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Over the last year, companies and agencies have been scrambling for ways to attract and retain talent amidst the Great Resignation. Some agencies have trialed extensions of Summer Fridays — or even a four day week — for some extra time off; others have encouraged employees to cowork in the metaverse to starve off Zoom fatigue.
But as the Great Resignation continues to loom, siphoning talent from the industry because of a lack of work-life balance, intense workloads and ultimately burnout, employees question employer sincerity. In this edition of our Confessions series, in which we exchange anonymity for honesty, Digiday talked to a brand salesperson about empty talk on mental health support from companies and job hunting during a pandemic.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
What happened that made you question your last company’s sincerity about burnout and mental health?
I was really burnt out. It got to the point where I didn’t even care anymore. It was a race of ‘am I going to get fired first or am I going to quit’? They sent an email about mental health, burnout and all of the traditional things that they’re supposed to say, like “If you need help, tell your manager.” In my touch base with my manager, I said, “I am not Ok. We’re having challenges. I really need time, a vacation or extended time to regroup.” The next morning, I had a calendar invite with HR and my manager. I’m like, “Oh yeah, they’re about to fire me.” I was actually relieved to get fired because I had wanted to quit for so long. That email on burnouts that said talk to your manager, I thought that was genuine. But bringing that up to my manager was the last straw that she needed to get me out. It’s obvious that they don’t mean what they say. It’s just to look good.
Have you gone back to work since being let go?
I got a new job the same month. This job was interesting because we were [working] in person. But even though we were in person, I was able to quickly identify that the culture was not what I expected. What I found was that people were short [with you]. You could tell people were holding on by a limb, stressed. I started back on the job hunt in December.
Since starting back on the job hunt, do companies seem to be offering more to attract and retain talent?
I wouldn’t say they’re rolling out the red carpet. Companies are still very selective and operating in their normal way. What is happening is candidates are becoming more selective in what they’re looking for. They’re looking for that culture, that work-life balance that, from what I experienced at the big companies, especially with layoffs, it just comes with more workload. I was seeing people’s priorities shift from working at big companies with big titles to wanting more balance. I’ve even been applying to companies that I usually wouldn’t, and I have friends that are starting to do more freelance.
How did that change your outlook out your relationship with work?
I was in a therapy session and I said, ‘With each promotion and elevation that I’ve experienced, it’s come at the cost of my mental health, my well being.’ It came at the cost of less time to do things for me, like go to the gym or go grocery shopping. I felt guilty. I [was] in back-to-back meetings all day. So after five o’clock, that meant I needed to catch up on the work that I couldn’t do because I was in meetings. Or that meant many mornings waking up at five or six in the morning to try to get things done before work starts because the nine-to-five turned into meetings and catch up. Those meetings — It was just people going through the motions and transactions.
What should companies be thinking about when recruiting?
It’s not as much about the benefits, but the balance, the humaneness of the company, the culture and the managers. It’s not that they expect you to work till 10 o’clock. But when you’re in meetings all day, and you have a heavy workload, you’re forced to work till 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock at night. I’m looking for where my job is actually done at five, a true nine to five. I’m looking for a culture where I can have balance and my work can be done at 5pm.
They still expect the work to get done. The issue is that these companies have too many priorities, and one person is doing the job of multiple people. You can do summer Fridays, you can do a day of rest and you can do vacation time. But the issue is when you get back to work, your workload is still there.
In today’s crowded and increasingly digital marketing landscape, you need a strong content strategy in order to reach your audience.
Here’s why:
Your content strategy is what makes your brand visible on search engines. It helps the right customers find you at the right time and provides the best possible user experience once they’re on your website.
In this guide, we’ll cover the specific steps you should take to develop your content strategy, plus real-world content strategy examples from brands who are doing it right.
Let’s get started!
Quick Takeaways
A content strategy is a holistic approach to delivering information to customers. It is different from content marketing, which is the execution of your strategy.
Clearly-defined goals and performance metrics are foundational components of your content strategy. They keep your strategy focused and help you measure its success.
Buyer personas are a valuable tool for defining your target audience prior to launching your content strategy.
Strong keyword research is essential to successful SEO for your content strategy.
Amplifying your content on your own platforms and making it shareable for users will increase your brand visibility and reach.
What is a content strategy and why is it important?
A content strategy is a holistic approach to delivering the information your customers need across channels and at every stage of the buyer journey. It makes content a strategic asset for your company — one you can leverage to drive traffic, leads, engagement, sales, and other business objectives.
As you can see below, companies can choose from a wide range of content to deliver at each phase of the buyer journey. Potential customers at each stage have different needs and require different kinds of information, meaning companies must be intentional about what, how, and when they deliver the various content they create. Having a defined content strategy is critical to this effort and one of the surest ways to maximize content ROI.
It’s important to note that a content strategy is not the same as content marketing.
Think of it this way: your content strategy defines the overall mindset, culture, and style for communicating with your customers through content. Content marketing covers the execution of that strategy — your techniques, tools, channels, and of course actual content.
