Category: Affiliate Marketing Tips

This year’s Interactive Advertising Bureau’s four-day NewFronts kicked off yesterday with digital content platforms and publishers giving presentations to marketers touting new advertising offerings and slates of video shows.

YouTube, Vizio, Amazon and a range of minority-owned media companies pitched their content, audience reach and ad offerings, with a focus on their ability to engage specific audiences — Gen Z, diverse and passionate entertainment and sports viewers in particular.

Ad spend in the U.S. grew twice as fast in the digital video space compared to the overall digital media market in 2022 (up 21% vs. up 11% overall), and digital video advertising is projected to hit $55 billion in 2023, said IAB CEO David Cohen in his welcome remarks, citing findings from IAB’s latest report on video ad spend that will be released on Wednesday.

Eighty-five percent of U.S. households have at least one CTV device being used every month — up from 80% in 2020, per the pending IAB report.

The key details:

YouTube touts its Gen Z audience and creators and its short-form content

Minority-owned media companies pitch their diverse audiences to marketers

Vizio announced the launch of a new branded content studio and talked up its “home screen hero unit”

Amazon put the focus on its FAST service Freevee, and the expanded amount of content that will be available to advertisers on the platform this year

Hear from Google’s generative AI chatbot Bard – and how it won’t help you get a rundown on this years’ NewFronts

Short-form ambitions

Short-form video was front and center during YouTube’s NewFront as it continues competing with other short-form video platforms such as TikTok and Meta. During its Monday morning presentation, YouTube announced it’s expanding Shorts to the company’s “video reach campaigns” — Google’s AI-powered way of letting marketers buy media across skippable and non-skippable ads as well as other formats. YouTube also will let advertisers appear next to trending Shorts content and/or in a new “first position” ad slot on Shorts to reach users at the beginning of a viewing session.

During its presentation, YouTube mentioned just a few advertisers that have already been using its new ad tools — namely Adobe, Paramount+ and Unilever.

Ads on Shorts will soon be available to all marketers on the platforms, YouTube announced during its presentation, but did not share when that feature will go live. It will also soon expand “beyond video action campaigns to include video reach campaigns,” which means Shorts can be used for both performance advertising and for brand awareness and consideration campaigns, said Kristen O’Hara, vp of agency and brand solutions at Google.

Shorts are being watched by 1.5 billion people each month,and racking up 50 billion views daily, O’Hara added.

Creator Alan Chikin Chow gave marketers tips on how to create a compelling Shorts video:

The hook: the first 3-5 seconds need to get a viewer’s attention before they decide to stay or swipe to the next video.

Watch time: “king” on YT Shorts, the longer the 60-second video can retain a viewer’s attention, the better a video will perform, Chow said.

Rewatch value: a Shorts video plays on loop until the viewer scrolls away – meaning a video should give the viewer a reason to watch the loop, such as having a funny or surprising ending.

Spotlight on diverse audiences

Sheila Marmon, founder and CEO of Mirror Digital; Deva Bronson, evp and global head of brand assurance at Dentsu and Melvin Wilson, founder and president of Solve Innovation Group, gave their annual grade on how the industry is doing on its DEI efforts. The average: about a “C”. 

“I might have started us at a D four years ago, and I think I trended up slightly over the last four years. Unfortunately, now I think we might actually be back around a C or a C-minus. Not because the efforts are failing, but more because the energy behind the movement is starting to wane, which is very worrisome,” said Bronson.

A whole segment of the first day at the NewFronts was dedicated to showcasing a number of minority-owned media companies, including Blavity, Cocina and iOne Digital. All three companies presented at the IAB at “no cost,” Cohen said in his opening remarks.

Morgan DeBaun, founder and CEO of Blavity Inc., a Black-owned media company that owns six digital publications, said the company’s video content had a 125% increase in total minutes watched year over year. And It is expanding its diverse publisher and ad management platform this year to service over 25 publishers.

Cocina pitched its content slate and Hispanic audience, saying the company reached 35 million devices on a monthly basis.

