Data-Labor-Technology

After running Porter and The Edit, Net-a-Porter’s print and digital titles, separately since 2013, global content director Lucy Yeomans combined the department into a unified front under the Porter name.

“Finally. We had been wanting to do it for a long time,” said Yeomans, who also serves as Porter’s editor-in-chief, a title she previously held at Harper’s Bazaar UK. “Porter is a brand name; it’s rooted in Net-a-Porter, whereas ‘The Edit’ as a title had gotten quite ubiquitous. Now, all of our content happens under one cross-channel platform. It’s more consistent.”

Content is a robust piece of both Net-a-Porter’s marketing and merchandising strategies: The company employs 70 people on its editorial team, and it publishes six issues of Porter’s print edition per year, which have featured celebrity cover stars like Viola Davis, Penelope Cruz and Bella Hadid. Previously, the print team at Porter and the digital content team at The Edit operated separately; while Yeomans oversaw both, there were silos separating each side of the content strategy. The Edit focused on trend-driven content, while Porter covered lifestyle, women’s issues, career and business content alongside its fashion editorial.

But as Net-a-Porter’s traffic shifted to more than 50 percent from mobile, Yeomans said, the need for a cohesive digital content platform became clear. Now, the combined content team works on Porter’s print magazine, as well as The Porter Edit, the digital content site on Net-a-Porter that is refreshed on a daily basis. Previously, The Edit was updated once a week. The editorial site is also translated for a global audience in French, German and Mandarin.

The Porter Edit on Net-a-Porter

As the lines between editorial and advertising blur at other revenue-starved fashion publications, Net-a-Porter’s content-and-commerce play is working off of the advantage that it’s not dealing with dueling agendas. And in online luxury, as competition among multi-brand retailers stiffens, a strong editorial point of view is emerging as a key differentiator and loyalty driver, an important piece in driving down the steep cost of customer acquisition.

Since Porter sits in Net-a-Porter’s broader ecosystem, editorial’s positioning is the glue bonding marketing and merchandising together into a more consistent machine.

“Today, the customer expects content over straightforward advertising,” said Robert Burke, the CEO of retail and fashion consultancy Robert Burke Associates. “What these retailers can offer, that no one brand can, is industry context. That’s why content sounds fluffy, but is so critical.”

In Yeomans’ eyes, fashion magazines are always trying to sell us something, anyway, and we read them for inspiration. Net-a-Porter’s publications just create a shortcut to getting to the purchase.

“As long as we have our customer in mind throughout everything we do, there’s no reason content and commerce can’t work together,” said Yeomans. “We have a single, editorial point of view that we communicate with the merchandising team and that the marketing team promotes. It all makes sense in the end, if you’re taking the approach of, ‘What would our customer actually wear? What is she interested in?’ That’s our editorial integrity.”

To get on the same page, the editorial team will preview new collections at the same time the merchandising team does, and then they’ll discuss what brands, products and trends they feel strongly about and believe will perform well on the site. That conversation continues as both departments discover new brands: If an editor comes across a new accessories brand not carried by Net-a-Porter, it will tip off the merchandising team, and the merchandising team will flag undiscovered designers for potential coverage.

The editorial team also looks to customer data when deciding what customers want to hear about, from Net-a-Porter’s trend performance reports, personal stylists and conversations with “EIPs,” or extremely-important people, Net-a-Porter’s highest-spending customers that drive about 50 percent of the company’s sales.

“When I was the editor at Harper’s Bazaar, I would have no idea what our readers were responding to,” said Yeomans. “Now I can watch what’s flying off the shelves and I know exactly what she’s buying.”

With editorial now backing one digital-print platform, there’s more opportunity for involved initiatives that extend beyond the publications. Yeomans said an editorial committee is working on a “content plus commerce plus cause” event this summer that, in partnership with a philanthropic organization, will include a content series, an event and a limited-edition capsule collection sold through Net-a-Porter.

“We can now take a cross-platform approach that we really couldn’t before,” said Yeomans.

The post How Net-a-Porter’s 70-person content team operates online and in print appeared first on Digiday.

Content recommendation services are trying to break out of their widget-shaped boxes.

In the past month, Taboola announced a version of its content recommendation app will come installed on select lines of ZTE phones; Revcontent launched Engage.im, an invite-only infinite scroll of publisher content it said has been in development for three years; and Outbrain launched Sphere, an invite-only publisher content recommendation network. Outbrain also ran a price promotion for premium publishers during the first quarter of 2018 to entice them to buy more traffic through its service.

All three are trying to make themselves more useful to publishers because the value they’ve long provided — a steady stream of revenue, and in some cases, cost-effective traffic — has been eroded by improvements in programmatic advertising and more focus among publishers on keeping readers on one’s own sites. For these new products to work, each must overcome publisher skepticism.

While publishing sources contacted for this story see promise in the new products, there is considerable skepticism to overcome: “It’s certainly a more promising direction, though I’m dubious the revenue will be as strong as what you’ve seen in the past with the minimum guarantees,” said one publishing executive, “and whether or not the benefit of these new services outweighs the benefit of just doing recirculation within your own properties.”

These new products all look and function differently: Revcontent’s Engage.im ditches the traditional widget look in favor of an infinite scroll filled with partner publisher content, which can be personalized and partners can monetize however they want; Outbrain’s Sphere looks similar to other widgets, but displays publishers’ brand names very prominently, a move designed to distinguish it from Facebook.

“This is about giving publishers every advantage,” said Matt Crenshaw, Outbrain’s North American gm. “We’re seeing premium publishers become a much bigger portion of our network over time.”