This distinction is crucial. Any company can publish content with fairly minimal effort. But to create consistent, high-value, relevant content that both helps your customers and drives your larger business goals is a much more complex undertaking. This is demonstrated in a startling statistic from SEMRush that found that while 91% of companies use content marketing, only 9% would rate the results of their performance as excellent.
So where’s the missing link? I’d venture to guess that almost all of those companies feeling dissatisfied with their content’s performance are missing a strong content strategy behind it. But you don’t have to be one of them. Let’s dive into how you can develop a content strategy that connects the actual content you create with the goals you want to accomplish for your business.
10 steps to a killer content strategy for your brand
Set your goals
The first critical step to a content strategy that will deliver is to set well-defined goals that can guide your strategy and help you measure its ultimate success. I recommend using the SMART goal framework, which helps you set goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Setting clear goals and knowing what you want to achieve better positions you to outline the rest of your content strategy.
Buyer personas are representations of your customers that help you determine needs, pain points, motivations, and behavior. Ultimately, they should help you understand what your customers are trying to accomplish and how your offerings can help them do it. That’s why you should always keep your personas focused on actionability rather than arbitrary traits.
When you’re developing personas, aim to define:
Content your target customers use
Topics they are interested in
Types or formats of content they prefer
Channels they use
Stage of the buyer journey
Keywords they use to search and
Questions they ask
These insights can help inform the content pillars you should focus on (more on that next), what topics to cover, and what types of content will best engage your audience.
Determine content pillars and types
Content pillars are the main categories from which all your content ideas originate. Think of them as the “buckets” or “themes” under which all of your content can be organized. They’re central to your content strategy because they determine what matters to your audience and serve as a guide for your creators, keeping them focused on creating pieces that align with your larger goals.
To really use pillars to drive results, you should keep them somewhat broad, allowing you to come up with a range of topics and content ideas to fall under them. Tag every piece of content you create under the appropriate pillar(s) so that you have visibility into the volume and types of content being created for each. Finally, stick with your content pillars for an extended period of time to give your content a chance to drive SEO results.
Establish your brand voice
Your brand voice defines the overall personality you put forth when you communicate with customers. It’s an important component of how brands make connections with their audience and plays a central role in the customer experience. Your brand voice, like your pillars, also serves as a guide for content creators and ensures your content is an accurate reflection of your company.
To develop a strong brand voice, you’ll want to set parameters around language and tone. For example, should your blog posts be casual and conversational or formal and strictly informative? Which words or phrases should be used consistently to refer to specific products or buyers and which should always be avoided (like cliches or outdated terms)?
It’s a good idea to put together a documented guide with dos and don’ts around brand voice to help content creators stay consistent and on the mark.
Conduct keyword research and develop your SEO strategy
Did you know that 93% of all online experiences start with a search engine? If you don’t rank on search engine results pages (SERPs) for keywords and phrases that your customers are searching for, you’re essentially invisible to your audience.
One of the keys to ranking on SERPs is effective keyword research. You can conduct it using tools like the Keyword Magic Tool from SEMRush. Once you have keyword ideas, you can develop your SEO strategy by aligning keywords with the buyer funnel and your content pillars. These steps ensure your content gets to the right customers at the right time.
For more on how to conduct keyword research with the SEMRush tool, watch a quick overview on each below:
Brainstorm content ideas
This is the fun part! Now that you’ve outlined buyer personas, content pillars, and brand voice and conducted keyword research, you have the information you need to begin coming up with your content ideas. This means outlining topics, titles, and types of content you’ll create to engage your audience.
Think creatively about how to communicate each of your topic ideas. For example, a how-to for using one of your products might be best published as a video, while a top ten list of resources on a particular topic might be better as a listicle blog post.
The Content Marketing Institute recently created this helpful content brainstorming guide with techniques to help you feel inspired and get more creative with your teams.
Create a content calendar
Your content calendar is a critical part of the execution plan for your content strategy. It determines how and when you’ll publish your content and keeps you on track and accountable. Check out our previous article on content calendars and templates for more on how to create one, or download our own template (linked here and shown below) to get started now!
Outline key metrics
How will you determine if your content strategy is a success? First and foremost, you’ll need to outline which key metrics you’ll measure. Many of these metrics will come from your original SMART goals, but now that the rest of your content strategy has been developed, you can get even more specific.
The five most important key metrics I recommend using to assess content performance are:
Traffic – Traffic is the one metric you must measure. If no one is landing on your website, no one is reading your content, and your strategy will not be successful.
Conversions – Conversions measure the rate at which your web visitors are taking action (such as subscribing to your newsletter or making an ecommerce purchase) after interacting with your content.
Engagement – You can track engagement by looking at data points such as time spent on your site and number of pages visited per session
SEO Performance – Track SERP rankings and how they are changing over time.
Authority – High authority drives better SEO and more traffic. Authority is not quite as cut-and-dry as the other metrics, but you can use this guide from Moz to help you determine yours.
