On behalf of PwC and the AAI, we’d like to invite you to attend a briefing and roundtable discussion about the future of digital marketing in a post cookie world.
Our event will quickly recap key study findings and then move on to the question: what happens next?
By the end of 2021, third party cookies will be history, so how can marketers leverage data and technology to retain and enhance the benefits of targeted marketing?
The format will be a short briefing by PwC, and then a Q&A with our expert panel to explore the future of data, technology, and digital marketing.
Date: Thursday November 12th Time: 10:00 – 11:00am Venue: Virtual – where else?
Please register to attend the zoom briefing and feel free to direct any questions in advance to [email protected]
If you’re a business owner, people have probably been talking to you about digital marketing for ages — whether it’s a well-meaning friend or an ad agency on the prowl, you’ve heard endless suggestions on everything from SEO to PPC and every other three-letter acronym. And all that was in a pre-pandemic world. The sudden, jarring shift to an audience more frequently online will leave behind many lasting effects on how businesses reach their target audience.
In a post-pandemic world, 56% of business leaders that utilize digital tools report that at least half of their sales occur online. While many businesses plan on decreasing spend, depending on the channel anywhere from 40-59% of large national brands intend to increase their ad spends across digital channels. That’s just the big guys.
But with all the financial stress facing small business owners, you may be worried about adding yet another cost to your budget. And marketing agencies can often seem like sharks circling businesses.
However, you don’t need a dedicated agency or a large advertising budget to make your mark in the digital realm. Here are some digital marketing tactics that all businesses, regardless of size, can benefit from:
Update Your Google My Business Listing
To some, this suggestion may seem obvious; in fact, if you otherwise don’t do anything else on the digital front, you most likely still maintain your Google My Business listing. But how quick are you to update your listing when you make changes to your business?
Of course, if you’ve changed your hours of operation, address, phone number or website, you need to update your listing right away. Google My Business is also a great place to show off your menu (for restaurants) or products and services. And don’t forget to update your photos. If you don’t maintain your photo section, your listing will be at the mercy of uploads from random visitors.
Bolster Your Social Media Presence
Everyone, even B2B companies, stands to gain from an involved social media presence. Of course, it’s important to utilize the correct platform. For example, a Main Street clothing boutique might find little use for a LinkedIn profile, while a steel bar fabricator might feel out of place on Pinterest. Make sure your message is appropriate to the platform you’re using and the audience you’re reaching.
Much like with your Google My Business listing, you need to keep your social media accounts current with any changes in your operations. You also need to be sure to have quality, high-resolution imagery for logos, banners and other photos.
And if you’re in a visually driven industry such as food, cosmetics or clothing, or have a younger target audience, you may want to experiment with platforms like TikTok or Instagram.
Respond To Reviews — Properly
Reviews are crucial to a small business’s existence, and a stream of poor reviews can be crippling to an upstart business. Conversely, positive reviews are one of the best ways for a business to organically grow their clientele. But there are a few things you should keep in mind when responding to reviews, including timing and messaging.
When you receive a positive review, you should respond right away. An immediate response shows your customers how much you truly appreciate their patronage, and reinforces the quality of their experience.
On the other hand, when you receive a negative review, you need to respond soon — but not too quickly. While you can’t let it linger and give off the impression that you’re ignoring the customer’s experience, you still need to give it enough time to show that you’ve considered their feedback. You also need the time to craft your message properly; too much emotion is off-putting, but a generic response is insulting. About 24 to 48 hours is an appropriate length of time for a negative review response.
And whatever you do, do not incentivize positive reviews. That may seem like an easy way to generate a large swath of positive feedback, but you’ll find that platforms like Yelp, Google and Facebook penalize accounts that are reported for incentivizing reviews.
Digital Marketing Is Here To Stay
While social distancing will eventually relax and foot traffic will pick back up in stores, digital marketing will have a lasting place in the business world. If you want to keep up with your competitors or even remain an active part of your community, you must maintain an active, involved digital presence. If you intend to hire a firm to manage your marketing, that’s fine — but by using these simple tips to improve your online presence, you’ll have a better understanding of what a firm brings to the table and will be more prepared to take the next step.
A quality email list is a vital part of email marketing and can determine the success of your campaign. Here’s how to build one.
Email marketing is an incredibly effective way to market your business, and your email list is arguably the most important component of your strategy. Your email list can have immeasurable impact on your marketing campaigns and a serious effect on your traffic and sales. If you’re looking to grow your email list, we have 25 tips to help your small business reach a wider audience.
What is an email list?
An email list, also referred to as a mailing list or subscribers list, is a collection of email addresses from visitors and customers who have consented to a business sending them communications, such as information, updates or discounts. Your list may grow and shrink as followers unsubscribe or new ones join over time.
Email marketing is a huge asset for a business. Nearly every customer has an email address, so there are billions of potential customers available for you to reach with just a few clicks. Additionally, email marketing is 40 times more effective in acquiring and retaining new customers than social media, and it has a significantly higher click-through rate than social media posts, which means more customers receive and read your content than they would if they came across your content on social media.
25 ways to grow your email list
There are many ways to grow your email list organically. Follow these 25 tips to grow your list the right way.
1. Create valuable content.
Your followers signed up to receive emails from you for a reason. Your job is to make it worth their while by providing interesting, engaging content. You will quickly lose subscribers if your content is boring or not applicable to your followers.
2. Know your audience.
Knowing your audience will help you create content they like. You can use email analytics or information you’ve collected on your own to inform your content. Look at things like demographics, customer behaviour and clicks to better understand your audience.
