Data-Labor-Technology

Don’t call it a pivot. USA Today Network is bulking up its video capabilities with plans to add 20 new editors and producers to join its current 40-person team that  handles video and photo production for USA Today and its network of 109 news and media properties. USA Today has also built new studio space in parent company Gannett’s midtown Manhattan headquarters as part of the video investment.

“In the evolution of our video business here, it used to be that if you were a great photographer and had been at the company for 20 years, we were leveling you up to shoot video,” said Russ Torres, vp of digital video content and strategy for USA Today Network. “But just because you’re a great photographer, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’d make a great videographer — it’s a different discipline, so that’s who we are in the process of hiring.”

USA Today Network’s video business is already profitable, Torres said, but the company has reorganized in an effort to grow distribution and revenue. Prior to Torres’ arrival from Yahoo, USA Today Network did not have a sole “head of video” that could oversee content and strategy across its network. It created many silos where multiple different video teams, including the core video production unit within USA Today and other teams within individual network properties, would produce content on their own. Often, that meant duplication.

“This is not a vanity investment,” said Torres. “Video’s a viable part of our business, and there are expectations on both the content side and the business side for the business to grow.”

Going forward, Torres and the content team will split its time between daily videos, including viral clips, breaking-news items and features tied to written features, and creating new editorial video properties, including shows for USA Today Network sites and social platforms such as Facebook Watch and YouTube.

On the latter, Torres points to recent success with USA Today’s Humankind Stories and Animalkind Stories on Facebook, which focus on feel-good local stories sourced from the network. Animalkind Stories got more than 400 million views on Facebook in January, the company said. The page, which lives on Facebook Watch, also received 109 million interactions last month, which suggests a shareability that will survive any impact of Facebook’s news-feed changes, Torres said.

Beyond creating new editorial video properties, Torres’ team will also develop and produce shows for key USA Today verticals, including sports, money, life, tech and travel. The team is targeting five to seven digital series this year that could live on USA Today sites and distribution platforms such as Facebook Watch, YouTube and MSN.

The USA Today Network averaged more than 16.7 million unique video viewers per month in 2017, according to comScore.

And while the 20 new hires for Torres’ team will focus on making video, USA Today Network is also committing to additional hires on the business side to grow the existing business as well as create new revenue streams. This includes an executive to oversee platform distribution deals.

USA Today Network is also exploring how it can turn some of the bigger stories from its network into other types of media, including films and TV shows, said Maribel Wadsworth, president of USA Today Network and associate publisher of USA Today. The Indianapolis Star, for instance, broke the story on the sexual assault allegations against former USA Gymnastics national team doctor Larry Nassar and continues to offer extensive coverage on the story. Agencies have approached The USA Today Network to turn its reporting on the Nassar case as well as other stories into long-form video projects, the company said.

“Because we produce premium original reporting, we regularly attract attention from agencies, independent producers and publishers,” said Wadsworth. “Today, we have a few different development deals in the pipeline and are actively engaged in a conversation about a broader relationship to turn the USA Today Network content into scripted and unscripted series, documentaries, movies and books.”

Image provided by USA Today Network

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Data providers are next on Pernod Ricard’s hit list to uncover which companies are secretly profiting from its budgets.

As easy as it is for an advertiser like Pernod Ricard to show third-party cookies often aren’t accurate, it’s proven harder to determine how that inaccuracy translates into wasted budget. What’s changed — and the reason why almost two-thirds (62 percent) of brands have made uncovering data arbitrage and the markups made on their data a priority in 2018 — is that advertisers are tightening up their contracts. If an advertiser doesn’t have contracts in place that guarantee transparency, it won’t know the fee added on to data segments as they are passed down the chain.

“Can I say with 100 percent guarantee that the [the third-party data] we use for our lookalike targeting is the way it should be? No, but we’re moving in the right direction,” said Conor McQuaid, evp of global business development at Pernod Ricard. McQuaid said it was inevitable the transparency spotlight would move to the costs and quality of data after Pernod Ricard gained greater clarity on how much of its budget contributes to effective advertising.

Now, Pernod Ricard is pursuing what McQuaid calls a “test and learn” approach to weeding out the unreliable third-party data it is buying from data vendors. One way to do this is by comparing third-party data with Pernod Ricard’s own data. For instance, a third-party data set of a company’s current subscribers can be shown to be unreliable if its first-party data shows those same people clicked on an ad and signed up to become new subscribers. “We’re buying the appropriate data and then seeing what the response is from the activity to determine whether it’s valid,” explained McQuaid. “Clearly, our preference is to use our own data where possible.”