And iOne Digital – a company that said it reaches millions of listeners monthly on radio and TV – said it reaches 80% of Black Americans every month. During the presentation, iOne Digital’s execs agreed that in order to sell to Black Americans, marketers’ need to know and understand this audience much better than they do at present.

Attracting entertainment and sports viewers

Smart TV company Vizio announced the launch of a new branded content studio called VCBS, working with brands like BetMGM to create custom video series. Vizio also promoted WatchFree+, its free, ad-supported streaming TV service, which now has over 260 linear TV channels as well as an on demand library.

Vizio pitched its “home screen hero unit” which allows media and entertainment advertisers to buy into the home screen experience on its TVs, to encourage viewers to tune in or engage with auto-playing video, links, storefronts and QR codes to boost sales, said Sean Booker, senior director of sales in media and entertainment. In the past six months, time spent on Vizio’s home screen grew 53%, according to the presentation. 

Amazon’s presentation focused on entertainment and sports content that will be available on its free streaming platform Amazon Freevee. By the end of 2023, over 100 of Amazon’s most-watched original series will be available for viewers to stream on the platform — and allow advertisers to appear alongside shows like Goliath and Mozart in the Jungle.

Amazon also announced it will host the NFL’s first Black Friday game this season for free, instead of only for those that pay for its Prime streaming service. Advertisers will have the ability to segment the football game’s audience into custom cohorts and show different creative assets to different viewers in the same ad break, Alan Moss, vp of global advertising sales at Amazon Ads, told Digiday on Monday.

For example, an auto company can show a sports card ad to a younger adult, an SUV ad to a sports enthusiast and a general ad to everyone else at the same time, he explained. Brand storytelling ads will also launch this year in beta on Amazon Freevee, giving advertisers the ability to tell a story over multiple, sequential ad breaks.

Amazon’s data clean room Amazon Marketing Cloud will now be available worldwide, Moss added. Previously, it was limited to beta customers. Brands can create and update their Amazon DSP audiences within AMC and activate them in Amazon DSP.

Reaching Gen Z

YouTube’s presentation featured a number of YouTube creators focused largely on the platform’s ability to reach Gen Z. YouTube creator Jon Youshaei who helped host YouTube’s presentation said the platform has paid out $50 billion to creators, artists and media companies over the past three years. The platform now has more than 30,000 creators with 1 million subscribers or more, he added.

The Gen Z creators onstage – including Asia Jackson, Larray and Darcei – gave advice to advertisers in the session on how to reach others in their age group: Keep it authentic by trusting the creator with the creative, build trust with the consumer, make sure there’s a fit between the brand and the creator’s audience, and have more Gen Z people in the room making decisions on how to reach them.

AI might muddy your NewFront news

When Digiday asked Bard what was announced during YouTube’s presentation on Monday, Google’s young AI-powered chatbot told a different story. According to Bard, YouTube also announced new partnerships with Coca-Cola for a series of short-form films on YouTube, a new partnership with Nike including a series of workout videos and a partnership with P&G that includes educational videos about health and wellness.

When Digiday asked Bard for a source of the news, the bot said it got the information from a press release quoting YouTube Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan, who’s now the platform’s CEO.

However, all three of those were entirely made up — a product of the “hallucination effect” that continues to plague not just Bard but other generative AI bots including ChatGPT.

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Publishers are following in the footsteps of advertisers that have pulled money out of Twitter since Elon Musk took the helm six months ago. Some media organizations are now doing the same, and no longer paying to promote posts on Twitter to draw more eyeballs to their stories or sponsored content.

“Publishers are seeing the platform as toxic and unstable, and no one really wants to put their budget or energy into maximizing a platform that feels toxic and unstable,” said Melissa Chowning, founder and CEO of Twenty-First Digital, an audience development and marketing firm, in an email. Chowning’s “handful” of publisher clients that previously retained ad spend with Twitter have walked away from the platform, she said.