3. Make it easy for followers to share your emails.
Include buttons that link to your social media and “email a friend” links in each of your emails to make your content easily shareable. You don’t want your subscribers to have to work hard to send your content to another potential customer.
4. Segment your lists.
Once you understand who your audience is, you can segment them into groups – for example, by age, location or buyer behaviour – and send emails based on those groups, making your messages more targeted to each part of your audience for a more positive effect.
5. Send out an opt-in campaign.
If you have an old email list that doesn’t yield much engagement, you can send out an email with an opt-in message and a promise to remove any email addresses that don’t respond. While it might seem counterintuitive to remove contacts from your list, it can actually give you better results by ensuring you only send emails to people who want to receive them.
6. Include a link in employee signatures.
Including a link to a landing page where people can sign up for emails in all your employees’ email signatures is a quick and easy way to help build your email list.
7. Include gated offers on your website.
If you have valuable content to offer, like whitepapers or e-books, you can host it on your website with a pop-up that requires an email address and an opt-in to receive emails from you in order for the user to download it.
8. Require an email address to get a quote or access a resource.
Similarly, you can require a customer to provide their email address if they want to contact you for a quote or access a unique resource your business offers on your website.
9. Host a contest.
You could host a contest and require an email address for entry. Post about the contest on your social media pages to drum up interest and awareness, with a link directing viewers to where they can sign up on your website. [Read related article: How to Create a Giveaway Campaign That Boosts Sales]
10. Have a pop-up on your website.
“The single best method I’ve used to grow email lists rapidly is via website pop-ups,” said Kent Lewis, president and founder of Anvil Media. “Add a pop-up to your site to ask for an email address to send updates. The strategy still works, especially if you cookie the visitor and only hit them once, instead of every time they refresh or visit a new page. Make sure the incentive is clearly articulated and relevant to your brand to maximize conversions.”
11. Put a call-to-action button on your social media.
You can add a CTA to sign up for your email list on your social media pages to make it easy for interested customers to sign up to receive your emails. Here’s how HubSpot Academy integrates a CTA on its Facebook page:
Visitors enjoy providing feedback on a topic they’re interested in or that pertains to them, so you can provide a form on your website that asks them to leave their feedback on your business or website, and make their email address a required field.
13. Keep lead-capturing forms short.
When you ask customers to provide information, you don’t want to overwhelm them with lengthy forms that ask for a lot of information upfront. Stick to the basics, like their name and email address.
14. Utilize Facebook groups.
“Over the years, I’ve added thousands to my email list by using Facebook groups,” said Rick Orford, founder of The Financially Independent Millennial. “As part of the joining process, I ask for users’ email address in exchange for free information, such as a PDF. Facebook groups can be an invaluable way to increase engagement with your audience, while allowing you the opportunity to keep in touch with everyone by email.”
15. Make subscribing easy on your website.
A customer who wants to subscribe to your emails should not have to hunt around your website to find the subscribe button. Make it plain and easy to find in several different places on your website, such as your homepage, your “about” page and your “contact us” page.
16. Conduct A/B tests of your email content.
When you first start out with email marketing, you don’t know what content will perform best. To find out (or at least better predict), you can send out different versions of the same email – with different subject lines or images, for example – to sample groups to see which performs better with your audience. [Read related article: 16 Effective Methods to Make the Most Out of A/B Testing]
17. Set expectations.
“Set expectations so that a subscriber knows exactly what he/she is signing up for and how often he/she will receive email from you, and immediately send a welcome email upon sign-up that matches the expectations you just set,” said Katie Bonadies, content and social media strategist at Berxi.
18. Have a blog.
Blogs are a great way to boost your online presence. They can increase your ranking on search engines like Google and go a long way to establish brand credibility. You can also collect email addresses via blog subscriptions and deliver quality content right to their inboxes.
19. Allow customer reviews on your website.
Alongside a blog, a place for customers to leave reviews on your website can boost your image as a reputable business while giving you another opportunity to gather email addresses. Make an email address a required field for a user to leave a review.
20. Be consistent.
“Don’t expect to have a massive email list overnight,” said Shmuel Fogel, web designer and online marketer at Talmudico. “It takes time to build email lists, but they can be extremely effective in marketing to your customers. By maintaining in-store signage, website banners and campaigns to grow your email addresses year-round, you will ultimately build up a large list over time that continues to grow.”
21. Collect email addresses at a trade show or conference.
There is always the old-fashioned way to collect emails: in person. Have a sign-up sheet readily available for anyone who stops by your booth or table, and have a welcome email ready to go once you add the email addresses into your system.
22. Add QR codes to your promotional materials.
Another quick and easy way to collect email addresses and maximize your advertising materials is to add a QR code to your printed advertisements. This way, you can collect email addresses even from a poster or brochure.
23. Offer an incentive.
“The best way to grow an email list is to offer some incentive for being on it,” said Rex Freiberger, CEO of Gadget Review. “Sometimes, if customers really want to know about an upcoming product or possible promotions, this is enough. Usually they need enticement in the form of free content, trial services or large discounts.”
24. Include timed pop-up surveys on your site.
You can create surveys that come up only after a customer has spent a certain amount of time on your website. This works because the customer has demonstrated interest in your content and is much more likely to sign up to receive emails from you if you make it quick and easy.
25. Leverage your social media.
“You can set up Twitter and Facebook campaigns to boost your lead generation efforts,” said Anthony Mixides, managing director of The London Vape Company. “By giving links to your various offerings and resources on social media, you allow more users to find you, and this helps you tap into a newer sect of people. This is also a very useful technique for growing your target audience base.”
What to avoid when building an email list
Because solid email lists are so vital to the email marketing process, there is some specific etiquette to keep in mind, as well as missteps to avoid. Here are 10 things not to do when building your email list.
