The Digiday Podcast

For Apartment Therapy, it just makes sense to bridge its events business with commerce. Not because the expectation is to make $10 million from affiliate commissions, according to the company’s president Riva Syrop, but because it’s only fair to give attendees every opportunity to make a purchase as possible – the struggle she often faced when attending industry trade shows.So during this year’s flagship shopping event Small/Cool, as well as smaller co-sponsored events like Dine By Design, Sryop’s team worked to figure out how this model worked both for consumers and sponsors alike, including using transaction data as a KPI.That said, as the economy toughens and advertisers look for more bottom-of-funnel advertising strategies, experiential – regardless of how transaction-focused it is – is one campaign type that might get put on the back burner until late 2023.“[2022 has] definitely not been my favorite year, if I’m being honest. It has been a slog.” said Syrop during the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast. “Advertising was very difficult. A lot of our normal, big partners pulled back in the back half. So we did fine this year, but I feel much more optimistic about what's to come [in 2023] than what we're coming out of,” she added.Apartment Therapy earns about 70% of its revenue from advertising, equally split between the direct and programmatic businesses. Commerce contributes 15% and events contributes another 10%, with the remaining 5% coming from the company’s licensing businesses, which includes product and content licensing through a number of partnerships.To give more “breathing room” to both advertisers and consumers, Syrop said that Small/Cool will be moved from its Q2 timing to the back half of the year in 2023, with the hope that the economic downturn will have bounced back by then.“What we often see is consumer content consumption behaviors change, you sometimes see consumer purchasing behavior change, sometimes the advertiser behaviors change, but rarely do they all change at the exact same time. So this was definitely a readjustment year for us,” she said.

To anyone hoping that California’s updated privacy law would help to simplify privacy compliance in the U.S., sorry. That doesn’t seem to be the case. Instead, the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), which takes effect on Jan. 1, seems set to muddy the privacy landscape even more.“CPRA is this unique kind of beast that has complicated privacy significantly for organizations in the U.S.,” said Sarah Bruno, a partner at the law firm Reed Smith, on the latest Digiday Podcast.One aspect of the CPRA needing clarification is the difference between the law’s “contractor” and “service provider” labels. “A contractor is a company that you make data available to, and a service provider’s a company that processes the data on your behalf. That’s not super clear, is it? We need more clarity on that,” Bruno said.The CPRA does clarify some aspects of California’s existing privacy law, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which took effect in 2020. It covers the sharing of data for cross-contextual behavioral advertising purposes, which helps to resolve the CCPA’s Rorschach-esque definition of sale that caught Sephora in the crosshairs of California’s attorney general.The CPRA’s addition of sharing data has “eliminated the question that we had with [the CCPA’s definition of] sale,” said Bruno.Besides, for as much as the CPRA may mix up the U.S. privacy picture for companies, the more prominent complicating factor remains the absence of a comprehensive federal privacy law. “We’re still going to have these nuances until there’s a federal law that addresses this,” Bruno said.

In recent years, data clean rooms have grown in importance to media and advertising companies' businesses. But this year has been "a step-change year where clean rooms became more sophisticated," Therran Oliphant, svp of data and technology at Essence Global, said during the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.The (supposedly) impending demise of the third-party cookie and increasing scrutiny from privacy regulators have pressed advertisers, agencies, tech platforms and media companies to adopt data clean rooms as a means of protecting their first-party data while activating it for advertising purposes.Already a fixture in major advertisers' dealings with tech platforms like Google, Meta and Amazon, this year data clean rooms were a key component of TV upfront ad buyers' and sellers' negotiations. Then, in October, Google announced its Publisher Advertiser Identity Reconciliation program to facilitate advertisers' and publishers' use of clean rooms for programmatic buying and selling. And in December, IAB Tech Lab plans to release its first draft of standards for clean rooms.Despite all the developments -- or maybe because of the developments -- the data clean room remains an enigmatic aspect of the advertising business because of its broad application."There is really no one ultimate application of that data," said Oliphant. "It could be that this particular data might be used for advanced analysis. Or to join data sets together so that a brand could understand more attributes about their user. Or so that they can go to market and activate media against those users."

