Less BS, More Facts, Some Opinions
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There is a literal divide within Bleacher Report between its predominantly white executives and its Black content creators. In B/R’s New York City offices, most members of the leadership team as well as its predominantly white sales, revenue and marketing teams sit on the third floor. Below on the second floor sits the company’s content teams, which is where the majority of its Black employees can be found.
“When you come into the second floor, you see a sea of faces representative of what you would expect to see. When you go up to the third floor, especially the sales side, it’s entirely white,” said a current B/R employee.
The disparity between the racial makeup of the two floors symbolizes the incongruity between the people who hold the most power and responsibility at B/R and the people responsible for creating the company’s content — and embodying its brand. B/R evolved from an SEO-driven sports blog into a lifestyle sports brand connected to Black culture, such as through its foray into streetwear through a 2016 deal with sportswear label Kith and efforts to grow its sneaker culture property B/R Kicks.
“The third floor is a complete 180 of what Bleacher Report’s editorial voice is,” said another current B/R employee. Said another B/R employee: “There’s a lack of diversity at the top, and they are the ones profiting the most directly off of Black culture.”
The internal conflicts reached a boiling point in the past month after B/R leadership struggled to sufficiently address the police killing of George Floyd, subsequent Black Lives Matter protests and calls for greater support of Black people. A contentious five-hour-long all-hands meeting with B/R leadership on June 18 was followed by the announcement five days later that B/R CEO Howard Mittman would be leaving the company.
B/R has joined a parade of media companies — BuzzFeed, Condé Nast, Digital Trends, Refinery29 and The Ringer — in dealing with a reckoning on their approaches to diversity and inclusion. Like other instances, the B/R revolt was mostly grass roots — and aimed in large part to the systemic racism seen to be pervasive in media.
“The real failure is not even at a Bleacher level. It’s a system. Howard is the mascot of everything wrong, but he’s not the whole thing. The system is bigger than Howard,” said a former B/R employee.
The following is based on conversations with 11 current and former Bleacher Report employees as well as internal company documents, including a diversity report that was recently shared with employees, organizational charts and internal emails. Some details have been previously reported by Awful Announcing, New York Daily News and The Washington Post. Mittman declined to comment. A spokesperson for B/R’s parent organization Turner Sports declined to comment on the record for this article.
“It’s become clear to me that significant change needs to occur now,” Turner Sports president Lenny Daniels wrote in a memo shared with Digiday and sent to B/R employees on June 23 to announce Mittman’s departure and a plan for the company’s People Advisory Committee to ensure diversity in B/R’s hiring and employee management.
On June 8 — three days before the first of multiple all-hands meetings at B/R following the May 25 murder of George Floyd — B/R and Turner Sports emailed B/R employees to share a diversity report that makes clear how significant the racial disparity is within B/R — 70% of B/R employees are white and 10% are Black. And there are no B/R employees at the vp level or above who are Black, according to the diversity report, a copy of which was obtained by Digiday. Meanwhile, 67% of B/R talent are Black employees; a source at Bleacher Report said that talent only refers to the half-dozen or so employees, such as Taylor Rooks, Master Tesfatsion and Adam Lefkoe, that appear in B/R’s shows and other content.
The figures were not surprising, employees said. The lack of diversity, particularly within certain departments, had become a running internal joke. When new employees join the company, the hiring manager typically sends a companywide email that includes information about the individual as well as a photo of them. Often these new hires are white people. “You scroll to the bottom and oh, there’s another blonde-haired white woman or another generic white guy with a beard wearing flannel,” said a current B/R employee.
The lack of diversity within B/R is even more pointed among its sales and revenue operations teams, based on current organizational charts for both teams that were viewed by Digiday. The org chart for B/R’s sales team lists 29 employees, including chief revenue officer Stefanie Rapp. Of those employees, none are Black. Similarly, the org chart for B/R’s revenue operations team lists 18 employees, including Rapp, and only one is a Black employee.