His comment doesn’t mean third-party data is dead in the eyes of advertisers like Pernod Ricard, but its role is changing. Third-party data will be used to “add color” to an audience profile or provide indication of intent, rather than as the core audience targeting method in a campaign, said Nick McCarthy, svp of data solutions of Merkle’s Europe, Middle East and Africa business.

McQuaid declined to reveal the results of those tests. There’s no incentive to publicly name bad actors, and in some cases, advertisers are contractually bound to keep quiet. Agencies are also in a bind where if they name bad actors, they can be held liable by brands. The best approach, according to ad tech firm Sonobi’s Chief Operating Officer, Justin Kennedy, is for marketers to conduct appropriate due diligence on data partners to know what they’re paying for upfront.

According to Infectious Media, which has extensively tested third-party data on behalf of its clients, it’s often difficult to get complete transparency on the third-party data supply chain. “Where we can’t get the transparency we require, we generally find it better to source data directly from publishers to ensure provenance and quality and to eliminate hidden charges in the supply chain,” said Dan Larden, Infectious Media’s global strategic partnerships director.

Rather than rely on agencies to help detect those hidden fees as some advertisers are, Pernod Ricard has turned to its in-house team of experts. The advertiser “still has some way to go” on bolstering its own data analytics expertise, McQuaid admitted, but it has made progress over the last 12 months. Furthermore, the business is reorganizing its central marketing team with the appointment in July of former finance chief Christian Porta to oversee its brands, a move it said will allow the global team to work better with local teams on issues such as data transparency.

Pernod Ricard’s attempt to unbox the data it uses has greater urgency ahead of the enforcement of wide-ranging data privacy laws governing advertisers’ management of Europeans’ personal data. In order to comply, the alcohol manufacturer will need to know in many cases that consumers have given active consent for their data to be used and will consequently have to get closer to the source of any data it buys. This will mean asking questions about how the data was sourced and whether all the correct permissions were obtained, which could potentially lead the advertiser to uncover more dubious activity in its supply chain.

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A year ago at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, P&G marketing head Marc Pritchard shook his fist at digital platforms and digital players that wouldn’t adopt uniform measurement standards, a sense of reality has set in. It was, at the time, a rare public rebuke for a duopoly-dominated digital media order.

A year later, in the California desert, the criticisms Pritchard leveled are now almost old hat. Digital media and marketing execs have entered the acceptance phase of duopoly control. Pritchard himself has said he’s seen enough progress on issues he raised to keep digital ad spending mostly the same.

Unilever CMO Keith Weed called for a more collaborative approach with the platforms. (Unilever also wasn’t among the marketers that pulled ads off YouTube last year after extremist videos were discovered on the platform.) It’s more effective to talk tough behind closed doors instead of through public ultimatums, Weed said without directly mentioning Pritchard. Weed made no specific public demands on the platforms, though, which left some audience members wanting. “It’s easy to make impressive statements,” one attendee shrugged.

The quandary for marketers is that they realize that public trust in the social platforms and corporations is nose diving, and that their brand risks a negative rub-off of advertising on a platform that’s polluted with misinformation or offensive content. At the same time, they can’t replace the platforms’ audience and user data elsewhere. One major marketer confided that after his company pulled its ads off YouTube last year, it paid the price: “It hurt my sales.”

(The digital platform giants themselves weren’t around in a big way to take shots at. Last year, Facebook, Google and Snapchat all had a big stage presence; Facebook’s vp of partnerships Dan Rose took the main stage to talk about how the platform had big plans to collaborate with publishers. This year, only Google was on the agenda.)

A year ago, Pritchard’s call to action raised digital ad execs’ hopes that other advertising giants would follow suit and bring pressure to bear on Google and Facebook to level the playing field and fix the fake news on their platforms. Publishers were eager to keep the pressure on Google and Facebook, whose dominance of digital advertising has come at the expense of publishers.

But after being angry for a long time, there’s a view that digital execs can’t blame Facebook et al. for everything. Marketers are getting pressured internally for taking responsibility themselves for embarrassing ad placements. There’s a publisher sentiment that Facebook doesn’t owe them anything, that they need to look themselves in the mirror and accept that they helped create their digital business problem, having decided 20 years ago to give away their content for free online. Call it the backlash to the backlash.

