The Feed

Tubi racked up viewership in 2020

Tubi, the streaming service owned by Fox, reported a sharp rise in viewership during 2020 and a near doubling of streaming hours; it now has 33 million monthly active users. 

The details

• Viewership was up 58%; viewers are, on average, 20 years younger than those of linear television and nearly half of MAUs are under the age of 35.
• Many of those can’t be reached through cable TV; Tubi claims an 80% incremental audience to the top 25 cable networks.
• It also reports a representative Hispanic audience (Index 101) and an even larger African American audience (Index 167).

Takeaway

As the effects of the pandemic bite and many people have less money to spend, they are turning away from cable TV and SVOD and opting instead for ad-funded streaming platforms.

Procter & Gamble outlines consumer habits that will survive the pandemic

Procter & Gamble, the consumer packaged goods manufacturer, believes that a variety of habits that have taken root during the COVID-19 pandemic will have long-term staying power.

Why it matters

The COVID-19 pandemic has boosted demand for household, health and hygiene goods, but marketers in these sectors need to understand which behaviors might endure, and those which are temporary in nature.

Several months of lockdowns, anxiety surrounding personal health, and occasional product shortages have led to a demand spike in a variety of P&G’s major categories, providing a boost to offerings from Tide laundry detergent and Ivory soap to Gain dishwashing liquid and Febreze air fresheners.

“Those increased levels of consumption are accompanied in many cases by new habit formation or habit strengthening,” Jon Moeller, P&G’s chief operating officer and chief financial officer, explained on a quarterly earnings call.

”Unfortunately, we've not been at this for four weeks or eight weeks where … behavior might snap back to pre-crisis levels. We've been at this on a global basis, even in the US, for a year. And that does tend to form habits, which means some higher level of consumption should continue to occur post-crisis.”

Takeaways

• While people will revel in freedom from lockdowns, the comforts of home are set to have an even greater importance than before the crisis.
• Health and hygiene is an area where consumers have necessarily placed greater focus due to the spread of Coronavirus, and this habit can be expected to outlast the pandemic.
• For a house of brands like P&G, categories that have struggled during the peaks of COVID-19 could be critical to driving post-crisis growth, when pent-up demand is unlocked.

IPA Bellwether: UK marketing budgets continue falling, recovery expected in 2021

As expected, UK marketing budgets continued to decline into Q4 2020, though less sharply than in Q3, but with recovery on the horizon, marketers are echoing consumer sentiments of macro gloom while also being more positive about the prospects for their own company.

What it means 

The turmoil of 2020, where lockdown restrictions actively shut down certain advertising formats (such as cinema), appears to be edging closer to equilibrium in 2021. Greater positive sentiment, despite a strange macro picture, suggests that brands are planning to lay the foundations for recovery.  

Details

• A net balance of -24.0% of panellists from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising's (IPA) latest Bellwether Report logged a contraction in marketing budgets during the final quarter of 2020.
  
• Just 16.4% of firms noted an increase in available funds.
• Some 40.4% of firms experienced a decline.

Looking ahead to 2021

• The coming financial year, 2021/22, is more optimistic, with a net balance of +12% of firms expecting total marketing budgets to be revised upwards.
• Interestingly, optimism abounded when panellists talked about their own company's prospects, with a net balance of +18.1% of firms now more confident of an improvement, compared to -3.9% three months ago.

Analysis: What the WhatsApp exodus says about trust

The backlash against the popular messaging app’s privacy policy changes won’t destabilise either WhatsApp nor parent firm Facebook, but it points to the high cost of trust when you haven’t built it – Sam Peña-Taylor.

On Saturday, the Financial Times reported that Facebook-owned WhatsApp would be delaying the privacy policy changes that had sparked outcry from users and led many to at least introduce themselves to smaller rivals able to tout their privacy credentials more compellingly. The reversal, the company says, is at least partly to “clear up the misinformation” around its privacy policies.

It is true that fears got ahead of facts, especially around sharing message content, which WhatsApp itself can’t access, let alone Facebook. But behind every widespread rumour there’s the kernel of a deeper truth.

WeChat racks up $250 billion in transactions in 2020

Products worth almost $250 billion were sold last year through WeChat, the Chinese messaging app, more than double the year before.

Transactions were via WeChat’s “mini programs”, which allow brands to sell services and products directly to app users, TechCrunch reports.

The details

• Interest in the use of mini programs shot up as brands looked to e-commerce to counter the drop in sales when physical stores closed during the pandemic.
• Mini programs have now expanded to cover a wide range of WeChat users’ everyday needs, with transportation, department store shopping and sporting goods especially popular.
• The number of active daily users was over 400 million by December last year, the company says, up from 300 million the year before. WeChat has 1.2 billion monthly active users.
• The number of mini programs used by each user was up 25% during the year. 

The context

The numbers signal Tencent, WeChat’s parent company, is a growing challenger to the e-commerce sector’s well-established giants, which include Alibaba, JD.com, and Pinduoduo.

Analysis: Lessons in out of home from the Media Awards’ Data winners

WARC’s Chiara Manco looks at 2020 WARC Media Awards winners that have used data to inform innovative out-of-home strategies.

Among winners of the 2020 WARC Media Awards’ Best Use of Data category, were many examples of effective uses of out of home. From the informative to the emotive, they show how data can enrich out-of-home communication through contextuality and personalisation.