Mittman joined B/R as chief revenue and marketing officer in July 2017, having spent the prior 12 years at Condé Nast. He brought with him not only experience leading sales for an established media company but also executives with the same pedigree and complexion. Rapp and B/R chief marketing officer Ed Romaine are both former Condé executives who joined Mittman at B/R. Before Mittman’s departure, three of the five members of B/R’s C-suite hailed from Condé Nast.
“The Condé leadership [at B/R] was very, very visible. They used to send welcome emails, and you would read the same lines over and over again. It was like, OK, these were his friends,” said a former B/R employee.
The racial homogeneity of B/R’s sales team has been a point of frustration among many B/R employees, according to those current and former employees interviewed for this article. The topic has been broached by employees at multiple company all-hands meetings, including the five-hour-long forum on June 18. During that meeting, Mittman was asked why the sales team is predominantly white and responded that he didn’t know, according to employees who were in that forum. The source at B/R said that Mittman had said that the racial makeup of the sales team remains an ongoing challenge for B/R and the overall industry.
During the June 18 forum, Mittman and chief content officer Sam Toles were asked to answer yes or no whether they would consider it a failure if B/R does not hire at least one Black person to a leadership position by the end of this year. Neither said yes and instead said they will expand the search as much as possible and do everything they can to interview the best quality candidates. That answer may have been connected to B/R’s hiring freeze but nonetheless failed to satisfy the B/R employees interviewed for this article. “If you can’t give that [‘yes’] answer and are trying to run in circles around the question, there’s a problem,” said a current B/R employee.
B/R’s leadership team acknowledged the problem in a presentation given during an hourlong company meeting on June 11. The presentation included four slides, which were viewed by Digiday, that outline how B/R plans to improve representation and support the development of its employees of color. Those plans include adding diverse leaders, such as Turner executives Tara August and Tammie Williams, to B/R’s executive committee, establishing target representation goals by group and establishing a diversity board to meet with final candidates considered for positions at the manager level and higher. Among the goals listed in the presentation was: “Increase diversity on executive leadership team and hire more diverse leaders across all departments, the most urgent and critical work to start with Revenue.”
B/R’s Black employees have had to take on much of that work themselves. In 2019, two of B/R highest ranking Black employees teamed up to create “Are You Listening?,” a series that debuted that February for Black History Month and feature Black athletes discussing issues such as the first time they were called the N-word. The combination of sports and Black culture would appear to intersect perfectly with Bleacher Report’s purview. However, the two employees teamed up to pitch the project because they felt it would be harder for B/R executives to reject than if only one of them were to pitch it. The two employees also pooled their respective budgets together to fund the project. The project’s budget was roughly $40,000, whereas the budgets for B/R’s premium shows, such as Emmy-winning “Game of Zones,” typically are in the range of $150,000 to $200,000, though the latter shows can be costlier to produce because they involve teams of animators and graphic designers.
“If you’re a Black employee, there was always this feeling that you had to get multiple people behind you. Our awareness of what the culture was saying and who the culture cared about was something that was always challenged by leadership and sometimes our white colleagues,” said a former B/R employee.
In the second quarter of 2019, the Black employees’ efforts to tackle those challenges were formalized through the creation of a Black employee resource group called EmB/Race that received a budget from B/R for professional development and other initiatives to support B/R’s Black employees, such as covering expenses to send Black full-time employees to conferences hosted by organizations such as the National Association of Black Journalists.
However, even as an organized group that had received the backing of B/R, EmB/Race faced challenges in forging a path to leadership positions for Black employees.
During one meeting between Mittman and EmB/Race in 2019, Mittman said, “The cupboards are bare when it comes to Black leaders,” according to an employee who was in that meeting. “We were all just like, ‘You’re speaking to a room full of Black leadership,’” said this employee. “There are multiple Black leaders in this building contributing far beyond their pay grade and job description.”