The social media platform had previously appealed to large brand advertisers, but companies from Coca-Cola to Best Buy paused their advertising on Twitter when Musk took over the company last October, due to controversies, uncertainties and changes that plagued the platform. This month, Twitter started winding down its legacy verified program that gave blue check mark badges to notable figures or organizations — particularly news publishers — to indicate their accounts were truly theirs. Now, individuals can pay $8 or $11 a month for that check mark, and most organizations will have to pay $1,000 for Twitter’s new gold check mark verification badges launched this month.

Of three national publishers Chowning works with, and declined to name, none of them “had any interest” in paying for Twitter’s gold check marks, she said.

Earlier this month, MediaRadar analyzed Twitter spend among 17 major U.S. news outlets, including Axios, CNN and HuffPost from Jan. 1, 2022 through Feb. 28, 2023 and found an 83% year over year decrease. The Atlantic, The Guardian and The Gist told Digiday they are no longer paying for paid posts on Twitter.

According to MediaRadar’s report, the news publishers it analyzed collectively spent just $279,000 from January to February 2023, a sharp decline from the $1.7 million spent during the same period in 2022. Axios and CNN declined to comment on this story.

Holding onto their wallets

Publishers like NPR and PBS have left Twitter entirely — both as users and as advertisers. A spokesperson at The Atlantic said they are not doing any paid marketing on Twitter right now; they declined to comment on this story.

The Guardian hasn’t placed paid posts on Twitter over “the last few months,” a spokesperson said. The Guardian declined to answer questions about when or why they stopped, but a spokesperson said the organization was “keeping an eye on developments.”

Newsletter publisher The Gist stopped paying for ads on Twitter about two years ago, co-founder Ellen Hyslop said. Advertiser clients have expressed “no interest” in having sponsored content boosted on the Twitter platform since then too, she said. Two digital publishing execs told Digiday in January that clients were not interested in advertising on Twitter.

“Twitter felt like it started to be a place and a community that was a little bit more negative than positive,” Hyslop said. “We started to see from our audience, a little bit of a mass exodus from Twitter because of fake news that unfortunately people were experiencing on Twitter.” Hyslop believes this move was accelerated by more news content getting shared on other social platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

But some still bullish on Twitter

Other publishers, however, are still spending money on the platform. News newsletter publisher 1440 started paying for ads on Twitter last December after not advertising on the platform in at least three years.

“We’re spending about six-figures a month on Twitter right now. It’s been about 10% of our [subscriber] growth over the last couple months,” Huelskamp said. The newsletter publisher currently has over 2.4 million newsletter subscribers. He declined to share exactly how much money 1440 spends on Twitter per month.

“We had tested Twitter previously and that just wasn’t feasible for companies like us… It was just not a good channel for folks that are doing direct response advertising,” he said. “Something like 90% of the clicks that came to our site would never convert.”

But when Huelskamp noticed that paid posts on Twitter were changing from “Bank of America ads to T-shirt ads,” 1440 started to pay to promote their own posts on the platform. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Twitter has more direct-response advertisers now paying for posts on the platform.

A publishing executive who spoke to Digiday anonymously said Twitter’s paid posts are converting newsletter subscribers “on par with Facebook and Google.” The publisher is spending around $2-6 cost per acquisition, they said.

HuffPost’s Twitter ad spend is “very small and based on client demand or if a branded content campaign calls for it,” a spokesperson said. They did not immediately respond to questions about how much they’re spending on the platform or if they’re paying to promote their own content on Twitter.

Declining role in referring traffic

Another reason for the decline in ad spend from publishers on Twitter is likely the platform’s declining role as a traffic referral source to publishers’ sites.

In 2022, referral traffic from Twitter to news & media sites dipped by 20% year over year, according to data from publisher analytics firm Chartbeat. Chartbeat analyzed Twitter traffic to over 300 U.S. news & media sites in 2023 and found little change since January.

Data from Similarweb also showed a decline in referrals from Twitter year over year in March 2023 to about a half dozen major news websites. Publishers such as BBC, CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post and USA Today each saw referral traffic from Twitter fall between 36% and 49%.

“[For] our marketing efforts, we’re constantly looking for the best returns. Sometime it’s on Facebook, sometimes on Google, sometimes [on a newer platform],” the publishing executive said. “We’re just constantly trying to find that perfect wave.”

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