The Digiday Podcast

Sienna Mae Gomez is a definitive overnight sensation. In August, she posted a video to her secondary TikTok account that attracted hundreds of thousands of views within hours and led her to become one of the platform’s biggest stars.“I gained a million [views] like every three days. It was crazy. It was just going so fast. From the span of August to maybe October-November-December, I was gaining a million [followers] like every week or two weeks,” Gomez said in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.Gomez’s rapid rise has hardly slowed. If anything, its pace has picked up. In the eight months since posting that video in August, she has accrued more than 22 million followers combined across her two TikTok accounts, signed with Hollywood talent agency ICM Partners, attracted deals with brands including Maybelline and Levi’s, launched a YouTube channel, started her own bathing suit line and is set to star in a reality show on Netflix.The third guest in a four-part series on individual content creators, 17-year-old Gomez represents a generation who grew up seeing YouTube stars chart a career out of creating videos and posting them online. She also symbolizes how the business of being a creator has matured and how creators today have solidified themselves as part of the Hollywood firmament.“I think if you told someone back in the 50s, ‘Oh, there’s gonna be an app, and it’s gonna create celebrities.’ They’d be like, ‘That’s literally insane.’ But times are changing,” Gomez said.

The allure of Substack has lured many journalists away from their traditional newsroom roles to a position of becoming their own editors, artists, marketers, accountants, and most importantly, bosses. Emily Atkin was one of the first to feel the draw, leaving her position as a staff writer at The New Republic in September 2019 to launch her climate change-focused newsletter, Heated, that same month."I definitely did not have the idea beforehand. I was at the place in my job at the time where I wanted to make a move. I weighed my options [and Substack] seemed like that was what made me the most excited," said Atkin. "I was trying to trust what would be the thing that brought me the most joy and sort of sense of purpose. And that's where the idea came from."A year and a half later, Heated has more than 40,000 free subscribers and boasts a conversion rate of free to paid subscribers between 8-12%, which Atkin said is the metric she obsesses over to indicate her path to success. With that proof point, she said she is ready to add to her team to deliver more value to the paid subscribers, who represent Heated's sole source of revenue. She did not say how many paid subscribers the newsletter has.This episode is the second of a four-part series on independent content creators that includes interviews with YouTubers, TikTokers and Substackers. The aim of the series is to show how these individuals — commonly labeled bloggers and vloggers, influencers and freelancers — are essentially turning their passions and hobbies into their own media companies, as well as highlight how this segment of the media industry is becoming more mainstream and setting standards for how digital media companies should approach these platforms themselves.

Alisha Marie and Remi Cruz have built their careers by posting videos to YouTube. But their businesses have grown beyond Google’s digital video platform. Since Marie launched her YouTube channel in 2008 and Cruz debuted hers in 2012, they have diversified to other platforms and revenue sources, including commerce and a joint podcast called “Pretty Basic” that the pair premiered in October 2018.“Being entrepreneurs or the businesswomen we are today was never the goal or the mindset. It kind of just evolved slowly,” said Marie in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast. This episode kicks off a series in which Digiday Podcast co-hosts Kayleigh Barber and Tim Peterson will interview independent content creators, including a Substack writer and a TikTok star. The aim of the series is to show how these individuals — commonly labeled bloggers and vloggers, influencers and freelancers — are effectively forming their own media companies as this segment of the media industry becomes more and more mainstream.

TikTok has risen rapidly from being a new platform for marketers to kick the tires on to becoming a staple in some advertisers’ social budgets. “Curiosity, for sure, has exploded. We were a test partner, I would say, in 2020, and 2021 is the year that we want to be trusted,” said TikTok’s head of global agency & accounts Khartoon Weiss in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.The latest sign of that trust is a three-year deal that TikTok has signed with IPG Mediabrands. The deal marks the second arrangement that the ByteDance-owned company has struck with a major agency holding company this year, following a deal with WPP announced in February. The agency holding company deals signal that TikTok has reached a new crest in its relationships with advertisers and agencies — two groups that may still be figuring out how to use the platform — but are invested in that education.Through IPG Mediabrands’ deal with TikTok, the agency group and platform will hold quarter-long “creator camps” for popular TikTok users to provide feedback on brands’ TikTok strategies and campaigns as a part of a broader program called “creator collective.”“It’s a new initiative that connects brands with forward-thinking and diverse creators who will advise on strategies and best practices, which is what we honestly get asked about most,” Weiss said.