Condé Nast's third quarter was seemingly better than what other media companies have reported, at least according to Craig Kostelic, the company's global chief business officer.In August, Axios reported that Condé Nast is on track to surpass 2021 revenues, equating to more than $2 billion, which is inclusive of both advertising and consumer revenue. Kostelic confirmed this report on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast and added that even just the commercial and advertising side is "definitely going to exceed last year's total," though he declined to share hard revenue figures for that business in particular.This growth is primarily credited to the company's ongoing globalization process, according to Kostelic. Through this process, the sales teams in both the U.S. and Western Europe have started working in tandem, versus being siloed, to sell larger global campaigns to advertisers -- a reorganization that Kostelic has been overseeing since entering this role in 2018.Starting in the New York City office, he said the first step was switching the sales team from being brand focused to category focused, meaning instead of one salesperson only selling ads for one title like Wired or Vogue across a number of advertising categories, an individual salesperson is now category specific and has the ability to sell ads on any and all parts of the company's portfolio.Not immune to challenges, Kostelic said that while starting to replicate this same transition with the Western European teams this year, he's needed to learn from the mistakes in the first go around and really focus on clarity and transparency with the sales team to make sure that people feel supported in their new roles, especially during an economic downturn.

Semafor launched on Oct. 18 with a business model that’s entirely reliant on direct-sold advertising and event sponsorship revenue – a risky business in some eyes during the current economic climate.But the company’s founding CRO Rachel Oppenheim is confident that her team’s client-centric approach, which prioritizes “innovative” branded content and running ads against “experimental” editorial products, will be the wind in Semafor’s sails, she said on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.Not only that, but focusing on the pockets of advertisers’ budgets that are directed to corporate reputation building will help insulate the company from the ebbs and flows of consumer and product advertising, which for now, is not a priority in the sales team’s selling strategy. Programmatic is also not a part of Semafor’s advertising mix, once again, preferring to build relationships with clients that are hopefully long term, according to Oppenheim.While having launched with partners like Verizon, Mastercard and Pfizer, Semafor recently came under criticism for having gasoline manufacturer and distributor Chevron as an advertiser on the company’s Climate newsletter in its second week, to which many criticized as tone deaf and irresponsible in the coverage of climate change.Oppenheim said post-interview in an email to Digiday that “advertisers have no bearing on our editorial coverage and we maintain a strict separation between news and third-party advertisement."

Let’s be clear: The advertising market has hit a rough patch amid the broader economic downturn. But that hit has not necessarily been a full-on body blow.“We’re seeing some shifts [in advertisers’ spending] but not necessarily dramatic cuts,” said UM Worldwide’s U.S. chief marketplace officer Stacey Stewart in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast. To be clear, she added, “Don’t get me wrong when I say there hasn’t been many cuts. They’re still cuts. They just haven’t been as dramatic as I think we all had feared.”Typically, advertisers are cutting ad dollars from deals that provide less flexibility, such as those earmarked for traditional TV. “That’s where we saw a lot of the cuts,” Stewart said.To an extent, advertisers are holding on to those dollars, but they are also redirecting them to places that provide greater flexibility for advertisers to cancel deals as well as more performance-oriented ad opportunities.“There’s definitely a shift to more immediate results — lower-funnel metrics if you will — focusing on revenue in the short term versus branded-building,” said Stewart.