Casual games attract large audiences but little spend

Casual mobile games are most attractive to audiences but this fails to translate into higher levels of consumption or in-game spending, according to data from mobile intelligence company App Annie. Instead, core games take a smaller share of downloads but a large share of activity.

Why it matters

Marketers need to recognise that different games deliver different levels of reach and engagement, so they need to tailor their strategy according to the KPIs they are interested in.

Takeaways

• Regardless of the approach, marketers need to integrate their messaging into the gaming content, not interrupt it.
• Advertisers may be missing out, though – audiences are receptive but WARC's survey of over 1,000 marketers finds that 40% of brands don't plan to advertise across gaming formats in 2021.

Sourced from App Annie, WARC Data

Apple's iPhone philosophy would revolutionise the electric vehicle space

Coverage of Apple’s nascent automobile interests has tended to focus on these vehicles' purported autonomy. However, for most technologies, the game changer is more likely to be the slow burning development and normalisation of electric cars that such a move would represent – and this future is mixed.

What it means

The implications of Apple’s entry to the mobility space would be seismic, not only for its potential to reset the car market (and the category branding conventions), but also to reshape it around bringing together best-in class tech under the hood, rather than making it all in-house.

Breakdown

It’s well known that certain concerns persist among consumers, not least high costs and more recently range anxiety, though fast-charging may be about to change this. As could the weight of the Apple brand.

Any entry by Apple into the car industry is 'certain' to affect the auto sector’s competitive landscape, but it will also catapult the many firms that go into the manufacture and assembly of batteries and, further down the line, sensor systems.

P&G’s Pritchard predicts all ads will involve 'some form of digital'

All advertising will ultimately incorporate “some form of digital” component in the future, Marc Pritchard, Procter & Gamble’s chief brand officer, has predicted.

During a session at the Variety Entertainment Summit, a conference held as part of CES 2021, Pritchard argued: “All advertising and media will become some form of digital, some form of programmatic, data-driven and automated.” 

Why it matters

The growth of channels like digital out of home and connected TV means what was once defined as “traditional” media inventory can now be purchased via systems that enable precise targeting and measurement. Even cinema, a touchpoint that has suffered greatly during the COVID-19 pandemic, has got in on the act, allowing for clearer measurement than in the past.

The payoffs from digital capabilities

As more media channels are infused with digital planning and buying capabilities, Pritchard noted, it will let marketers:

• “define the audiences that we want to reach”;
• “define what kind of programming we want our brands to be associated with”;
• “recognise … there is a huge ocean out there, and there are a lot of fish, and there are just a few that you have to go with.”

Continued Pritchard: “That's the beauty of what we have here with programmatic … and the advent of connected TV: it just opens this vast opportunity to ensure that we can reach people, the people we want, where we want, when we want, in a safe environment. And it will be good for the entire industry.”

Predictions for the next decade of sport streaming

As streaming enters the mainstream of sports viewing, a new paper anticipates that fans will increasingly subscribe to a handful of services, expecting the ability to switch plans on and off as needed.

Why it matters: The magical critical mass for sports streaming success might be 50m active subscribers, as two media veterans predict how the direct-to-consumer streaming giants, with their large international audiences and flexible packages, leave no one dominant player but multiple platforms selling certain sports.

This is according to an exploration of the future of sport broadcasting by the media consultants and former heads of NBA Broadcasting in the 1980s and 90s, Ed Desser and John Kosner, writing in Sportico.

Still got it: “Sports is appointment viewing, an advertising magnet and a means of counter-programming against services with stronger libraries like Netflix.” Sports are both promotion machines and some of the most promotable content out there.

Growth potential: SVOD platforms are approaching saturation in many markets, but the US has its own quirks of distribution. Broadband penetration is higher than traditional cable networks, which makes the exposure an SVOD platform offers arguably superior to cable providers given the headroom in the market.

The really worrying thing: the new guard of video titans – Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple – “can justify outspending linear TV because of their scale, applications for data, and superior monetization capabilities.” Worse still, they don’t even have to.

One size no longer fits all: Leagues are likely to align with the highest bidder, which means that the all-in-one subscription for all available sports will likely recede. In its place, platforms able to reach out to a younger fanbase will make individual sports more accessible.

Investors call out Omnicom and Home Depot on ads fuelling misinformation

Investors in advertising giant Omnicom and the home improvement retailer Home Depot are calling for investigations into whether the companies may have paid for digital ads that appeared alongside hate speech and misinformation.

Resolutions have been filed by both groups of shareholders calling for independent investigations to look into whether advertising policies “contribute to the spread of hate speech, disinformation, white supremacist activity, or voter suppression efforts”.

The context

• The resolutions make clear investors consider advertisers cannot distance themselves from the context in which they advertise. “Advertisers are not passive bystanders when they inadvertently finance harm,” the resolutions said. “Their spending influences what content appears online.”
• Companies are now believed to spend over half their global advertising dollars on digital platforms, where ads are mostly placed using algorithms with no oversight of the content alongside which they may appear.
• Recent research revealed 1,668 brands had run 8,776 unique ads on 160 sites that published misinformation about the 2020 election.

Takeaway

The Capitol siege, greatly fuelled by misinformation about voter fraud and conspiracy theories, is seen as a game changer. Shareholders’ current action signals that a lack of supervision over where advertising dollars end up is no longer acceptable – plus, it’s a risk to a brand’s, and so investors’, interests.