During a 2019 meeting between Mittman and EmB/Race, members of EmB/Race voiced their requests for how B/R leadership could better support its Black employees. The requests included a diversity report and a fair evaluation of internal Black candidates for leadership positions. Some members of EmB/Race saw the action plan that B/R leadership presented during the June 11 all-hands as a remixing of those requests. They took it as yet another sign that, even though they are not among the leadership executives responsible for the company, they have to bear the responsibility of ensuring that changes are made.
After the killing of Floyd on May 25, B/R sought to release a statement on its Instagram account regarding the tragedy and subsequent outcry over racial injustice in the U.S. Mittman had B/R leadership ask two of the company’s highest-ranking Black employees to craft it. The employees declined, feeling it was above their pay grade, and Mittman ended up writing the statement, according to current and former B/R employees. The source at B/R said the statement was a collaboration among B/R leadership, EmB/Race leadership and B/R’s social moments team; this person also said that Mittman made edits to the statement with the support of EmB/Race’s leadership team. Either way, the statement that was posted to B/R’s Instagram account on June 1 did not go over well with those employees that spoke to Digiday.
“The statement we put out as a company that starts ‘Racism exists’ — no shit,” said a current B/R employee.
The dearth of Black employees among B/R’s leadership ranks has limited the ability of B/R’s Black employees to ascend into those ranks, according to the current and former B/R employees. These employees said they feel that promotions for Black employees are contingent on other Black employees championing them for those promotions and that a majority of the Black employees at B/R were hired by Black managers. The diversity report states that, as of February 2020, only 8% of managers and directors at B/R were Black.
Several current and former Black B/R employees said that they have remained in the same roles while white employees that joined the company after them, and that in some cases have less experience than the Black employees, received promotions.
“I’ve seen white employees enter the company after me and get promoted before me for having less responsibility, bringing in less revenue but getting rewarded more. What do I have to do?” said one current B/R employee.
“Being a Black professional, you have to work twice as hard, sometimes three times as hard, and still not feel like you’re getting there,” said another current B/R employee.
One former B/R employee who is Black said that they received a promotion after their first year at the company and acknowledged that they were an outlier. However, this employee attributed that promotion to having a Black manager who had recruited this employee to B/R and then put the employee up for the promotion. “I attribute my promotion to him 100%,” said the employee of the manager.
In August 2019, B/R laid off roughly 20 employees within its content organization. Those layoffs affected the employees that had produced the company’s shows, and the layoffs were connected to Sam Toles’ decision to outsource production after he joined B/R in March 2019.
Weeks before the layoffs, a Black employee had pitched an idea for project to Toles and was told to collaborate with an employee from a different department who had pitched a similar idea. Then, the Black employee was laid off, the other employee was moved to a different department and the project was killed.
The layoffs spared a Black female producer who is a temporary employee of B/R and as such does not receive benefits like paid time off or insurance. She recounted her own tale during the June 18 forum in which Toles was among the B/R executives answering employees’ questions and responding to their comments. Multiple current staffers relayed her story, described below, to Digiday.
While B/R’s full-time producers were laid off, the Black female producer was kept on given that she was not a full-time employee. That left her as the sole producer of “Untold Stories,” a video series hosted by Tesfatsion that features professional athletes recounting tales from their playing days. She produced the show by herself, and the show was successful enough that it was picked up for an additional four episodes to run through the 2019-20 NFL season’s playoffs, including a Super Bowl special to be filmed live in Miami, the site of this year’s Super Bowl.
This employee asked her white manager whether she needed to book a flight and hotel to travel and produce the Super Bowl special since she had produced every other episode. She was told no. A white male producer was assigned to produce the Super Bowl special in her stead; the source at B/R said this was a budgetary decision that was made because the white male producer was already slated to be on site.
Whatever the actual reason, the decision meant that the Black female producer was not given a credit on the Super Bowl special that could be added to her professional portfolio. Additionally, the white male producer was awarded “Asskicker of the Month,” a companywide recognition in which the recipient also received $1,500 from B/R. The source at B/R said the Black female producer would not have been eligible to receive the award because it is limited to full-time employees. The Black female producer still was not a full-time B/R employee as of the June 18 forum.