More than a decade ago, Dan Roth left the world of traditional journalism to join LinkedIn as the business-centric social platform’s executive editor. Eleven-plus years later, the former managing editor of Fortune.com and now editor-in-chief and vp at LinkedIn has built up the platform’s news operation into one that bears some of the hallmarks of a traditional outlet.“I had a lot of belief in what the company could create, but I didn’t know how it was going to work out. And I wasn’t entirely sure what I was getting into,” Roth said on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.Under Roth, LinkedIn’s news division has been getting into producing more original content, from newsletters to podcasts and videos. In September, the platform announced the hire of former CNN executive Courtney Coupe to be its first head of original programming, which appears to portend the next phase of LinkedIn’s editorial ambitions, which were already raised earlier this year with the formation of the LinkedIn Podcast Network.“The hiring of Courtney Coupe is designed to push us in a more professional way through creating original video and audio content,” Roth said. “There are about 180 people on the editorial team at LinkedIn. But half that team comes from a business journalism background, and almost all of those who come from a business journalism background come from mostly writing. So it’s a text-heavy team. When you’re creating audio [and] creating video, there’s something unique about creating that content.”

Unionization has been on the rise at media companies over the last nearly three years after the pandemic upended the way publishers work. But it seems that the list of concerns shared amongst journalists, editors and other media employees is only growing and few resolutions have been met during that time.It's all created a need for more communication, community rallying and strategic training, to get workers the most leverage possible when communicating with management, said Susan DeCarava, president of the NewsGuild of New York, which represents unions including The New York Times, Insider, The New Yorker.In the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, DeCarava discusses why unionization is on the rise and how her team has implemented programs like the Strike School to help embolden media employees to make change within their companies, be it around the return to the office, equitable pay or ensuring equal treatment amongst employees.

It’s been nearly a year since German-based Axel Springer acquired Politico for over $1 billion, which included both the U.S. and EU iterations of the brand, in addition to the almost 3-year-old technology-focused title Protocol. Since that acquisition, the Politico brand has started undergoing a merger of sorts internally as well.Despite sharing a brand name and founder — Robert Allbritton — Politico U.S. and EU have operated as separate businesses until earlier this year. Now, Politico EU’s chief revenue officer Nicolas Sennegon said the Washington, D.C.-based and Brussels-based teams have developed global ambitions that include working together to sell ads across both regions, bundle subscriptions and find ways to editorially cover unfolding political news for readers around the world.Most of the cross-brand collaboration has originated at the advertising level, which represents about one-third of Politico EU’s revenue currently (the other two-thirds come from its subscriptions business, which runs about €17,000 per year), according to Sennegon. But as the brand pursues its global expansion, he added that there are opportunities to further link those two sides of the business, by turning subscribers into advertisers, where Politico EU already sees about a 50% overlap.On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Sennegon said that over the next year, Politico will be further branching the two brands together, though he would not disclose exactly what a global Politico will look like or when we can expect its launch.

Publishers’ commerce businesses can take many forms nowadays, from earning small commissions with in-article affiliate links to creating an entire direct-to-consumer (DTC) product line that turns a publisher into a retailer.But given commerce revenue is down this year for some media companies and the economic slowdown has put restraints on shoppers’ wallets, publishers may need to rethink their commerce strategies.Take Hearst which is in the process of launching a new marketplace in the fourth quarter. The marketplace is meant to be the new hub for the company’s DTC products and licensed products, but it will also be a new sales channel for the brands and products that readers of Hearst’s media brands regularly shop for as well, according to Sheel Shah, Hearst’s svp of consumer products and partnerships on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, which was recorded in front of a live audience at the Digiday Publishing Summit on Sept. 20.This is an expansion of the media company’s current commerce shop strategy, which consists of 20 individual online branded shops for nearly all media brands in the Hearst portfolio, including the Oprah Daily Shop and Good Housekeeping Shop. The shops currently sell branded merchandise and licensed goods and are collectively on track to make 500,000 transactions this year, a 15% increase over the previous year’s transactions, according to the company, which declined to share hard revenue figures.Ultimately, Shah hopes that the marketplace can tie together the company’s commerce business — from DTC and licensed products to affiliate links to direct brand deals — and ultimately drive digital subscriptions to the brands in Hearst’s portfolio.