Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
TV Pullback
Television ad revenues will drop 12% this year, according to MoffettNathanson – a loss the research firm WARC pegs at $25.5 billion. Despite a surge in viewership, with people stuck at home, advertisers have slashed budgets by more than 40%. Lowe’s, for example, spent $1 million last year on a TV campaign for a Memorial Day washer-dryer sale. This year, it used a 15-second spot set in a bare utility room for its summer kickoff sale, The New York Times reports. Walmart skipped TV altogether for Memorial Day, promoting discounts on social media instead. Brands that historically spent 30% of marketing on TV may stick with virtual production and invest more in digital platforms moving forward. Amid the pullback and delay in upfront commitments, networks are offering discounts in the double-digits.
A Chip Off The Old Block
Comcast has spun off Blockgraph, its blockchain-based data onboarding unit, into a joint venture co-owned by Comcast, Charter and ViacomCBS. Each company will own a third of Blockgraph, The Wall Street Journal reports. The tie-up makes sense, similar to a television advertising business such as Ampersand, which is co-owned by Comcast, Charter and Cox. In television, the name of the game is scale. Addressable TV initiatives struggle to gain critical mass because they’re often tested with a single broadcast partner. To gain meaningful scale the advertiser needs visibility across the fragmented TV landscape. A campaign could run on CBSi, Roku, Pluto TV and directly with NBCUniversal. Frequency capping that campaign in a silo could be worse than useless. AdExchanger caught up with Blockgraph GM Jason Manningham in February.
Continue reading »
This article charts the coronavirus pandemic’s ongoing effect on the digital ad industry – from publishers to vendors, marketers and agencies.
We will continuously update this story as more developments become public.
May 29
Skift To Shift To 100% Remove Work In August
B2B media company Skift will let its Manhattan office lease expire July 31 and go fully remote, Folio reported. The move will save the company $600,000 in expenses.
The company, which covers the travel industry, will rent meeting space as needed every week to accomodate its New York-based employees but expects some to relocate.
“Business operators are realizing this is a once in a lifetime chance of resetting your cost base,” CEO Rafat Ali told AdExchanger last month. “This is true across all industries, not just in travel, not just in media.”
Roughly 40% of its revenue was derived from events; When the pandemic struck, the company furloughed 20 workers who have since been laid off. Skift has also introduced a hiring freeze, solicited donations from readers and shifted to virtual events. Read more.
Continue reading »
What goes down must go up.
Now that the economy is slowly beginning to reopen, Facebook CPMs have bounced back and then some after dropping precipitously in March due to the pandemic.
When COVID-19 hit, CPMs on Facebook dipped by as much as 50% in some cases, according to eMarketer. CPMs on social platforms were down by between 15% and 30% on average across the board.
But by the end of May, it was a completely different story. Facebook CPMs shot up by between 20% and 50%, depending on the app, said Eric Seufert, a media strategist, former Rovio exec and editor of Mobile Dev Memo.
Seufert saw the trend play out for a number of his clients across gaming, health and fitness, messaging and travel. Ad pricing started to normalize at the very end of the month, with CPMs closer to pre-COVID-19 levels, but still elevated by about 10%, he said.
GroupM has also seen demand increase in markets and CPMs begin to revert to baseline pricing, said Kieley Taylor, global VP of social at GroupM, with the caveat that pricing invariably fluctuates depending on the advertiser, category and audience.
Continue reading »
For better or for worse, the country is starting to reopen. But that doesn’t mean advertisers are simply flipping their media plans back on.
As advertisers return to the market, they’re thinking critically about how consumer media and shopping habits have changed, and how strategies that worked in the past won’t necessarily work in the future.
AdExchanger rounded up responses from agency executives about how brands are starting to return to the market with a new mindset as the country reopens.
-
- George Manas, president and chief media officer, OMD
- Ashley Sobel, group director, The Media Kitchen
- Amanda Martin, VP, enterprise partnerships, Goodway Group
- Talia Raviv, Global CEO, Publicis Media Exchange
- Danielle Koffer, Chief Client Officer, Mindshare USA
George Manas, president and chief media officer, OMD
“Recovery isn’t the right word. Reset is more accurate. The pandemic has radically altered so many behaviors, perceptions and realities of everyday life. Just how long and how deep this disruption will go is up for debate.
“What is certain is that where we are headed won’t be where we’ve been. Savvy brands are recognizing the opportunity in this reset to use behavioral data and empathy to forge new connections, conversions and relationships. These brands are returning to spending, but reevaluating their channel priorities, mix and messages to new consumer patterns, rituals and routines as well as the new commercial realities of their business.”
Continue reading »
Subscribe to AdExchanger Talks on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Much of JT Batson’s career has focused on bringing tech and automation to bear on the agency-publisher relationship. He was an early employee at Rubicon Project and a senior executive at Donovan Data Systems during the period when it merged with Mediabank (creating Mediaocean).