1. Buying email lists
This is the No. 1 mistake marketers and business owners make in building their email lists. Many think the best and quickest way to build a list is to buy one. While it’s true that this is the fastest method, it generally comes back to bite you, since there’s no way to guarantee that the purchased email addresses are real or associated with users who are interested in your content. As such, you could purchase a list with 1,000 addresses but discover that only a few engage with your content.
2. Adding email addresses without permission
This is another huge mistake many marketers make, and it could even get you in legal trouble. You should only send marketing emails to addresses who have given you permission in some form. These are the two main types of permission for email marketing:
Implied, which covers those with whom you have an existing business relationship – like current customers, donors or members of your website
Express, which is when someone gives you clear permission to send them emails, such as by entering their information in a subscription form
3. Asking for too much information
When you’re asking someone to provide personal information for your email campaign, you don’t want to ask for too much and risk coming off as a spammer. You want to make subscribing quick and easy, and make the customer feel at ease providing you with their contact information. Give the customer plenty of time to learn about your business and establish that you are a credible organization.
4. Offering a nonvaluable incentive
Offering an incentive is a common way to get people to sign up for a targeted email list, but it can backfire if the incentive isn’t actually valuable to the customer. For example, you don’t want to offer a coupon that expires the next day, or a discount that can only be applied at one store at a specific time. Make your incentive as valuable to and usable by as many of your customers as you can.
5. Using stolen email addresses
“There are bots that can search the web and aggregate a list of found emails,” said Steffa Mantilla, founder of Money Tamer. “If you add these emails to your list, you’ll likely get reported as spam, and your deliverability will go down drastically.”
6. Skipping the welcome email
When a new subscriber signs up, it’s important to send out a welcome email as soon as possible. This greeting makes the new subscriber feel valued, encouraging them to become a repeat customer. Your welcome email should have a clear subject line, engaging visuals and content, and a link to whatever incentive you promised when they signed up.
7. Using paid advertising too soon
“You don’t want to grow your email list with paid advertising until it’s proven,” according to Kelan and Brittany Kline, founders of The Savvy Couple. “You always want to focus on organic growth to find what actually works, then you can scale things up by running paid ads.”
8. Sending emails without a goal
A clear goal for your overall email marketing campaign as well as each email you send will go a long way in making your emails worth your subscribers’ while. You don’t want to send out emails for the sake of sending emails; this will be clearly felt by subscribers, who may be put off by content that isn’t valuable to them. You should know what you want to accomplish with your emails before you send them. Is it sharing news about your company? Sending a discount code? Informing your customers of a new product? Shape your email marketing content around that goal.
9. Being disingenuous
“I’d stay away from anything disingenuous to the reader,” said Jakub Rudnik, vice president of content at Shortlister. “Ultimately, any bait-and-switch tactics will lead to the sign-ups that you earned unsubscribing more often than not. People are protective of their inboxes, so tell them exactly what types of content they’ll get and how often they’ll get it. You’ll gain their trust far better that way.”
10. Sending too many (or not enough) emails
With email marketing, the best way to retain your customers is to be consistent in your sending habits and let subscribers know what to expect. If you send a burst of five emails every few months, or three emails every day, your subscribers could get annoyed and unsubscribe. Set and stick to a regular posting schedule. Many email marketing services have scheduling features to make this effortless, even allowing you to schedule emails months in advance.
Kiely is a staff writer based in New York City. She worked as a marketing copywriter after graduating with her bachelor’s in English from Miami University (OH) and now writes on small business, social media, and marketing. You can reach her on Twitter or by email.
Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Marguerita Choy
(Reuters) – Adobe Inc ADBE.O said on Monday that it has put a new set of artificial intelligence tools into its digital marketing software with the aim of helping companies sharpen their marketing campaigns.
Once known for applications like Photoshop, Adobe has become one of the biggest providers of software for running such campaigns, which businesses use to decide which of thousands of images and pieces of written to content to show to potential customers. Growth in its marketing software division has helped send shares up nearly 50% this year.
The artificial intelligence features released on Monday aid that effort by, for example, scanning and labelling thousand of product images by colour and shape, or using natural-language processing technology to read an article to determine its subject.
That makes it easier for marketing campaigns to make a recommendation, whether that means showing a person browsing an e-commerce site a pair of shoes similar to ones they have previously viewed or a news website suggesting a story on a similar subject to the one just read.
Such artificial intelligence technology has existed for several years, but using it generally required corporate marketing departments to export data from their systems and work with another division of the business to use, slowing the work down, Ali Bohra, director of strategy and product marketing for intelligence services at Adobe, said in an interview. Adobe has placed the technologies directly inside the marketing systems, reducing the need to export data.
“When you’re thinking about the need to be agile and work in real time, this is not a process that works very well,” Bohra said.
Feature Image Credit: An Adobe Systems Inc software box is seen in Los Angeles, California, U.S., March 13, 2017. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson
Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Marguerita Choy
So, how do we then structure our content to be persuasive?
Good content structure is never written in stone, but persuasive copy will do certain things and contain certain elements time and time again.
Whether you’re writing a sales page, blog post, or promotional ebook, the flow will determine effectiveness.
Here are some guidelines:
First of all, focus on the reader — make an important promise early on (with your headline and opening paragraphs) that tells the reader what’s in it for her. Never allow readers to question why they’re bothering to pay attention.
Each separate part of your narrative should have a main idea (something compelling) and a main purpose (to rile up the reader, to counter an opposing view, etc.) that supports your bigger point and promise. Don’t digress, and don’t ramble. Stay laser-focused.
