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Smash Like And Subscribe!
Seemingly every business and investment firm is all in on the subscription economy.
But subscriptions aren’t magic. Companies need to understand who their subscribers are – and could be – for the business model to really work.
About one-fifth of US adults have at least one digital subscription – be it news, streaming TV, recipes, Substack blogs (or whatever) – according to a joint survey of more than 2,500 people by the National Research Group and Toolkits, a subscription consultancy and information resource.
The results show that a small cadre of power-subscribers are supporting the great subscription revenue hypothesis – for now, at least. Of the one-fifth of Americans who do carry a digital subscription, one-fifth of those (about 4% total) have five or more subscription products.
According to Toolkits, “Power-subscribers may have proved relatively easy to convert to date, but it’s safe to assume this group could be approaching saturation point in terms of the number of digital subscriptions they’ll maintain on a long-term basis.”
Which means that the big opportunity (and obstacle) for subscription businesses is to get people who haven’t yet subscribed to fork over their credit card information – because “never-subs” still represent the majority of US consumers.
Data Dalliance
TV ad measurement and data privacy are both headaches for marketers – but together, they’re a total migraine.
Brands have to reinvent their ad targeting and measurement plans to align with evolving privacy standards, Jason Manningham, CEO of TV ad tech company Blockgraph, told AdExchanger.
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Daily Roundup
Blockgraph sells data clean room technology for media companies – primarily TV programmers or streaming content publishers – so they can share anonymized data sets without exposing user-level data from any one company to another.
On Monday, Blockgraph and Ampersand, a TV ad sales company, partnered with Acxiom to expand their addressable TV footprint.
With the integration, advertisers can make Acxiom’s audience segments targetable using Blockgraph’s platform, and then match those to audiences across Ampersand’s inventory. (Ampersand is co-owned by the cable companies Comcast, Charter and Cox.)
“This collaboration helps simplify the complexities of exchanging audience intelligence to develop people-based marketing campaigns across [platforms],” Conor Burgess, Acxiom’s VP of business development, told AdExchanger.
TV delivery is extremely fragmented, Burgess said, but marketers still need intelligent data to activate advanced audience segments at scale.
Close The Pod Doors
Spotify was on a podcast binge in 2019, dropping $400 million to acquire Gimlet, Anchor and Parcast, and bring their podcasts exclusively to its service.
And, to be fair, Spotify did surpass Apple last year as the most-used podcast player, so the plan worked. Sort of.
The hit podcasts Spotify acquired have since fizzled, and last week, Spotify made deep cuts to its podcast production groups.
Spotify seems to have kneecapped its own podcast growth by focusing on exclusivity over distribution, wrote media reporter Simon Owens in his newsletter. The Joe Rogan show is still the most popular podcast program, but even Rogan had a “sizable” dropoff after moving to Spotify. Oh, and Rogan still posts some content to YouTube to maintain traction there, despite being “exclusive” to Spotify.
Amazon and Sirius have taken a different approach than Spotify by allowing off-platform distribution. Not only does off-platform distribution increase listenership, it’s a vehicle for Amazon or Sirius to promote their other podcast shows and retain production talent.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is YouTube, which likely profits greatly from podcasts despite taking no stake in podcast IP and putting near zero effort into a podcasting strategy.
But Wait, There’s More!
What Netflix will look like in 2023. [Bloomberg]
TikTok expands its partnership with IAS for pre- and post-bid brand safety measurement. [release]
Kroger and Albertsons are merging because … everything is an ad network! [Mobile Dev Memo]
WTF are ID-based vs. model-based approaches to data clean rooms? [Digiday]
Pinterest’s new measurement tool takes on Apple’s ad data changes. [Ad Age]
You’re Hired!
Omnicom Group hires Andrea Lennon as its first chief client officer. [MediaPost]
Verve Group appoints Evgeny Popov as EVP and GM of international sales. [release]