After the Black female producer told her story, Toles initially deflected, saying that many people inside B/R, including Rooks and Tesfatsion, had advocated for her to be hired as a full-time employee. Then Toles apologized for having not reached out to her personally to recognize her for her work. “A lot of people were disappointed in his response,” said a current B/R employee.
There were also people disappointed in Toles’ hiring and subsequent leadership. Toles did not respond to an email informing him of details concerning him reported in this article.
For more than a year, B/R had an open position for a chief content officer. Leadership told at least some B/R employees that they wanted to bring in Black candidates and candidates of color to interview for the job. Some Black employees were asked to recommend candidates and offered up Black executives that had experience within sports media, having worked with companies like LeBron James’ media company Uninterrupted. While Black candidates accounted for roughly 30% of the people considered for the position, ultimately none of the Black candidates were hired, according to a former B/R employee, and B/R tapped Toles for the position.
The hiring of Toles was meant to position B/R to break further into traditional Hollywood, to develop more original shows and movies to sell to TV networks, streaming services and digital video platforms. However, some B/R employees disagreed with the hire because Toles does not appear to have experience in sports media. Before joining B/R, he had served as svp of digital and new platforms at MGM where he struck a deal with Vudu, a streaming service owned by Walmart at the time, to produce an original show based on the 1980s film “Mr. Mom.” Prior to MGM, he had worked at various entertainment companies, including Warner Bros., New Line Cinema, Vimeo and FremantleMedia, with roles that spanned programming, production, marketing and business development.
The announcement that B/R had hired a white male executive from Hollywood and with no apparent experience in sports media or media that is connected to Black culture upset many of B/R’s Black employees, according to those employees who spoke to Digiday.
“I knew right away with Sam that he was not going to be that change that we needed in order to get better when it came to diversity,” said a former B/R employee who had worked within Toles’ organization, which is called “Voice” and includes its editorial, social content and studio teams.
Multiple current and former B/R employees who worked with Toles described him as aloof, pointing to Toles’ office as emblematic of this detachment. Toles is one of the few members of B/R’s leadership team that sits on the second floor. When he first joined B/R, he worked out of a transparent glass office near the floor’s entrance that had previously served as a conference room and could be seen into from the floor’s main hallway. At least 10 months into his tenure at B/R, Toles moved his office to a more secluded location on the second floor to be closer to B/R’s studio team, which he worked most closely with on the original programs that B/R develops to sell to TV networks, streaming services and digital video platforms.
“They ended up fogging the glass [to Toles’ new office] so you couldn’t see in it,” said a former B/R employee who had worked within Toles’ department. Other employees confirmed that the glass to Toles’ office was no longer fully transparent.
Toles’ decision to outsource production created a level of mistrust among some employees within his organization. When B/R switched to working remotely in March because of the coronavirus crisis, Toles created a program called “Pitchfest” for employees to pitch ideas for projects, such as new shows ideas, that B/R could develop. Employees’ whose ideas were picked for development would be rewarded with prizes such as $500. However, if someone’s idea were chosen, that person was not guaranteed to work on it.
The B/R source said that Toles’ meaning was that, if a person pitched a concept outside their particular realm of expertise, they may not be solely responsible for developing it. However, without that being made explicit in Toles’ note to employees, current employees who spoke with Digiday said the perceived risk of not being able to work on a project could mean that the program would not be an opportunity for employees to grow by pitching projects that extend beyond their existing roles.
On June 22, the day before Mittman’s departure was announced, Toles emailed B/R’s Voice organization; the title of the Voice team in B/R’s email distribution list is “Team Sam.” In his email, Toles wrote that he planned to schedule a two-hour meeting to take place during the work day for all members of the Voice team to ask questions and provide feedback to Toles and his deputies, which include svp and gm of B/R Studio Rachel Brill and svp of programming Bennett Spector.
