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WPP is embracing the forces of change – both internally and externally. Internally, CEO Sir Martin Sorrell knows WPP’s clients want simplification, which will lead to more consolidation. “We’ve seen it amongst clients and media,” he told AdExchanger. “We’re quite likely to see a similar set of circumstances in the agency business.” And externally, he’s… Continue reading »

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Makeup Breakup Amazon is the largest online cosmetics seller, but many top brands see the platform – “a scroll of endless products on white background” – as incompatible with luxury appeal, reports Bloomberg BusinessWeek. The EU’s top court ruled last month that luxury… Continue reading »

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Sky can’t make money from football fans watching this year’s World Cup on TV, but the broadcaster will try to make money from how they follow the tournament online.

World Cups have always been somewhat of a moot point for Sky. Football’s biggest event must be shown on free-to-air channels in the U.K. due to strict regulations, meaning the commercial broadcaster misses out on the lucrative TV budgets pumped into the matches. But since the 2014 World Cup, social video has become central to how younger fans watch sports, and Sky sees a chance to win a larger slice of budgets.

Previously, the broadcaster hadn’t done enough to push its social media credentials to brands and agencies in the absence of TV rights, said Jason Hughes, head of Sky Media’s creative solutions. Instead, display and bespoke native ads were Sky’s main ways of monetizing the tournament online.

For this year’s World Cup, Hughes and his team are pushing social media, particularly the organic reach Sky can generate from it, to advertisers. Just 1 percent of Sky Sports’ interactions on Facebook came from promoted posts between Jan. 1, 2017 and Jan. 1, 2018, while posts that linked outside of Facebook to Sky Sports sites were the most popular content type over the same period, ahead of video and photos, according to Socialbakers.

“We’ve known for some time how important our social media channels have been at driving traffic back to our sites,” Hughes said. “But from a strategic perspective, we’ve not done enough to show that expertise.”

Sky’s pitch to advertisers sorts World Cup campaigns into pregame, in-game or postgame slots, depending on advertisers’ objectives. For a pregame slot, an advertiser could produce a show like beer brand Carling’s “In Off The Bar” with the broadcaster’s presenters such as Max Rushden to riff on the buildup to matches. Another brand might want to do something away from the games and be matched with influencers, whom Sky has employed to produce short videos reporting on fan culture around the tournament.

Sky will use its influencers from its chat show “Soccer AM” and Football Daily, the YouTube channel Sky acquired when it bought social content producer Diagonal View last March. Diagonal View’s channels will add more than 15 million subscribers to Sky’s own following, which it said amounts to around 11 million monthly unique users.

Hughes said branded campaigns will run across all its own sites and social media channels, including Snapchat, YouTube and Twitter. Sky Media won’t prioritize one platform, he added, though he did talk up livestreaming on Facebook Live. Facebook Live, which launched in 2016, struggled to win over much of the sports media industry in 2017, but Sky continued to experiment with it. The broadcaster considers livestreaming on social networks a way to reach younger audiences, which may not subscribe but can be sold to advertisers.

While branded social video will be Sky Media’s main focus for the World Cup, the broadcaster will also offer to turn ads into sequentially targeted campaigns using its AdVance platform and addressable TV inventory via AdSmart. “When we talk to advertisers, it’s not so much the decline in viewing that they’re interested in when it comes to discussion about social video,” Hughes said. “It’s about being savvier about following that customer journey.”

Image courtesy of Sky Media

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Publishers may be pulling away from Facebook in favor of keeping readers on their own sites, but they’re warming to Facebook Groups.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg overhauled Facebook’s mission last year to focus on fostering community, touting Groups in the process. Naturally, publishers are following suit. The New York Times, BuzzFeed and the “Today” show have all launched special-interest groups on the platform in the past few months.

Growing audience is the basic goal, but publishers are finding benefits beyond that. The Washington Post is trying to grow subscriptions, and PostThis, a Facebook group with more than 4,000 members, is an efficient way to promote the accountability journalism that seems to get people to subscribe. Bloomberg News uses Money Talks, a 3,500-plus member group, to promote its personal finance articles and its reporters and highlight content that Bloomberg News wouldn’t normally be associated with, like a 30-day challenge to get people to improve their financial health, said Meena Thiruvengadam, head of audience strategy.

“It’s engagement, it’s community, it’s urging people to build conversation around your stories,” she said.

Publishers’ and Facebook’s goals have often been at odds, but the groups seem to align with publishers’ focus on communities and subject-specific content — sort of a vertical strategy around community. The groups also are a way for publishers to promote their own journalists, who lead or join the discussions.

“We’re actually marching in the same direction,” said Matt Karolian, a Nieman Fellow at Harvard who heads social media at Boston Globe Media, which has two Facebook groups to discuss race and the news in general, each with about 3,000 members. A third, smaller one suggests things to do around Boston.

To promote the groups, Facebook launched analytics tools last year to help administrators track usage. Admins can now see the number of active members they have and how often they post and comment, which can show them if a particular topic resonates or not. Before, admins had to manually count this data. They can also qualify people before they join a particular group, which can help weed out trolls.

“For us so far, it’s definitely been worth it,” said Terri Rupar, senior projects editor at the Post who administers PostThis. “It’s not been a huge time investment, but it’s a way to connect readers with stories they really want to read. It’s been a useful way to say, ‘You’re interested in this, and this is a way to find it.’ Engagement can be tricky; we want to keep it from being overly partisan. But for the most part, the group has embraced what we’re trying to do.”

Publishers aren’t always pushing their own content. In a different approach, the Times has a podcast club of 22,000-plus members that it uses to lead discussions about podcasts but doesn’t expressly promote the Times’ own podcasts.

“We’re paying attention to what people respond to, and it does help us think about our own programming,” said Samantha Henig, editorial director for audio at the Times. “It also helps get The New York Times out there as an important brand in the audio space.”

In yet another use case, some publishers including The Information and The Atlantic are using private Facebook groups as a benefit of subscription or paid membership programs.

For publishers, distributing content and conversation off-site is always a double-edged sword because they need to go where readers are, but they can’t track readers and upsell them to subscriptions and other products as well as they can when they’re on the publisher’s own site. Karolian said he hasn’t seen groups cannibalize The Boston Globe, where commenting tends to be article-specific.

“People are going to spend a set amount of time on Facebook every day, and I want them to spend as much time with us as possible,” he said. ”I don’t necessarily see it as competition with our website. Comments on our site are more important, but they’re more targeted to what people are reading at the moment.”

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