If Facebook’s recent announcement that it would run less news content in its news feed, was distressing for publishers that rely heavily on it to reach audiences, there’s also a feeling of liberation now that publishers know they can’t count on Facebook for distribution like they used to.

“There’s a feeling that we’re in the middle of a reckoning,” said Grant Whitmore, an evp at Tronc. “There’s the belief that money will flow to us. It gives a certain type of publisher swagger to say, ‘I have an audience who comes to be because they like what I do.’”

That doesn’t mean there’s no room for opportunism. Some, like Oath, the newly cobbled together Verizon-owned company that includes Yahoo and AOL, are using the opportunity to present themselves as an alternative to the duopoly. “We look at ourselves as not just a viable alternative, but one that should be in the conversation,” said Tim Mahlman, Oath’s president of advertiser and publisher strategy.

Attendees acknowledged digital ads’ problems are far from solved, but also acknowledged there’s been progress in cleaning them up. Ad fraud declined 10 percent last year, according to an Association of National Advertisers report. There’s been a big uptake in adoption of ads.txt, which is designed to help buyers avoid spoofed domains and arbitraged inventory. Chrome’s ad blocking filter is about to be turned on, which high-quality publishers hope will lead to higher pricing for their inventory by weeding out annoying and obtrusive ad formats.

Mahlman said the 2017 YouTube brand crisis and pressure from the P&Gs of the world kicked Oath into gear to shore up its own verification practices and caused others to follow suit. “It cleaned up a lot of our industry,” he said. “It also sends signals to major brands that they need tech to know an ad was served to a real human.”

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American Media, the publisher of the National Enquirer, OK! and Radar Online, is paying more attention to the Instagram-famous.

After years of getting occasional referral traffic from celebrities sharing their stories, the above titles, along with their fitness-focused sister brands, which include Men’s Fitness, are now devoting more coverage in 2018 to promoting the exploits and side hustles of internet influencers, partly to serve audience need and partly to tap into a vital, cost-effective source of mobile referral traffic.

Here’s how it works: Editors from a publisher sit down with an influencer and collaborate with them on content about one of their endeavors. Once the content is live, said influencer distributes the content through their social channels, with the publisher paying for the resulting referral traffic, at a rate lower than the going rate for Facebook traffic.

American Media stressed that all its coverage decisions will be editorially driven.

“In an audience development landscape where reach is declining, you almost throw your hands up and say, ‘Where can I reach the people I was reaching three years ago?’” said Eli Lippman, the director of digital for American Media Inc. “This is a win-win. We get the audience we want; they get access to our editorial team.”

American Media has experimented with one-off influencer partnerships for years. But over the past few months, its audience development team has been focused on creating content for influencers affiliated with Relic, a network of influencers that claims a combined digital reach of 150 million users, with 65-70 percent of it concentrated on Instagram.

Relic’s founder, Nik Richie, said the Relic network drives between 100,000 and 200,000 unique sessions per day across all of those platforms, either to publishers or brands.

Lippman declined to share specifics about how much traffic this strategy drives, saying only that it was an “enticing” amount of its referral traffic, one he intends to grow in 2018. American Media pays the influencers for distribution on a CPM basis, though it declined to offer specifics on price.

American Media pays for distribution across multiple platforms, including Facebook and Twitter. In cases when Facebook posts resonate with their intended audience, Lippman said, American Media will put a paid budget toward promoting those posts as well.

Though Instagram is the principal area of focus, members of Relic’s network also distribute to Facebook and Twitter. The arrangement is similar to one popularized many years ago, after publishers realized that the large followings that celebrities had amassed on platforms like Facebook offered an opportunity for traffic arbitrage.

Facebook has begun closing that loophole, most recently changing its branded-content guidelines in a way that prohibits Facebook page owners from accepting “anything of value” in exchange for sharing content they had no hand in creating.

Because this content involves direct participation from the influencer, both Richie and Lippman believe their arrangement isn’t subject to the guideline change. And in any case, both see more promise in Instagram, which continues to grow and features a growing population of internet-famous people eager for an opportunity to monetize their presence on the platform.

While Instagram accounts for a small sliver of global referral traffic — less than half of 1 percent, according to Parsely data — it has grown substantially as a referral traffic source over the past year. Over the past 12 months, the share of referral traffic it’s driven has more than tripled, surpassing LinkedIn, per Parsely data.

“Instagram’s the future of this market,” Richie said.