Be ultra-specific in your assertions, and always give “reasons why.” General statements that are unsupported by specific facts cause a reader’s BS detector to go on high alert.
Demonstrate large amounts of credibility, using statistics, expert references, and testimonials as appropriate. You must be authoritative — if you’re not an existing expert on a subject, you had better have done your research.
After building your credibility and authority, get back to the most important person around — the reader. What’s still in it for him? Restate the hook and the promise that got readers engaged in the first place.
Make an offer. Whether you’re selling a product or selling an idea, you’ve got to explicitly present it for acceptance by the reader. Be bold and firm when you present your offer, and relieve the reader’s risk of acceptance by standing behind what you say.
Sum up everything, returning full circle to your original promise and demonstrate how you’ve fulfilled it.
These are some of the key elements of persuasive copy. Use them to provide a “roadmap” for your writing, and you’ll achieve better results.
Over the last two decades, email marketing and its optimization have been written, talked and argued about—from the tactics of acquiring an email address to subscriber re-engagement and purging.
Personalization is one area of optimization that’s continuously addressed on blogs or at conferences. Each year, marketers gather more data, and have more tools and opportunities to ensure their emails allow the subscriber to feel more connected to the brand. Some brands have been able to leverage the data and the tools to become more relevant to the subscriber, having done so with diligence, testing, resilience and taking risks.
However, many brands have overlooked a key component to relevancy bliss at some point in time: the pre-send experience. This refers to anything that could impact the email program before the email is sent to the subscriber.
It’s not about a beautiful piece of creative, captivating copy and irresistible calls to action with hyper-personalization sent at the right time to subscribers. The optimization of the pre-send experience is sometimes put last on the list of things to do because it’s not sexy, takes time and requires patience.
Inception and administration
There are two equally weighted areas of the pre-send experience that marketers need to focus on: inception and administration.
Inception is tied to what a person goes through to sign up for the email program on a site or on another channel. In many organizations, the website and UX are owned by different groups, which often means that the email department is left out of the optimization discussion even though the objective of list growth is technically shared.
For example, brands like to play hide and seek with the email sign up and place it toward the footer of the site in a small font, because the notion of making it more prominent is often frowned upon by designers. The idea of making a pop-up banner to capture email addresses is too intrusive to the experience. Yet if done right and tested, it can be a stable and sustainable source of email list growth.
HOW SHOULD EMAIL MARKETING STRATEGIES EVOLVE IN A PANDEMIC?
A critical part of inception is the experience you provide on getting data, preferences or choices that people have around your email program. If you have 15 newsletters and capture 11 pieces of geographic and psychographic data points, is that too much for the subscriber to handle the first time they interact with your email program? While the goal is to provide choice, too much choice can overwhelm and turn people off.
As an email marketer for more than 21 years, I encourage clients to go through the sign-up experience at least twice a year with an unbiased group of people to see how easy or painful it was to get on the email list. As marketers, we understand our brand’s process on the site, but often overlook the things that could annoy or frustrate the typical site visitor who wants to sign up for your email program.
A great test to execute this is watching people navigate the front page and looking at the process they go through. After, you should ask the following questions:
Did you find the process to sign up for email easy or challenging?
Do you understand what our email program is about and what to expect?
Do you feel special or do you feel like a number?
The goal is to create an experience your customer can benefit from, rather than what your marketing department wants.
Administration is the ongoing experience your subscriber has during specific points of their email lifecycle with your brand. These things include a preference or subscription centre, cadence or frequency caps, opt-out or opt-down options, and the use or misuse of the data you have on each one of them.
If you have data, use it. But use it sparingly as not to raise the red flag of creepiness.
For example, if you have invested resources and budget into a preference or subscription centre and only leverage or promote it for the inception experience, you could be missing out on critical lifecycle points from the subscriber because things change in their lives.
A preference or subscription centre shouldn’t just capture data points at one point in time and be promoted at the bottom of every email next to the unsubscribe link. It should be publicized at various time stages for each subscriber to update as their life and preference changes.
Finally, if you have data, use it. But use it sparingly as not to raise the red flag of creepiness. Today’s sensitivity of subscribers is at an all-time high and, as brands, you need to be a good steward of privacy.
The optimization of the pre-send experience should be an ongoing project for any organization. It’s time for email marketers to help influence and take ownership of things that have long been assigned to other departments. The email program has long influenced attribution, and marketers today need to un-silo themselves from single-channel expertise.
With the state of third-party cookies and identifiers in flux, as well as increasing regulations around consumer privacy, Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) that can combine first-, second- and third-party data have become the latest tool in the chest for marketers.
Research from Advertiser Perceptions shows marketers generally view CDPs as an important part of their privacy compliance efforts. A sample of 101 respondents were surveyed between July 27 and August 17 to determine their views on CDPs.
For the study, Advertiser Perceptions focused on marketers from U.S.-based companies with at least $500 million in annual revenue.
CDPs impact on success metrics varies. Some 45% of marketers said CDPs have the most significant impact on online sales, while 43% pointed to return on investments and return on ad spend, 41% cited engagement, 41% cited cross-selling, 39% cited cost per action, and 38% cited brand lift. Conversion rate, Customer acquisition, and reduced shopping cart abandonment also came in with a score of 38%.
Companies are using CDPs for a variety of reasons. Marketers are integrating their CDPs with other marketing technologies to personalize communications and improve customer experience and customer journeys. They also apply CDP insights to their ad campaigns to personalize advertising campaigns in real-time, or target specific customer segments.
Internally, marketers use CDPs to better understand various customer IDs and customer-specific insights across the organization that can be fed to other appropriate teams as needed.
While both house customer data, CPDs differ from CRMs.