Current employees said that Toles never set a date for that meeting, while the source at B/R said that the meeting was scheduled for noon EST on June 24. Either way, the meeting that took place on June 24 did not end up being the two-hour forum that Toles had described in his June 22 email. Not only was the calendar invite scheduled for just one hour, it only actually lasted for about 20 minutes, according to current B/R employees. “He said, ‘Enjoy the free 40 minutes I’m giving back to you,’” said one employee who participated in that meeting.
Around 7 p.m. ET the night before the June 11 all-hands meeting, B/R employees were asked, via an emailed questionnaire, to submit questions that Mittman would field during the next day’s meeting. B/R employees who received the questionnaire and spoke to Digiday said they took its late sending as an attempt to limit the number of questions submitted. Employees submitted more than 125 questions. Mittman answered less than a handful, according to employees that participated in the meeting; the source at B/R said Mittman answered roughly six questions — and the meeting ended after roughly an hour.
“Nothing hammers home the emotions of feeling voiceless like the number of questions left unanswered in that all-hands,” said a current B/R employee.
While a two-hour listening session was scheduled for 5 p.m. EST the following Monday for employees to provide further feedback to B/R leadership, employees were dissatisfied enough after the June 11 all-hands that a petition was started to ask for an open forum to be scheduled for employees to speak with leadership. The source at B/R said the June 18 meeting had already been scheduled, but employees dispute that.
The June 18 meeting brought to light multiple examples of B/R’s diversity issues, like the black female producer who was not allowed to produce the Super Bowl special. One of the examples that alarmed employees the most was a comment that Mittman had made in a sales meeting in the first quarter of 2018 during which he railed against the company’s dismal sales efforts that put B/R at risk of missing its $140 million revenue target for the year.
According to multiple current and former B/R employees who had either been in that meeting or been told of that meeting by attendees as well as emails sent by B/R employees in 2018 that quoted Mittman’s comment and were viewed by Digiday, Mittman told the sales employees, which included Black employees, “I fucking own all of you.” While the emails quote Mittman as saying “fucking,” some accounts disputed whether he swore.
“That shows the issue of Bleacher Report. That was said two years ago, and it wasn’t until shit hit the fan that it really looked bad,” said a current B/R employee.
“Stories like that with Howard bear witness to the systemic issues with his hiring practices and the culture he developed and the issues that branched out,” said another current B/R employee.
Addressing these issues is now the responsibility of Turner Sports. Following Mittman’s departure, Daniels has assumed oversight of the publication, and B/R execs, including Rapp, Romaine, Toles and chief operating officer Alex Vargas, now report directly to executives inside the parent organization.
Current B/R employees are cautiously optimistic that changes will be made after seeing Daniels sit through the entire five-hour forum. “On the WebEx link at the bottom, I made sure I could see his face during the entire duration. He didn’t zone out. He didn’t take any calls. He was very attentive, and I think he was really taking everything in,” said a current B/R employee.
In an email sent to all B/R employees on June 19, the day after the forum, Daniels wrote that changes are coming and that he would have more to share in the coming days. Four days later, Mittman’s departure was announced, and since that announcement, Daniels has reached out to some B/R employees to better understand the issues inside B/R.
However, Turner Sports has its own racial diversity issue to address. The diversity report shared with B/R employees in June also included statistics for the publication’s parent organization. As of February 2020 and excluding B/R, 26% of Turner Sports employees were Black, and Black employees represented 23% of executives at the vp level and above. But, of the vps and above on Turner Sports’ ad sales team, none were Black.
The post ‘Being Black, you have to work twice as hard’: Inside Bleacher Report’s staff revolt that toppled a CEO appeared first on Digiday.
As more advertisers pull money from Facebook over its handling of hate speech, attention has turned to how their dollars are funding similar divisive content across the rest of the internet, right down to how they segment audiences.
As June comes to a close, some of the world’s largest advertisers including Unilever, Verizon, Diageo, Honda and Coca-Cola have canceled ad buys with Facebook for at least until the end of July.