JT’s work adding efficiency to media buying has continued with Hudson MX, a relatively youthful ad tech business that he founded about four years ago. Hudson MX helps local TV and radio broadcasters and media buyers transact with more efficiency and speed than they've been able to in the past.
Continue reading »
Vox Media Chief Revenue Officer Ryan Pauley has dealt with a lot since the pandemic hit two months ago.
His team first had to deal with the cancellation of South by Southwest, where Vox Media usually sets up a large presence. Then advertisers panicked and pulled spend. And now those same advertisers are reentering, albeit they’re trying to message consumers in a vastly changed economic and social climate.
Ryan, holed up in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood, is focused on adapting and being flexible with advertisers
Brands are now wondering how to reenter the market. They’re leaning on Vox Media to provide insights into what readers want to do and watch, and how to make ad creative that’s sensitive and resonates during this time.
Vox Media, too, has had to weather the storm. In April, it furloughed employees and cut salaries and benefits to keep the business going as some revenue dried up.
But Ryan is optimistic about the company’s future. Vox Media and New York Media combined last year, which gave it needed scale to ride out the storm. New York Media had its biggest month of new subscribers
in April, bringing in triple the number of new subscribers as it did the year before. And its commerce business, via
The Strategist, has also been a bright spot bringing in revenue during the pandemic.
“All of these things make me think we’re weathering this crisis much more strongly together than we would separately,” Ryan says – the power of banding together during a challenging time.
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community.
Today's column is written by Ward Flock, global vice president, Magnify, at Prohaska Consulting.
If you're expecting to find yet another article about selling during a recession, feel free to browse elsewhere.
Many sage sales consultants talk about promoting collaboration, planting seeds for the future or taking whatever you can get during these uncertain times. I get it, but there’s another bigger danger these days and it could be your next customer – the customer you can’t afford.
In the spirit of my favorite movie, “The Shawshank Redemption,” you can escape the metaphorical COVID-19 prison to stand in the pouring rain – but not if you stay in your cell. You can win in this desolate market by choosing and nurturing positive partnerships with good ROI.
All sellers and business development professionals feel constrained in some way because of COVID-19. We can’t go to conferences or fly in for in-person presentations. We can’t easily read body language on a tiny Zoom screen. We’re missing that personal interaction, that one-to-one connection that builds a lasting relationship for years to come. The current restrictions can make us feel trapped in our homes and apartments, unable to be the freewheeling hunters we are.
Continue reading »
A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem...
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Are You Committed?
Advertisers want more flexibility in upfront deals this year. Cancellation options are a big topic, with buyers pushing for the right to cancel a higher percentage of their commitments closer to air date, agency executives tell Digiday. Advertisers also want “expansion rights,” or the ability to invest more money in a given quarter at upfront prices. Brands are prepared to pay a premium for the flexibility, recognizing the need to adapt to a more fluid cycle. “Having the flexibility to take money out or put money in is what we’re going to look toward,” an agency exec said. Brands also want the TV marketplace to look more like digital, with standard 14-day-prior cancellation windows for guaranteed deals and the right to reinvest at any time.
All Content, No Distribution
Distribution deals are increasingly cutthroat as programmers and distributors consolidate streaming ownership. HBO Max’s launch on Wednesday did not include distribution on Roku or Amazon Prime, the two largest OTT platforms in the United States. WarnerMedia, which owns HBO, hasn’t reached an agreement with Amazon because the AT&T business is pushing subscribers directly toward the HBO Max app, instead of going through Prime’s UI. With Roku, the disagreement is about revenue sharing and advertising, The Wall Street Journal reports. Five million HBO subscribers who watch through Amazon Prime have lost access to HBO content. WarnerMedia also barely eked out a deal with Comcast prior to the launch.
Continue reading »
Miffed by Twitter adding fact-checking labels to some of his tweets this week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday that, if enacted, would challenge social media companies or other aggregation platforms that moderate or remove political content.
The reported draft of the executive order targets Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which shields online platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter from liability for copyright violations or other illicit posts, as long as they respond quickly and remove content when there are complaints.
In the early draft, the administration contends that major online platforms are a 21st-century equivalent of the public sphere, and thus can’t “hand-pick” which comments or viewpoints are allowed.
The executive order would face a court challenge. And it consists mostly of “atmospherics” (aka political posturing) or changes that can’t be re-done by executive order or likely wouldn’t hold up in court, according to Daphne Keller, platform regulation director at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center (and former Google deputy counsel), who published an annotated version of the draft.
On the other hand, Republican politicians, regulators and policy leaders have been circling social media content regulations for some time.
On Wednesday night, Republican FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr told Fox News host Tucker Carlson that he believes Section 230 should be pared back and that the FTC could pursue a case against social media platforms for unfair business practices. In the past year, Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley have proposed bills giving Congress powers to regulate if and how social platforms can ban users or block certain content.
Continue reading »