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Thanks to Glamglow’s social media savvy, it’s secured the top spot for earned media value amongst skin-care brands, beating out older brands like Clinique and Origins, which are also owned by its parent company, Esteé Lauder.

A new report from TribeDynamics found that, at $6.3 million, the brand’s earned media value saw a 54 percent year-over-year increase in 2017. It is followed by other brands that rely largely on social media for growth, including new entrant Farsali, which grew 86 percent year-over-year to $4.7 million, and Lush, the value of which actually decreased 25 percent year-over-year to $4 million.

Glamglow’s success is the result of the current online buzz surrounding face masks, a wide-ranging influencer program, significant YouTube traction and an emphasis on brand localization. Its giveaway-heavy feeds probably aren’t hurting, either.

The mask effect
From rubber to charcoal, masks are definitely having a moment, and, luckily for Glamglow, the product has always been its bread-and-butter. Initially famous for its Supermud skin-clearing mask, the brand has since gone on to launch various renditions that target different concerns including anti-aging (Gravitymud) and skin brightening (Flashmud). In the last year, the company has amped up the social media appeal of these masks by incorporating elements like glitter or rendering the masks in metallic shades.

When Allure editor Devon Abelman got to try out the brand’s new Glittermask early last October, she saw the boost on her own social channels.

“In all my nearly 26 years, I have never felt as popular as I did after using GlamGlow’s new #GlitterMask,” she wrote. “I posted a selfie (maskie?) on my Instagram Story after applying the mask, and the dozen or so replies I received immediately following made me feel like the homecoming queen I never was.”

Contributing to its snapability is how easy the mask is to peel off, leaving users with a glittery molding of their face to document further — a prime example of the industry’s sought-after Instagram “moment.”

But Glamglow may not be able to ride on those effects for long.

“It’s very resonant at the moment, and they’re doing everything they can to be on trend,” said Chelsea Gross, an associate director of client strategy at L2. “They’re not going to be able to keep riding on this one year from now.”

Betting big on influencers
Overall, it’s the brands influencer partnerships that have most effectively moved the needle, said Gross.

Indeed, the brand has an undisclosed number of “#Glambassadors” who are paid in either product or cash to support its latest products. “Creating social tribes like this is always a win,” said Thomas Drew, a social media strategist at the creative and analytics agency BLKBOX.

The group includes lifestyle blogger Annie Jaffrey (250,000 followers on Instagram) and beauty blogger Drea Beauty (21,300 followers on Instagram). The original content that these influencers create is regularly reposted on the company’s Instagram account for added buzz, and it’s video-heavy, which is favorable to the current Instagram algorithm, per Drew.

As the boy beauty movement has continued to lend brands a new way to drive buzz and opened them up to a new audience base, Glamglow has also made a point to engage men, often utilizing the #menwhomask hashtag alongside photos of various different men using their products. The first official face of the brand, in fact, was the Instagram star/actor Nick Bateman, first announced last April.

Glamglow’s male influencer partnerships have drawn notable traffic to its website, said Gross, but the brand still doesn’t over-index on male-centric influencer content, compared to other brands.

A hit on YouTube
While much of Glamglow’s traction comes from Instagram, where the brand posts twice a day on average, YouTube also drives a bulk of its social traffic. In the fourth quarter of 2017, the platform drove 43 percent of that traffic, according to data from L2.

“This is not uncommon, but is particularly interesting for a skin-care brand,” said Gross.

Videos created by the makeup artists Jeffree Star and Patrick Starr have driven much of this traffic, but smaller influencers are chatting about the brand too — there are 89,700 results for videos featuring Glamglow products on YouTube. Its unclear how many, if any, of these videos are paid or how YouTube fits into the brand’s larger influencer strategy, and they didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Either way, the brand is letting influencers take the wheel here, as it hasn’t posted an original video on its YouTube channel in 10 months.

Going local on Instagram
Alongside its main Instagram account, which has 735,000 followers, the brand has numerous local accounts geared toward different geographies. These include the United Kingdom, South Africa and Canada.

While the accounts sometimes share content, most of it is specifically focused on influencers or beauty concerns that are of the most relevance in that area of the world. The U.K. account, for instance, recently posted unique photos of the British model Adwoa Aboah and the Welsh blogger behind Velvet & Glitter rocking Glamglow’s masks. Minky Mothabela, a South African beauty blogger, is featured on the brand’s South African channel.

The success of a localization strategy like this really depends on its execution, said Gross. “Sometimes it can parse a brand’s engagement too much across accounts.”