The spark, the killing of George Floyd last month and global protests it spurred, prompted a reckoning with racism for those businesses that made them quickly align themselves with protesters calling for Facebook to be defunded over its handling of hate speech. In doing so, advertisers have set a precedent for whom they buy ads from in the future.
“This is a good start but anti-racist work must be continued and sustained, underpinned by tangible actions throughout the business and industry,” said Leila Fataar, founder of marketing and communications company Platform 13. “Truly acknowledging, facing, and addressing the uncomfortable truths about yourself and your business is what’s required. This is not a situation that can be ‘fixed’ overnight, or in a month or even by the end of the year.”
What the advertisers exiting Facebook are grappling with is how to reconcile their pledges to defund racist rhetoric with their traditional business practices on the huge social platform. Granted, many of them haven’t had to think critically about racism or their own role in perpetuating it until now. But in their rush to say they’re anti-racist, advertisers haven’t fully thought through the disconnect between their messaging and the actualities. Ads bought by advertisers including Walt Disney, Amazon, Microsoft via ad tech vendors appeared on stories spreading hate speech and misinformation about the protests between June 22 and June 26, per the Global Disinformation Index. This happened at the same time many of those companies were publicly rebuking racism.
“You’re starting to see advertisers think more carefully about where they buy ads and the impact that has on society,” said Jerry Daykin, media director for GlaxoSmithKline in EMEA. “Programmatic technology puts focus on reaching the right consumers but less on the context in which that happens. That has left many marketers distant from the voices behind authentic journalism and quality content.”
Daykin, alongside Electronic Arts’ former global head of marketing intelligence Belinda Smith, is leading a task force for the World Federation of Advertisers to come up with a series of steps their peers can take to ensure they’re not just promoting messages of diversity and inclusivity but are also funding businesses that do the same. “It’s important to make it easier for advertisers to manage their media to systematically challenge the funding of hate speech and misinformation, and instead to invest in building a quality internet,” said Daykin
Some advertisers are already redistributing media dollars to minority community publishers. For example, GroupM is building private programmatic marketplaces of those media owners on the instruction of some advertisers in recent weeks. “There’s a concerted push on minority publications right now to see what we can do to support them as well as make sure they’re a permanent part of working with advertisers,” said GroupM’s global vp of brand safety John Montgomery.
Other advertisers are looking at Black-owned podcasts. AT&T is working with Pod Digital Media, a multicultural podcast network, to find sponsorship opportunities for its Cricket Wireless network. “AT&T wants to support Black voices by identifying a mix of podcasts that not only align to their audience but also have the scope for them to make long-term media commitments,” said Gary Coichy, CEO of Pod Digital Media.
Making those commitments won’t come without careful consideration of existing media strategies. In fact, some advertisers are already mulling how to move away from classic demographics to find more nuanced ways to segment people based on their behavior, personal interests and life stage. Their rationale is that there are some segmentation practices that incentivize segregation. An example of this is the catchall term of BAME, which lumps together Black, asian and minority ethnic groups, who all have their own rich heritage, experiences and interests.
“We’ve seen through our communities that this is an area that’s not improving as fast it could and the events over the last few weeks have underlined how important it is for marketers to act now,” said The North Face’s vp of marketing Steve Lesnard. He said the company would have more to say on how its own media strategies are changing in the coming weeks.
“Segmentation is always going to hurt Black people,” said Steve Stout, CEO of agency Translation. “Agencies will segment African Americans based on the fact that they represent 13% of the population, but that doesn’t capture the dominant cultural influence those people have. The value created by Black people is never going to equate to value earned through traditional segmentation.”
While these changes won’t compensate for advertisers’ systemic failures to foster racial equity in the past, it’s clear that they are no longer able to sit on the fence.
“When it comes to our welfare and sustainability messaging we’ve always talked about diversity and inclusivity, but I can honestly say that we’ve not been as strong about those issues as we have about animal welfare,” said Handsome Brook Farms CMO, Matthew Sherman. The death of Mr. Floyd and the subsequent civil rights protests have forced a reassessment of that stance, said Sherman.