CRMs can organize different types of customer data, but CDPs can activate that data across the marketing and advertising ecosystem, Stuart Schneiderman, SVP and business intelligence at Advertiser Perceptions, explains in an email to Search & Performance Marketing Daily.
“CDPs pull in CRM and transactional data,” he wrote. “They go beyond by integrating varied sources such as first- and third-party data, mobile, social, web site analytics and product usage data.”
Whereas CRMs limit the information to known data about customers, CDPs use known and anonymous data to create unified views of customers.
CRMs tend to be focused on managing sales and sales pipelines. CDPs go beyond that to implement, manage and optimize advertising and marketing programs that can be aligned to customer journeys.
When survey participants were asked to name the types of data they currently merge or unify with their CDP, 76% said they currently merge CRM data.
Some 65% cited transactional data, while 57% pointed to website visits, 49% cited customer support data, 47% cited first-party customer profile data, 46% use mobile and device-level data, 46% use product use data, and 45% use third-party data. Other types of data cited include social media, anonymized from cookies, app data, and offline data.
CDPs also have a major privacy compliance role, helping marketers as they address challenges and respond to regulations, according to the findings.
About 66% build GDPR and CCPA compliance marketing lists using the data, while 63% centralize and unify customer data, 55% manage compliance programs, 52% enforce opt-out policies, 52% increase transparency around data use, and 52% enforce data retention and use policies.
Other strategies include conducting data audits to validate the types of information collected, enforce the right to be forgotten, and restrict access and rights management to select areas of the organization.
Depending on who is doing the talking, TV’s 2020 “upfront” market was absolutely horrendous or merely awful.
Advance advertising commitments for the next year of TV could be down as much as 15% to 20%, according to six media executives and ad buyers familiar with parts of the industry’s annual negotiations for commercial support for its next programming cycle. The projected shortfall takes place after a slew of regular TV sponsors were crippled by the coronavirus pandemic, and the TV networks’ ability to showcase original content was severely hurt by scuttled and delayed productions.
More concerning, perhaps: some of the drops in advertising outlays could become permanent, as advertisers scramble to get commercials in front of a viewing public that is turning increasingly to streaming, on-demand video. “Things we thought would happen in 18 months or two years are happening in real time,” says one media buying executive. “What may have been the right path six months ago will have to go out the window.” That could leave TV fighting harder to keep ad dollars at a time when the medium needs them more than ever.
The nation’s five English-language broadcast networks could have seen the volume of ad commitments they secured for their next cycle of primetime programming fall by at least 9.3% to 14.6%, according to Variety estimates. It is the first time since 2015 that upfront estimates have sagged. Based on conversations with media buyers and other executives, Variety estimates NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox and the CW have secured between $8.2 billion and $9.8 billion for their 2020-2021 primetime schedules, compared with between $9.6 billion and $10.8 billion for primetime in the 2019-2020 season. Last year, upfront volume surged between 5.5% and 7.4% over 2018.
UPFRONT VOLUME
IN PRIMETIME, AMONG FIVE ENGLISH-SPEAKING BROADCAST NETWORKS
2010 $8.1B to $8.7B
2011 $8.8B to $9.3B
2012 $8.8B to $9.3B
2013 $8.6B to $9.2B
2014 $8.17B to $8.94B
2015 $8.02B to $8.69B
2016 $8.41B to $9.25B
2017 $8.78B to $9.62B
2018 $9.1B to $10.06B
2019 $9.6B to $10.8B
2020 $8.2B to $9.8B
Source: Variety estimates
The numbers should be taken as directional indicators, not hard, cold cash. Upfront figures are typically built on fuzzy math and rarely have any correlation to the ad money big media owners like CBS, Walt Disney, NBCUniversal, Fox Corporation and WarnerMedia collect by the end of the year. Advertisers can pull orders at certain moments in the season or “re-express” advertising if specific programming is yanked off the schedule, changing the nature of their commitment to purchase inventory. But they still serve as a sort of guide as to where money is being sent. In recent years, the figures have lent ballast to the theory that the networks can still keep new money flowing despite ratings erosion and viewers moving to streaming options. This year, the numbers indicate tricky trajectory ahead.
“The advertisers had aggressive expectations for rollbacks, because they all thought a lot of categories were on the side-lines, that the networks were going to get really nervous because they would not have enough of a base,” says one media executive. But the TV outlets resisted some of that pressure, pushing back against harsh demands until they could talk about the return of sports like the NBA, NHL, golf, and, most importantly, the National Football League.
The upfront showed “a mix of stronger demand than many people have estimated just a few months ago,” said Comcast CEO Brian Roberts at a recent investor conference, noting that the company sees “really good signs for both the third and fourth quarter. “
To be sure, the end results were not as robust as they have been in the recent past. Big TV networks in the last three upfront sessions have been able to snare double-digit percentage increases in the cost of reaching 1,000 viewers, a measure known as a CPM that is central to these annual discussions between U.S. media companies and Madison Avenue. Last year, NBCUniversal sought CPM increases of between 13% and 14% for primetime inventory, while CBS pressed for CPM hikes of between 14% and 16%. ABC sought 14%, Fox called for 12% to 13% and the CW pushed for 14% to 15%.
One year later, the rate increases are much more paltry, with ad buyers suggesting CPM rates rose just 3% to 4% for top inventory, with some media companies consenting to single-digit percentage rollbacks for less-desirable and less popular inventory. The media companies are also said to have offered rollbacks for digital inventory – even though some of it was in high demand from advertisers that were ready to spend.
Walt Disney, ViacomCBS, NBCUniversal and Fox declined to make executives available for comment.