But if done correctly, with a real awareness to the local environment, it pays off, said Drew.

“Having branded Instagrams that speak to different countries and demographics is smart because different countries come with different norms. What drives sales in North America for this product may not be the same stimulus that drives sales in South Africa,” he said. “It also shows that your brand isn’t limited to the understanding of one specific group, which is amazing for brand sentiment — especially via social media.”

Giveaways with a boost
Glamglow is also partial to giveaways, which are effective from an engagement perspective, according to Gross.

Although the brand often hosts these on its own feeds, it also regularly works with retailers like Ipsy or individual influencers to host the events. To drive even more traction, it also often partners with like-minded brands, as it did recently with the skin-care tool brand Foreo.

“They rely heavily on an assortment strategy for their giveaways, which adds benefit,” said Gross, referencing how the brand tends to group various items together for its giveaways, rather than just send out one individual product. The Foreo giveaway, for instance, included two different Glamglow cleansers, one Glamglow mask and the Foreo tool.

According to data from L2, Glamglow’s posts involving product sets drive more traffic to its site than the rest, so adding a freebie element to them only fuels that. This is the case with most beauty brands right now, said Gross: “It’s all about bringing in the entire routine these days.”

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It has been a year since Chobani dropped Opperman Weiss as its creative agency in favor of an in-house creative shop. Since then, the brand has rebranded, and it launched an experiential and social campaign on Feb. 11 celebrating the brand’s 10th anniversary. It now has a 32-person in-house creative team.

Leland Maschmeyer, the brand’s chief creative officer, spoke with Digiday about the challenges of building an in-house agency and how it’s growing and evolving its capabilities. 

Why did Chobani bring its creative in-house a year ago?
Chobani is a scrappy, fast-paced and innovative organization, so the more that we’re able to bring our execution and analytical capabilities into our culture, the faster we can move. We can also make our dollars work harder for us by putting them toward growth initiatives rather than agency fees, and with an in-house agency, we can make sure the work is more coordinated. It’s easier when everyone is in-house rather than working out of 12 different agencies.

What have been the challenges of starting an in-house agency?
It’s harder to start an in-house agency than out-of-house. With an out-of-house agency, you just have to focus on your business. You take on a couple clients, and you can move slowly. There’s no culture yet, and you’re just starting with a few people. In-house, you have to focus on two businesses and try to figure out how to merge the two. There’s also pressure to scale really quickly, so you have to figure out what are the right disciplines to build out and what types of positions you need to hire.

How about internal communication?
There’s also a lot of debate around how to manage other people’s expectations about what you will and won’t work on, which isn’t something you have to worry about when you’re a contracted agency partner focusing on one thing that has been brought to you.

How has Chobani’s in-house agency model evolved?
When we first started, we were focused solely on the brand and the packaging because those are the core assets of our company. We are now into what we call stage two: With the success of the new brand launch behind us, we focused our energies toward campaigns. 

How are you planning on being successful with stage two?
One of the things we wanted to do as an in-house team was to produce very smart work. So we’re working on sequential messaging, working with our individual retail partners on a very targeted, local level and working on frequency caps on messaging so we don’t overcommunicate to someone. With our campaign, website traffic is up 88 percent, our email list has almost doubled itself in the week that we began to tease the campaign, and video completion rates are near 70 percent.

Are you building out your internal team?
We’ve added a core marketing investment team, a marcom strategy team, and we beefed up our production team as well as pulled in some more sophisticated martech strategy, copywriting and art direction teams. We’re looking to hire across the board.

Are you considering adding media buying?
No, we don’t do enough buying to justify having that in-house. Usually, you have to be at a pretty big scale to do that. We are doing media planning in-house, but we’re going about it very slowly.

What comes next?
Now, it’s about how do we start growing the brand and getting it into more people’s hands. After that, it becomes: How do you develop capabilities that augment the company and truly differentiate it? We are starting to work more with publishing companies and leveraging their insights, their platforms and also their in-house teams to collaborate on creating content and events that appeal to their audiences. They have unique insights into their audiences and their publisher organizations that we don’t have.

Does Chobani still work with outside agencies?
We don’t believe in-house should do everything. I don’t think it makes sense. One of our rules is not to bring something in-house that we don’t do enough of. For instance, industrial design is something we probably won’t ever pull in-house because we don’t do it enough. There are some fantastic agencies out there that do a wonderful job, and there is no reason to break those relationships with them.

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