For example, Sherman has asked the company’s media and PR agencies to find minority community publishers and black influencers for his ad dollars. “We want to be more supportive at the lower end of the funnel to those companies that may not have steady access to funding because the likes of ABC and Hulu are going to be fine without my dollars,” said Sherman.
“To show our support of the Black Lives Matter,” added Sherman. “We’re going to use our messaging and dollars to support social justice, amplify voices as well as make donations and identify new media organizations to work with.”
The post With the Facebook ad boycott, the push for inclusivity arrives in ad buying appeared first on Digiday.
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Subscriptions are gaining ground as a major source of revenue for Bloomberg.
“We’re seeing significant, significant growth and gains,” Bloomberg Media Group CEO Justin Smith said at the Digiday Publishing Summit.
And that growth in the first and second quarter has proven sticky, according to Smith. “Some of the churn rates are consistent with previous churn rates. This is not just a short-term thing,” he said.
His forecast is that subscriptions will make up a rising and significant part of Bloomberg’s revenue, especially as income from advertising diminishes.
Bloomberg started its subscription business in May 2018, and Smith credits its “first phase” growth to the long brand-building that preceded it.
“The introduction of our paywall benefited from 25-30 years of Bloomberg LP growing out one of the largest newsrooms in the world, creating amazing content,” Smith said.
His outlook for future revenue also lies in live events, and he’s confident that the events business “will come back very, very strongly” once it’s safe to convene in big groups again.
“There’s a big opportunity to capture more market share as we go through this lost year in events — to come back with a much more aggressive slate of event programming and also a whole new range of opportunities tied to virtual events, which will become much more of a complement to the live event experience.”
Here are highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarity.
“My personal view is that the economic situation — to which advertising spending is directly tied — is derivative of the public health situation. As long as the public health situation is not under control or the trend lines are negative, the economic metrics which affect advertising spending are going to follow suit. We’re not counting on a rapid bounce-back in Europe or in the U.S., though we’re a little more confident — both timing wise and in terms of how they’ve managed the public health situation — in our Asian and our European outlook than we are in our U.S. outlook.”
“The difference between advertising and live events it that advertising was already facing significant headwinds across the last couple of years, especially digital advertising. My view is that the pandemic, to a large extent, is going to accelerate those negative trends on digital advertising. The platforms, even though they’re facing relative difficulties this year, they are going to increase their strength and market share out of this pandemic. In an environment where CMOs have less dollars to spend, the scale and the performance metrics and efficiencies of the platforms will prove very attractive. Unfortunately, the publishing business has not yet come up with alternative advertising models that are competitive.”
“This is a time when you can lean into some of the revenue streams that are being promoted by some of these lifestyles changes and work from home dynamics. We are seeing major increases in subscription revenue. We’re even seeing signs that the big bumps in subscription revenue across the first and second quarter due to the increase news consumption actually are sticking around.”
“There’s a lot of conversation around pulling back from advertising — the idea that we should divest from advertising. We think the advertising business will continue to be a viable business, in terms of ‘how do you modernize and transform your ad business for post-platform work? If we’re honest, as an industry, I’m not sure any of us get great marks for the amount of innovation or new solutions that we’ve brought to the advertising marketplace. Particularly if you deliver on audience segments that are targeted and niche, with better execution around first-party data and integration of marketing services, I think there’s a viable ad business in a post-platform world to be built.”
“There’s a talent gap around advertising, data, technology, engineering that exists between publishers and platforms. It’s very much a David versus Goliath dynamic when you think about the numbers and types of people trying to solve these marketing challenge at platforms versus publishers. Of course, it’s a reinforcing deficiency: the more the businesses have been challenged by the platforms, the more market share has been taken away, the less resources exist to invest in this area. I’d largely say it’s a talent and resource question, and one which because of that, is very difficult to solve.”