If broadcast faced headwinds, cable squared off against a hurricane. Some media executives believe the volume of ad commitments at cable networks could be down by 20% or more.
To keep the dollars flowing, the networks had to be flexible. They offered compelling rates on digital inventory to stoke commitments to primetime. They gave sponsors more wiggle room to claw back dollars in case of a business downturn. And they made sure advertisers would be taken care of if certain big events, such as sports matches, never made it to air.
The Madison Avenue manoeuvre to push back upfront talks may have backfired, according to one media buying executive. Advertisers seeking so-called “calendar-year” deals – agreements that start in 2021 rather than the beginning of new fall TV – found higher costs, says the buyer. “I do think if anybody tried to wait to do calendar deals, they really got hurt.”
Procter undercut its own efforts, not waiting for its calls to shift the upfront to take effect. Instead, the maker of Pampers and Crest did a direct deal with ABC, CBS and NBC, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, rather than working through its agencies. The pact was for broadcast inventory only, these people say, and did not focus on cable. In September, Marc Pritchard, P&G’s chief brand officer, raised eyebrows when he said at an industry conference that “we’ve taken control of when we negotiate and buy TV media. To level the playing field, we negotiate directly with as many as possible.” Most large advertisers rely on one of the ad industry’s big media-buying firms to get such things done. The consumer-products giant declined to offer any details of its deal with the networks, noting in a statement that “we do not comment with regard to any supplier negotiations given they are proprietary to our business.”
There were still some bright spots. Ad buyers suggest NBCUniversal and Disney fared better than their competitors, buoyed to some degree by interest in on-demand hubs Peacock and Hulu. Ad money moved to streaming video across the board, with buyers looking at ViacomCBS’ Pluto and Fox’s Tubi, and even setting aside dollars for the ad-supported version of WarnerMedia’s HBO Max, which one ad executive expects to see debut in early 2021.
Some advertisers gravitated toward Discovery, which has maintained original unscripted programming at outlets like Food Network while the rollout of new comedies and dramas have slowed. Discovery said the number of clients joining its “Discovery Premiere” offer, which puts clients in a package of 30 of its best-known series, increased during the upfront to 75 from 25.
Many networks are looking to better times. Several held back upfront inventory so it can be sold in TV’s so-called “scatter” market, when inventory is purchased closer to the date it airs and is often sold at a premium. Speaking to investors recently, Fox Corporation CEO Lachlan Murdoch said the company had probably held back 5% more commercial inventory than usual in hopes of getting better prices for it later in the cycle.
The networks will need that money.
Based on Variety’s estimate of a 10% to 15% cut in volume, NBCUniversal may have seen primetime commitments fall to between $2.68 billion and $2.84 billion, compared with $3.15 billion in 2019. ABC may have seen primetime commitments fall to between $1.66 billion and $2.18 billion, compared with between $1.95 billion and $2.42 billion a year ago. And CBS may have seen primetime commitments fall to between $2.03 billion and $2.51 billion, according to Variety estimates, compared with between $2.39 billion and $2.79 billion in 2019.
The smaller networks were affected as well. Fox may have seen primetime commitments fall to between $1.36 billion and $1.64 billion, according to Variety estimates, compared with between $1.6 billion and $1.82 billion in 2019. And the CW may have seen primetime commitments fall to between $440.8 million and $$597.1 million, according to Variety estimates, compared with between $592.7 million and $663.4 million a year earlier.
The moves wipe out some the volume gains the networks have made since a three-year stretch in the middle of the decade, when the TV companies had to muscle through tougher upfront sessions in the aftermath of a large recession. They have been helped in recent years by advertiser concerns about offensive content on YouTube and other social-media outlets as well as an inability to get independent consumer data from many digital players.
Last year, Madison Avenue rushed to TV as if Tony the Tiger and the Marlboro Man were still in their prime. As more Americans move to stream their TV favorites, media companies seem to have good reason to worry about how closely advertisers will follow them.
Going into month eight of the coronavirus pandemic, we’re just beginning to understand the long-term impacts that the global event has had on news publishers and how they’re charting a sustainable path forward.
A new report at What’s New In Publishing, “The Publisher’s Guide to Navigating Covid-19,” looks at eight trends that have emerged globally, as well as strategies that publishers have implemented as a result of increased web traffic.
The report’s author, journalism professor Damian Radcliffe at the University of Oregon, notes that it’s difficult to make broad conclusions about Covid-19’s impact. The pandemic has forced some publications to lay off or furlough staff or shut down completely. Others publications, though, have been able to capitalize on increased reader attention and boost subscriptions.
Radcliffe looks at what we know now about the media industry so far, though even more could change in the United States as we inch closer to Election Day and watch President Donald Trump’s recovery from coronavirus. Here are some findings:
Smaller marketing budgets worldwide means advertising-dependent publications will have to pivot if they haven’t already. According to PwC’s Global Entertainment and Media Outlook report for 2020–2024, “global newspaper advertising (print and online) will fall from $49.2 billion in 2019 to $36 billion in 2024, a decline of more than a quarter (27%) over five years…[Alongside this] global circulation and subscriber revenue is expected to fall from $58.7 billion in 2019 to $50.4 billion in 2024,” Press Gazette reported in September.
People are spending a lot more time on their devices, but media consumption has fallen off after an initial surge. Smartphone usage is up 70%, laptop usage 47%, and tablet usage 23%, according to data from the Global Web Index’s Coronavirus Multi-Market study. For DataRePortal, Simon Kemp wrote, “many people say that they expect their new habits to continue after the Covid-19 outbreak passes too. One in five internet users say they expect to continue watching more content on streaming services, and one in seven (15%) say they expect to continue spending more time using social media.” All media, however, from internet surfing to TV watching, has declined since the initial surge in April. That means that news publishers have to get creative about gauging audience interest, and keeping it.
