Future of Media: Euro Pride, sustainable billboards, Pinterest weight rules
Good afternoon media reader. Next week our Sports Marketing deep-dive is acoming, but for now, here's this week's stories.
Pinteresting development
Does a better ad experience actually make app users happier and keep them using longer? Pinterest is betting on that with a best-in-class set of new protections and rules around weight-loss ads. Its brand strategy is based on positivity – happy users keep on getting inspired, keep on pinning and, ultimately, keep on buying.
So we looked at its new rules and explored how a more body-positive ad product could impact the app. Will this inspire change from media rivals?
Euro rainbow
Real talk. The last few years have been relentless, you'd be forgiven for thinking the world is slowly degrading into chaos – a reflection on the media we consume and the model funding it. The bad stuff, the crazy stuff, climbs to the top of the pile while the incremental improvements in culture and society remain unheard amid such noise.
But after more than a few PR scrapes around the Pride rainbow, Uefa gave sponsors the go-ahead to include it in their ads. Around half of the official sponsors took the opportunity to make an inclusive effort, aware there are so few out players at the top of the men's game.
We studied which brands made these impactful buys and why. We would never have seen these concessions made in Russia 2018 and I can't help but think these efforts made the world a slightly more tolerant place.
Sustainable out-of-home
We all love billboards. They don't interrupt. They aim to inspire, educate, amuse (the good ones anyway). Out-of-home could be a huge lever in the green transition societies around the world must make – we've all saw those record high temperatures this week, it is Taps Aff in Glasgow (just Google it).
So Neil Tookey, vice-president and head of commercial trading at Essence, kindly took us through how the medium can guide us, pointing to some really clever campaigns so far.
Snapping point
Snapchat's ad revenue soared 66% this year according to its recent earnings report, up to $770m. The ad product really came along in lockdown, with the launch of e-commerce and AR shopping tools, rolling out its dynamic ads format globally and opening up its Reserved Buys tool.
Adidas Canada reported a 4.4-times incremental return on ad spend after using the tool, Snap claims. Is it too good to be true or will the app be a staple of all smart Christmas campaigns later this year?
Meet the Media Minds
Keith Tiley, global chief investment officer at Wavemaker Global, was in the hot seat for Meet the Media Minds this week.
The veteran started off as a TV buyer and is wowed by the quality of content hitting the smaller screen. In fact, he believes advertisers could be hurting production.
"As a business, we continue to treat media as a commodity and push to the lowest prices. We're all complicit in that: clients, consultants and agencies. As we typically pass the burden back to the media owner, this impacts their margin and, in turn, their content budget. As content quality subsequently erodes, audiences decline and the migration of advertiser money accelerates – it’s a vicious circle."
There's something to think about - read more here.
That's you all caught up. If you missed the last installment, read it here. You can subscribe to our other briefings here. And if you want to talk to me, I'm on Twitter, Linkedin and email