I’m hoping for is a sustained reallocation of money,” the CRO added. “Advertisers have 40-50% on Facebook. You stop, then maybe it goes back to 25-35%. We can we siphon off some of it.”