With more new readers, publishers are experimenting more with news products. At the beginning of March, we noticed that publishers were quick to launch coronavirus pop-up newsletters and drop their paywalls on pandemic stories. According to members of WAN-IFRA’s Global Media Trends Panel, more than half of the editorial executives they surveyed had launched new products as a result of the pandemic, Radcliffe writes. “Newsletters are the most common product, with some 55% saying they have launched them, followed by infographics (49%), and videos and live blogs (30%).”
Covid-19 has helped boost subscription numbers for a range of publishers. With advertising revenue down, publishers have leaned into reader revenue and membership programs to fill the gap. More and more publishers are explaining to readers why their journalism should be paid for and they’re doing so on various platforms, including YouTube and Facebook. Some success stories Radcliffe notes are:
The New York Times now has more than 6.5 million subscribers (print and digital), adding 669,000 digital subscribers in the second quarter of 2020. In March, nytimes.com had 240 million unique visitors and 2.5 billion pageviews, up from 101 million uniques in January.
CNBC’s website hit 1 billion page views for the first time in March 2020, more than doubling traffic from February. Subscriptions to CNBC Pro, a premium product costing $29.99 a month or $299.99 a year, were up 189% since January 2020.
Tribune Publishing experienced a 293% increase in new digital subscriptions between March and February 2020. This included an increased conversion rate, from users hitting the paywall, of 109%.
Radcliffe also looks at audience engagement strategies, building loyalty among readers, and the ways that publishers have tried to be more accommodating to advertising. Read the full report here.
Firefox offers the speed and convenience of Chrome—and protects you from prying eyes.
The web browser has become the central app on today’s computers. It’s where people check email and social media, message friends, read news, play videos and music, attend school, do office work, and have socially distanced online meetups. You can learn a lot about someone from what happens in their browser, and dozens of companies do just that with cookies and other tracking technology that build up advertising profiles. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Google’s Chrome browser is fast and efficient. But Chrome has conflicting loyalties between its users and a parent company that is the world’s largest advertising firm. That’s not to say that Google is standing still. The new Chrome 86 includes an impressive list of security upgrades around areas such as password management and preventing harmful downloads. But privacy reforms still lag. For instance, Chrome has yet to disable third-party tracking cookies, although Google says it intends to in coming years.
But you don’t have to wait for Google. Firefox, a privacy-focused browser from the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, already blocks third-party cookies and a wide range of other tracking technologies. Firefox also offers many bonus features, such as the Pocket web-clipping tool and the ability to reformat web pages, so they are easier to read.
Mozilla has demonstrated a years-long commitment to its users as an alternative to big tech that puts people’s privacy and security ahead of everything else. Those efforts have accelerated in the past few years with the development of aggressive but user-friendly anti-tracking technologies, which helped Mozilla earn a nod as one of Fast Company‘s Most Innovative Companies of 2019.
And Mozilla continues to innovate. Most recently, it became one of the first browser makers (Google isn’t one of them) to adopt a new version of the Do Not Track signal. This one sends a signal to automatically opt the user out of the sale of their data under the California Consumer Privacy Act.
While that tech is still in its infancy, Mozilla also just made some concrete privacy improvements by upgrading its Enhanced Tracking Protection to more aggressively block snoops on the desktop. And for Apple users, Firefox is now a better alternative on mobile devices. The new iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 now let you replace Safari as the primary browser, so that links from email or other apps can automatically open in mobile Firefox.
Yet for all the new features Firefox brings, the transition from Chrome (or another browser) is a cinch. In minutes, you can be up and running with a new browser that offers all the conveniences of Chrome, along with better privacy.
If you’ve been putting of switching browsers out of laziness, we’ve got a handy guide to help you get set up. We’ll take you through the process of switching to Firefox and discovering key new features, including all of Firefox’s security and privacy services. Some, such as Pocket, you will access by clicking icons that appear along the top of the browser. Others you’ll reach by clicking on the “hamburger” button of three horizontal lines in the right-hand corner of the browser window and clicking through the popup menu.
INSTALLING, IMPORTING, AND SYNCING
After you download and install Firefox, it’s time to import key information like bookmarks and website logins from Chrome. This is the deepest rabbit hole you’ll have to go down when setting up Firefox.
First, click the three-line hamburger button and select Library. Next, click Bookmarks, then scroll to the bottom of the window and click Show All Bookmarks to open the Library window. Now click the third button from the left at the top of the window (featuring up and down arrows) and click Import Data from Another Browser. Follow the instructions to import your choice of cookies, browsing history, saved logins, and/or bookmarks from your old browser. To get a fresh start, free of any trackers, uncheck Cookies before the import.
Tip: you can also press Ctrl+Shift+B (Windows) or Shift-Command-B (Mac) to open the Library window.
Looking just to the left of the hamburger button you’ll come to a circular icon representing a person’s head and shoulders. This takes you to your Firefox account. By signing up for Mozilla’s free cloud service, you can sync all aspects of your browsing—such as bookmarks and history, or even open tabs—over the internet to other computers or mobile devices running Firefox. This account also enables you to use some cloud-based security features I’ll describe in a moment.
You can select what information to sync through the cloud, such as bookmarks and open tabs.
FIREFOX’S KEY PRIVACY AND SECURITY ENHANCEMENTS
The top reason to switch to Firefox is for its enhanced privacy. Starting at the hamburger icon in the upper right of the browser, those features begin to emerge.