But they have a common goal: Entice the more premium publishers that Outbrain and Taboola once tempted with large checks. For years, the two companies built their market share through publisher guarantees, which sometimes ran into the seven figures.

Those payouts were great for growing the widgets’ possible audience and well-received by publishers, who were happy to add dependable revenue streams. But that also meant publishers had to deal with links that were sometimes seen as too risqué, outré or déclassé.

The recommendation companies have pledged to clean up the content that appears in their widgets. But cleaning the widgets up won’t solve a bigger, structural problem for publishers: Their purpose is to drive traffic off publishers’ sites, an unappealing outcome in an era where publishers want to keep readers on their sites as long as possible.

“We’re not interested in driving traffic to other sites or bringing in other sites’ traffic,” said a second audience development executive, who doesn’t use the widgets at his job. “Also, who clicks on the ads? Not high-quality people that would stick around on our site.”

The recommendation services think these new products solve the quality and engagement problem. For example, Revcontent said audiences delivered through Engage.im spend over 500 percent longer on publishers’ sites, on average, than visitors from social platforms.

That point of comparison — widgets versus social — is a key element in how these services are marketed. Sphere specifically points to “audience development that diversifies away from Facebook” as a key reason to participate in it.

That value proposition could hold some appeal, particularly for publishers that have gotten used to buying audiences on platforms like Facebook.

“If they can drive clicks at a comparable price [to Facebook] or lower, I think you’re going to see people start to shift spend over to their platforms,” said a digital executive at a legacy publisher that works with Outbrain, but does not spend any money buying traffic through it.

Some of these companies have made attempts in the past to make themselves more useful to publishers. Two years ago, Outbrain started rolling out Messenger bots for publishers including CNN as part of an attempt to help them build audiences among Messenger users. The company folded that business last year, after publisher interest faded.

“Publishers have short attention spans for things that have no revenue,” Crenshaw said.

The post Content recommendation networks look for a second act appeared first on Digiday.

Alcohol advertisers Bacardi and Pernod Ricard’s Beefeater are abandoning Twitter.

More than 4 in 10 (42 percent) of the top 100 major spirits and liqueur accounts on Twitter have not posted at all within the past month, according to a study from drinks specialist marketing agency YesMore Agency. Almost a third (32 percent) of the advertisers surveyed have not posted within the past three months, while a fifth (21 percent) have not posted in a year or more, according to the report.

A quick check bears this out anecdotally. The global account for Beefeater gin last posted to Twitter on March 20, 2017, while accounts for Bacardi, Grey Goose, Smirnoff Europe and Baileys have each posted three or less times to the site since the start of 2018.

While some brands have jumped to other platforms or focused their online efforts away from social media, the report found many have “simply gone” without any notice or suggestion to followers that they might like to find the brand elsewhere, said Tom Harvey, new client director at YesMore Agency. Advertisers are “simply getting overwhelmed with places which they are supposed to post content,” he said, and the “days of getting the intern to do it are long gone.”

Twitter is undoubtedly the most effective customer service platform, but alcohol brands have been historically wary of using it as a core marketing channel. A key reason is age targeting. Twitter is seen to be a less innovative marketplace when targeting a younger demographic on social. As media budgets increase, other platforms, particularly Instagram and Facebook, offer much greater control over who can see content, said Mike Harris, senior social strategist at AnalogFolk, which previously worked with Pernod Ricard.

Alcohol advertisers like Diageo are seemingly reserving Twitter budgets for larger brands like Johnnie Walker and Captain Morgan, which still frequently update some but not all the profiles for their markets, while winding down profiles for lesser-known brands.

The Diageo-owned Haig Club, for example, last posted to Twitter on March 29, but has continued to post on Instagram and Facebook — even producing original content with co-founder David Beckham for the channels. A year after Haig Club’s last post to Twitter, its account had grown by 379 followers to around 7,100 followers by March 31, according to Socialbakers. In that same period, Haig Club posted eight times, per Socialbakers, and the most engaged spot generated 64 likes, replies, retweets and comments.

By comparison, the majority of the Twitter accounts for the top 15 most popular spirits in the U.S., according to market research firm IRI, are frequently updated. Five of those spirits — Smirnoff, Crown Royal whisky, Svedka vodka, Skyy Vodka and Grey Goose — have not updated their U.S. profiles since February or earlier.

Another challenge for alcohol brands like Smirnoff is that they have layers of sign-off for social posts, rendering their Twitter content out of date before it’s even posted. On the flip side, content on Instagram doesn’t have to be as responsive, and therefore, more time can be spent producing and tailoring content for different markets.

While Twitter is seen more as a customer service channel than an outright media buy to many alcohol advertisers, some are starting to reconsider the social network’s role. “From an advertising perspective, we see [alcohol brands] placing more importance on paid media,” said Catherine Chappell, paid social account director at iProspect. “This will mean their organic efforts will change.”

The post Alcohol advertisers are fleeing the Twitter nest appeared first on Digiday.

Median pay at Amazon reveals the predominantly blue-collar nature of its workforce, which sets it apart from tech peers Facebook, Apple and Google-parent Alphabet Inc.

Google’s data-gathering empire is bigger and more pervasive than Facebook’s—and while it hasn’t been plagued by scandal, it can’t evade scrutiny forever.

The barring of Chinese smartphone maker ZTE by the U.S. government from working with American companies is an unforeseen challenge for Google in a bid to get its mobile software in the hands of wider swaths of users.

Chinese President Xi Jinping outlined an updated vision for China’s future as an internet and technology power, pledging more state support for sectors caught in the cross-hairs of a trade fight with the U.S.