Join us on Friday, July 10 at 12 p.m. ET on The New Normal, a weekly interactive show focused on how publishers are adapting their businesses. Team Epiphany founder Coltrane Curtis will talk with Digiday editor-in-chief Brian Morrissey about connecting with the influencers who truly shape culture. Register here.
The post ‘Significant growth’: Bloomberg Media Group CEO Justin Smith on the accelerated shift to subscriptions appeared first on Digiday.
By Neal Sinno, general manager Americas at GeoEdge
For marketers, 2020 started out with so much promise — but this changed rapidly as the industry faced a global epidemic head-on. Not only did our own daily routines come to a screeching halt, for many of us our professional lives did as well. Almost as quickly as lockdowns began, we saw drastic changes in the realm of digital media and advertising.
Publishers in 2020: From boom to bust
As consumers sheltered in place, online usage soared across the globe. This surge in traffic would have been a blessing at any other time, but advertisers that would normally fill this additional demand — sports, entertainment and airlines — weren’t there, as they faced their own challenges. The perfect storm was created — increased costs for publishers and platform providers, less revenue and a rush of malicious actors trying to capitalize on the weakened ecosystem. Unfortunately, as publishers’ CPMs fell, the doors opened wide for fraudulent activity, with 67 percent of publishers reporting that they encountered deceptive ads related to COVID-19 to a significant or great extent.
Streaming experienced similar issues, with advertisers unable to meet a surge in demand. On-demand video increased 79 percent in Q1 alone, but advertisers were unable to take advantage of the opportunity. Advertisers’ economic uncertainty, content concerns and ad quality issues led to 46 percent of ad opportunities being left unfilled.
There’s huge strain on the industry, with 81 percent of brands planning to reduce spend through 2020. Although most — if not all — of us were not fully prepared for the doom and gloom that set in, some of our “normal” business practices, when applied to these abnormal times, may help identify new opportunities that weren’t visible a few months ago.
We have spoken to our partners and other businesses across several different digital industries and discovered four commonly held approaches to adapting to a changing marketing ecosystem:
1. Know the audience, and track changes
Aside from the increase in traffic to publishers’ websites, it will be important to take note of any other changes with their audiences. Have visitor demographics altered? Are they younger or older? Are visitors staying longer, using different devices or visiting at different times of the day? Changes to routines also have an impact on who is consuming media, where and when they choose to do it. As new routines develop, publishers and advertisers need to identify and to adapt to it.
2. Focus on retention
While publishers are experiencing an increase in traffic or they are identifying incoming audiences that don’t normally visit their sites, it’s a great time to think about techniques to keep them coming back and consuming more content. Focusing on techniques that maximize retention now will save publishers time and money in the future.
3. Optimize demand
If all else fails, publishers can optimize demand. Now is the time to better understand who a given set of advertisers are and how they are performing with a publisher’s audience. While CPMs are important, focusing on the overall yield will help publishers maximize a better end result. This may also be the time to A/B test multiple partners or experiment with a new technology. Either step has the potential of helping businesses achieve their long-term objectives.
Finally, if a publisher really knows their audience, they’ll know what their tolerance is for different types of ad creatives. If they’re turned off by medical ads, for example, using keyword blocking to eliminate those completely will help create a better overall experience.
4. Talk to and learn from partners
As an industry, we’re all in this together; it’s important to learn and help each other. While we may be competitors, it’s still a fragile ecosystem that requires a certain amount of harmony to keep everything moving. Competition is healthy, but cooperation can stimulate a stronger market for all of us. Publishers benefit when they talk to their partners, industry-wide, learning about what they’re trying, and sharing best practices when they can help boost outcomes for all. A friendly catch-up among colleagues from the industry, seeking and offering a bit of guidance on both successes and failures, is a strategy that helps us all in the end.
There’s no secret sauce that will help the industry navigate through these difficult times, but taking a few thoughtful and proactive steps will provide enough guidance to highlight your business’s path in the uncertainty of the months to come.
The post Four ways to adapt to the changing publisher ecosystem in 2020 appeared first on Digiday.