Encrypted DNS lookups
When you start using Firefox, you’ll see a popup pinned to the hamburger button that alerts you to the use of encrypted DNS lookups. Here’s what that means: Whenever you type in a site URL like “amazon.com,” your browser has to check something called the domain name system (DNS) to see what numerical IP address corresponds to the site name you’ve entered. Typically these lookups are unencrypted, potentially allowing an internet service provider (ISP) or hacker to retrieve a list of all the sites that you visit. Chrome encrypts DNS requests if your ISP offers the capability. Firefox is more aggressive, automatically routing all DNS requests to an encrypted service, regardless of the ISP you use.
Firefox automatically routes DNS requests to one of its carefully vetted encrypted service partners.
Protections Dashboard for privacy overview
Click the hamburger icon, and one of the first items you see is the Protections Dashboard. This takes you to the heart of Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection, with a tally of all the trackers that the browser has blocked so far, and descriptions of how they work. This includes third-party (or cross-site) cookies: small files that reside in your browser and report the sites you visit back to marketers. Firefox also blocks tracking code in online ads, as well as “cryptominer” scripts that commandeer your computer to generate cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin. Finally, the browser blocks fingerprinting, which collects specific computer and web browser settings, such as the plug-ins installed, to develop an identifier for advertisers. (Enhanced Tracking Protection is enabled by default on the Firefox Android and iOS apps, too.)
The Dashboard shows tallies and explains the different kinds of trackers that Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection automatically blocks.
To see what Firefox has blocked on the current web page, click the shied icon that appears just to the left of the address bar at the top of the browser window. (The icon turns from gray to purple when content is blocked.) A popup provides details on the specific trackers that have been blocked.
Click the shield icon to see what Enhanced Tracking Protection has blocked on a particular site.
Firefox Monitor for data breaches
Right below the Enhanced Tracking Protection summary, you will see an invitation to sign up for Firefox Monitor. It checks your email address against a database of emails that have been leaked (often along with passwords and other data) in security breaches over the years. If you sign up, a summary of breaches involving your email appears on the dashboard page. Now that you know what accounts have been compromised, you can change your login for the breached service, or shut down the account, to insure that hackers can no longer access it.
Firefox Monitor reports whether any online accounts tied to your email address have been compromised.
Lockwise password manager
The final element on the protections dashboard is Firefox’s password manager, Lockwise. By default, Firefox offers to save any username/password logins you enter on web sites. These go into Lockwise, along with any logins you may have imported from your previous browser when you set up Firefox. If you sign up for a new online account, Lockwise will offer to generate and remember a super-secure password when you right-click the password field on the website. Lockwise has Android and iOS/iPadOS apps, so you can sync logins through your Firefox account across all your devices.
Lockwise generates and remembers secure passwords that you can sync across devices via your Firefox account.
Facebook Container limits social network tracking
The hamburger icon menu has a lot more options, and one more is especially worth mentioning: Add-ons. Click on this, and search for the Facebook Container. This extension is designed to guard against the way that the social network tracks you across the web. For instance, those like and share buttons that appear on many web pages register that you visited the site featuring them, even if you never press the button. Facebook also places cookies to see if you visit the sites of its advertisers. The Facebook Container doesn’t affect your experience on Facebook itself, but it blocks Facebook’s tracking tools on all other sites.
The Facebook Container add-on prevents Facebook from seeing what other sites you are visiting in Firefox.
SWITCHING YOUR SEARCH ENGINE
Switching from Chrome to Firefox doesn’t completely free you from Google, as it’s the default search engine for Firefox. Even with Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection, Google can still track you through your IP address and through cookies that Google places when you use its search engine. (Firefox doesn’t block the “first-party cookies” placed by the web site you are visiting, only third-party cookies placed by outside advertisers.) But you can change the default search engine to DuckDuckGo, which doesn’t track your activity over time to build advertising profiles.
Start by typing any term into the address bar. A dropdown menu previewing results appears. At the bottom right corner of the dropdown is a gear icon. Click it to reach Firefox’s search preferences page. Under “Default Search Engine,” click the down arrow to open the dropdown menu, and select DuckDuckGo from the choices.
You can change your search engine to DuckDuckGo for further protection from tracking.
FIREFOX’S HANDY FEATURES
The switch to Firefox rewards you not only with better privacy but with several handy usability features. Let’s take a tour of a few, beginning right in the address bar.
Reader View’s streamlined article mode
On certain pages, such as newspaper articles, an icon representing a printed page appears just to the right of the page URL. Click this to enter Reader View, which strips away ads, navigation menus, sidebars, and other extraneous elements to give you a clean page for easy reading or printing. A toolbar to the left provides several viewing options. Clicking the “Aa” icon allows you to change font style and size, paragraph and line spacing, and the page color. Click the headphones icon to hear the article read aloud. (Reader View, without dictation, is also available in the Firefox Android and iOS apps.)
Reader View provides a streamlined page in your choice of type and page style.
Pocket web clipping
To the right of the address bar you will see an icon of a shield with a chevron pattern. This activates Pocket. Just press the button to save a copy of the web page you are viewing to your Pocket account. You can tag each clipping with one or more keywords to organize your sources. It’s also a convenient way to save an article you want to read later, when you have more time (including on Pocket’s free mobile apps).
You can add keyword tags to web pages when you save them to Pocket.
Sending tabs to another device
If you use your Firefox account to sync multiple devices, you can use this handy feature to send the tab you are viewing to another device. For instance, you can start reading an article at your computer and finish it on your phone’s Firefox browser, or vice-versa. To send a tab from the desktop browser, click the Firefox Account button in the upper-right of the browser window and select Send Tab to Device.
Use your Firefox account to send the tab you are currently reading to another device.
