TikTok’s grasp on Gen Z’s attention has kicked off an industrywide pivot to vertical video.
But YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Snap aren’t the only ones taking their cues from TikTok. Publishers are now racing to produce – and monetize – more vertical video content.
UK-based Mail Metro Media, the advertising arm of dmg media, which publishes the Daily Mail, MailOnline and Metro, partnered with video ecommerce platform Firework in March to integrate a new vertical video player across dmg’s digital portfolio.
In addition to inserting interstitial ads between videos, the Firework player includes shoppable elements, such as TikTok-esque clickable video overlays.
Commerce play
Advertisers can buy interstitial ad inventory either directly or programmatically, depending on each site’s regional monetization strategy.
Owing to regional restrictions around tracking and targeting, however, particularly in the UK and EU, most of this inventory is sold directly, said Lauren Dick, Mail Metro Media’s executive director of media and data services.
In addition to adding more video ad inventory, a main motivation for the deal with Firework is to help Mail Metro Media accelerate its retail media business by making it easier to share product recommendations and sponsored content across its own sites and its social media channels.
Dmg’s sites specialize in producing sponsored and non-sponsored content (both written and video) that focuses on product recommendations and fashion advice, Dick said.
That content funnels viewers to retailer sites where they can buy the products, which generates affiliate revenue.
Typically, click-to-buy functionality is easier to add into written content than video. But Firework’s tech helps publishers emulate TikTok’s approach by making ecommerce-friendly, actionable video content.
In addition to standard fare, like adding click-to-buy links into a video’s text description, video producers can also add clickable overlays and interactive carousels to their video content.
Weaving shoppable vertical video into its editorial content brings a version of the shopping experience audiences are accustomed to on social to dmg’s sites.
First-party data gathering
But there’s also a first-party data play involved in dmg’s approach to video.
Last year, Metro Mail Media launched a proprietary ID called dmg::ID. Assuming a user consents to having their browser behavior tracked, dmg appends an ID to a user that follows them across dmg-owned sites.
The ID is used to build a profile based on the content a person engages with and any purchases they’ve made as a result of recommendations.
For example, the Daily Mail site includes a subsection called Fashion Finder. Just before Christmas, it featured a video highlighting a pair of earrings worn by the future Queen Consort of England, Kate Middleton. That video was a piece of sponsored content created on behalf of a retailer that sold those earrings.
“We can see standard conversion metrics, like who has bought the product, and feed that back into a segment of jewelry lovers or Kate Middleton fans,” Dick said. Once that user is added to that targeting segment, dmg can more effectively recommend content for that user, including sponsored and affiliate content.
There’s a limit to the insights publishers can get about user interests from social media platforms, because they operate as walled gardens. That’s why dmg wants to focus more on its owned-and-operated sites.
“[It’s about] capitalizing on what would have traditionally been a social drive through to the point of sale and bringing that closer to our content discovery,” Dick said.
But why vertical video?
Video content has been a focus at dmg for years, Dick said. The company publishes about 1,000 editorial and sponsored content videos a day, and its readers appear to eat it up.
MailOnline’s video content delivers 3,000 more attentive seconds per 1,000 impressions than YouTube, according to a study conducted by Lumen Research.
Largely on the strength of its video content, dmg has also amassed a considerable social following, with 25 million followers across Facebook and Instagram, 4.5 million followers on TikTok and 15 million Snap subscribers.
With the Firework vertical video player integration, dmg hopes its onsite vertical video will prove as engaging as TikTok’s endless feed.
The early signs are encouraging.
Since it launched the Firework vertical video player in March, MailOnline amassed eight million video views from its UK audience alone. Videos about this year’s Oscars ceremony in mid-March performed especially well. The top-performing video, which featured Rihanna’s performance at the ceremony, had a 76% view-through rate.
Producing more onsite vertical video should also make it easier to syndicate that content across social platforms, which have all prioritized vertical video, including Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.
Rather than trying to “rubbish” – a Britishism for criticize – the social platforms, Mail Metro Media is simply looking to boost engagement with whatever prove to be the most effective strategies, Dick said.
“It’s about taking the best bits of [social] and the best bits of the shopping experience” she said, “and bringing that across the content that we know works.”
