Category: Affiliate Marketing Tips

Advertisers’ interest in longer-term spending is a sign of stability continuing to return to the advertising market after the coronavirus pandemic pressured the media industry into months of short-term dealmaking. It is also part of the years-long trend of advertisers gravitating toward fewer, bigger partnerships with media companies, ones that increasingly involve more than just the buying and selling of ad space. 

“[If I’m an advertiser today] I don’t need to do a direct deal to buy weight on a site,” G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller said. “If I’m going to do a direct deal, I want to do something that’s got meat to it.”

But the trend is also a sign of how publisher-advertiser deals could continue evolving, as media’s buyers and sellers adapt to the coming end of third-party cookies. As publishers amass more first-party data and get better at using it to track changes or shifts in their audiences over time, it creates greater incentives for advertisers to stick around for longer.

“There’s a positive correlation between the increased demand for longer, bigger partnerships and the degradation of the cookie,” said Josh Stinchcomb, the global chief revenue officer of Dow Jones Media Group, which includes The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and Marketwatch. 

“Advertisers have been able to cobble together performance metrics across multiple sites; that’s going to get harder… We can measure multiple exposures to their messages using just our first-party data.

“They have to accept our first party as valid,” Stinchcomb added. “But that’s what they accept from the walled gardens today.” 

These kinds of opportunities extend to publishers that reach niche audiences too. “This is a win for a company like mine because we have a mostly organic audience that goes deep within our demographic,” said Morgan DeBaun, the CEO of Blavity, a startup that operates seven media brands aimed at Black audiences. 

DeBaun said she’s noticed more brands inquiring about multi-year partnerships this year, going back to conversations she and colleagues had around Black History Month. Many of the conversations, DeBaun said, involve partnerships where the metrics change over time, evolving from awareness metrics to conversion.

Watching that shift happen over time requires sustained looks at one audience. “We’re going to be doing a lot more research studies,” DeBaun said.

Publishers that have attracted those audiences allow for non-endemic brands too. For example, Dow Jones recently named Macallan the official scotch of Penta, a luxury and wealth sub-brand that’s now part of Barron’s.

Long-term sponsorships are not a new thing; publications such as The Wall Street Journal have been selling multi-year partnerships to brands around its most sought-after audiences for years.

But as these changes come along, some publishers have reorganized internally in a bid to pitch and win these deeper partnerships. The Atlantic’s “Inheritance” project came out of Atlantic Ventures, a cross-departmental team meant to find ways to develop large editorial ideas and get advertisers involved from the jump.

Editorial and salespeople will always dream of realizing big projects like that. But this year, for The Atlantic at least, they are an important part of reality: projects developed through Atlantic Ventures are projected to deliver 10 to 20% of the company’s ad revenues this year, according to The Atlantic’s chief revenue officer Hayley Romer.

Through March 12, media publishers can apply for TikTok’s Instructive Accelerator Program, which kicks off in April. Twenty-five publishers will be chosen, a smaller pool from last year’s selection of 45. This time around, TikTok is focused on “quality over quantity,” said Brett Peters, education and non-profit content partnerships lead at TikTok, adding that in an effort to hone in on what is the most engaging for the community. (The number of individual video creators and other partners selected for the fund is still to be determined.)

While Peters wouldn’t say how much money TikTok will be paying fund recipients this year, he did say partners would be paid “fairly” to make the program a “worthwhile endeavor.”

Last year, TikTok paid individual publishers $50,000 to publish 35 posts over a seven-week period, Digiday previously reported. In addition to the payments from the platform, publishers will also be able to sell ads or sponsorships against the videos made with the help of TikTok’s grants.

The program has four, eight-week cycles during which publishers will post videos four times each week. At the end of each cycle, TikTok will let publishers know whether or not they are moving to the next cycle.

Any partners not meeting “our minimum threshold requirements” may be replaced by another partner, Peters said. Those metrics are “determined internally,” said Peters; he declined to give more information. TikTok also offers publishers in the program monthly webinars and one-to-one content strategy meetings with growth strategists.

The initiative was created last year as part of TikTok’s COVID-19 relief fund for creators and publishers in support their production of educational content and resources for young learners. The first round of the fund launched in May 2020 with $50 million for over 2,400 participating partners. The #LearnOnTikTok hashtag was created at that time to amplify the program partners’ content and has generated 75 billion video views.

The fund’s name change signals that it will live beyond and outside of TikTok’s COVID-19 relief efforts for creators and publishers, according to Peters.

Advertisers are more willing to experiment on platforms like TikTok as a result of the pandemic, said Andrea Mazey, BuzzFeed’s vp of talent partnerships. Allie Wassum, vp/group director of social strategy at Digitas, echoed this from the advertiser’s perspective. “Lots of exploratory budgets” are going to TikTok, she said. “You’re not going to have a viral moment anywhere else other than TikTok right now.”

Last year’s program had media companies like Discovery, Insider and Group Nine Media participate. Group Nine’s science brand Seeker produced TikTok content around environmental issues and received a licensing fee and advertising opportunities. The program revealed that instructive, informative, thought-provoking or actionable videos inspired other TikTok users and creators to produce similarly focused content. “There was a ripple effect,” Peters said.

For this year’s program, TikTok is looking to pay publishers to create content in a greater variety of categories such as mental health, sports, fashion, video editing and music.

In selecting publishers that produce educational and engaging videos, TikTok will not only consider publishers’ videos on TikTok but also on other platforms like YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. Applicants for the grant can show how a video format is performing well on another platform and how that can be converted to a format for TikTok.

“There’s a lot more innovation happening in the short-form space,” Buzzfeed’s Mazey said. “The stakes are lower, so you can iterate and play on insights in a more rapid way.”