Turner Sports is using the recent return of sporting events to bolster new initiatives in both advertising and audience building. In the heat of March Madness, which has returned this year after taking a 2020 hiatus, Tina Shah, evp and general manager at Turner Sports, said her team has been integrating innovation in both production and content for the event’s ad campaigns after seeing a strong return of interest from advertisers.Beyond that, Shah said in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast that these events mark the perfect time to try and engage both younger — and female-skewing audiences — after recognizing the linear coverage of live sports is not quite cutting it. Bleacher Report’s House of Highlights is leading that charge by creating new livestream competition shows while B/R is working to champion representation of women athletes across its site — something both fans and advertisers appreciate, she said. At the end of the episode, Shah also spoke about her experience as a woman building a career in sports media and how representation of women both on screen and behind scenes on the business side is important to creating a successful, impactful business.

A successful first-party data strategy incorporates data into every facet of the business — from advertising to affiliate to licensing.At least that’s how Trusted Media Brands’ CEO Bonnie Kintzer is approaching the company’s first-party data strategy. So far the company's notable revenue growth is proving this to be a good move.The company’s advertising revenues have been up 40% year over year, with particular growth in programmatic business since the beginning of TMB’s fiscal year July 1, Kintzer said. Meanwhile, its affiliate commerce business has seen 75% growth year over year, with January coming in at double its revenue from the same month the previous year, she added.“We may have been a little bit late to the [affiliate] party, but [we’re] making up for lost time,” Kintzer said.

There is a reason why most conversations start by addressing the weather. It's a universal talking point that affects everyone, regardless of backgrounds and demographics, making it an easy icebreaker.Marketers love the topic too and publishers like The Weather Channel end up benefiting greatly because they attract large audiences that span whatever targets an advertiser is hoping to reach.In February alone, The Weather Channel's website and app reached 430 million active users, according to Sheri Bachstein, the global head of Watson Advertising and The Weather Company, owned by IBM.Bachstein discussed the ways in which The Weather Channel and IBM are making the most of its audience and first-party data, including creating an AI-based data offering and launching a subscription product on its app to diversify revenue with the help of nearly 1 million super weather fans.

The digital advertising industry is in the midst of an identity crisis. Between the third-party cookie’s impending demise and Apple’s mobile app tracking crackdown, advertisers and agencies are having to figure the future of identity in digital advertising. Fortunately, that future has been a long time coming.“For better or worse, the crystal ball has been decently clear that this is the direction we’re going from regulatory pressures, from a consolidation in terms of who is owning and controlling experiences through the lens of a browser, through the lens of an operating system. So we take solace in that there’s been a bit of a head start,” said GroupM global head of partnerships Kieley Taylor in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast. Taylor was joined by GroupM global head of social Amanda Grant.Further helping advertising figure out the identity situation is Apple’s mobile app tracking crackdown. That change is expected to take place this spring and is “giving us really good training wheels for the cookie-based changes that are going to come about,” Taylor said.However, what that experience is showing so far is that advertisers may want to exchange the training wheels for off-road tires as they try to navigate the bumpy trails ahead. Although Apple has been fairly clear in saying that apps will need people’s permission in order to continue to track them for advertising purposes, “the platforms are all interpreting that very differently as it impacts their platforms. So it’s not like we have a single rules of the road for social activation moving forward,” said Grant.

Harper's Bazaar is a 153-year-old legacy magazine using social media platforms to help it become a modern, digital fashion authority.The brand's digital presence not only helps amplify its print stories, but diversify revenue through e-commerce and advertising — turning fans of the magazine into digital consumers of luxury fashion and beauty.And three months ago, Nikki Ogunnaike rejoined the magazine as its new digital director to help strategize ways it can grow and monetize its audience, including staying on top of digital trends."Now is this weird, sort of wild, wild west time" of new social media platforms that Harper's has to consider in its digital strategy, including Clubhouse and Twitch, said Ogunnaike on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.

The ways in which publishers solved their 2020 problems vary, but Bustle Digital Group's approach included reestablishing longterm relationships with advertisers in a variety of categories and leaning on retail partners like Amazon to bring in incremental commerce revenue.During the first quarter of 2020, Bustle Digital Group was projected to be up 40% in revenue over 2019 by the end of the year, according to Jason Wagenheim, BDG's president and chief revenue officer. But by March, reality of what the year would hold had set in and that projection was thrown out the window."We had the darkest 72 hours in our company's history where literally tens of millions of dollars just cancelled within a three day time period," said Wagenheim in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast. "There was a lot of panic at the start of the pandemic."Ultimately, BDG ended the year about 5% up from 2019, thanks to its position in a myriad of advertising categories. Wagenheim did not provide exact revenue figures. "It's the importance of being able to satisfy retail as much as tech as much as auto as much as fashion," he said.