Create awesome content
Content creation is no small undertaking, and publishing consistently is one of the most important drivers of content marketing success. Part of developing a strong content strategy is thinking thoroughly and realistically about who is going to create and publish your content.
Your two primary options are to create content internally or to outsource to an agency. Both have pros and cons, but I will say this: if you don’t have an internal team that is experienced with creating optimized content and has the bandwidth to do it, outsourcing is almost certainly your best option.
The biggest concerns companies typically have about outsourcing content are cost and loss of control over content, so let’s address those here.
There’s no denying that outsourcing comes with costs. But if you don’t already have an established content team, outsourcing is actually more cost-effective than building a team internally. When you outsource, you don’t have to worry about costs like salaries, benefits, or office space. You don’t have to worry about the time or additional human resources needed to manage a new team.
Outsourcing also allows your existing team to focus more on strategic work related to your core business initiatives.
As for control over your content, know this: a good content marketing agency will take time to get to know you, your goals, your brand voice, and much more. They will have ways to maintain ongoing communication with you built into their processes that allows you to see and provide feedback on all of your brand’s new content.
This one’s a no brainer! Don’t just publish content and hope it does well on it’s own. Amplify your content by making it as shareable as possible and sharing it yourself in other places. Share your content on social media, include it in newsletters and emails, and ask employees to share content, too! In short: the more your content is shared, the more it’s seen, and the higher your ROI on it will be.
Content strategy examples to inspire you!
While we don’t have access to other brands’ internal documents and strategy development meetings, we can see great strategy when it’s reflected in content. To help you get inspired, check out these 7 real-world examples of high-quality content strategy execution.
Hubspot’s inbound marketing strategy
When Hubspot launched in the early 2000s, founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah were pioneers of inbound marketing with online content. Realizing that traditional sales methods were becoming less effective as people were inundated with more media and information, they quickly began building a blog covering topics relevant to their customer base.
Over time, they established strong brand authority and online presence for a wide range of marketing topics. Today marketing professionals know them as a go-to resource for inbound and content marketing information. Their success lies heavily in their ability to pinpoint customer needs and create high-volume, high-quality content — blogs, videos, infographics, original research and more — that addresses those needs.
Spend a few minutes scrolling through their blog and other content libraries and it’s clear how the customer is at the center of everything they create. You can see it, too, in Hubspot’s customer code — a guide by which the entire company operates. Dharmesh Shah’s deep dives into how you can grow your brand using their customer code are valuable reads.
Blendtec’s marketing team launched their “Will it Blend?” video series in 2007. It featured founder Tom Dickson blending extremely non-blendable items to show just how powerful their product was. The series was a hit — it increased their sales by 1000% and now has hundreds of millions of views.
The reason I like it as a content strategy example is for their clear brand voice in the videos. Blendtec decided that selling a practical household product didn’t need to be boring. They created a relatable, funny brand voice that connected with customers and made their brand recognizable to consumers.
John Deere’s The Furrow publication
Did content marketing exist in the 1800s? If you read original issues of John Deere’s ‘The Furrow’ magazine, the answer is a clear yes. John Deere has been publishing The Furrow for well over a century — since 1895 — to help farmers solve common problems they encounter. John Deere products are the secondary message, although they are woven into stories and articles to demonstrate how they can make farmers’ lives better and easier.
A lot has obviously changed since 1895. But the team at John Deere has smartly stuck to the content strategy roots established by The Furrow. It is still a premiere brand for farming equipment known for their long-standing focus on customer needs first, brand second.
As for The Furrow itself? More than 500,000 customers still receive it every year.
The lesson here: when potential customers recognize you as a thought leader in your industry, a brand they can turn to for important information, they’ll also turn to you when it comes time to make a purchase.
American Express’s OPEN Forum
American Express has always shared their commitment to supporting small business customers. Their OPEN forum has been one of the smartest ways they do it. OPEN forum aims to be a hub of thought leadership that small business owners can utilize to grow their businesses. It features content around finances, marketing, management and other topics important to small business owners. The catch? The content comes from other American Express customers, not the brand itself.
Hosting a place where small business owners can share ideas and learn from peers has proven valuable to their customers. Today, the OPEN forum is a core part of their content strategy. It has helped build community among customers and allowed American Express to create content on a larger scale.
Here’s a recent OPEN Forum feature from Inc. Magazine columnist Norm Brodsky and serial entrepreneur Brian Hecht on how to write business plans:
Moz’s Whiteboard Friday series
Moz’s Whiteboard Friday series is another example of a brand providing real value by covering topics that address customer needs and challenges. The Whiteboard Friday series, started by Moz founder Rand Fishkin, launched when Moz itself was a very young company. Rand used the videos to address common and complex industry topics in a visual, engaging way.
The series quickly gained momentum. The content was valuable and SaaS professionals responded, subscribing to their channel in droves. Rand is no longer with Moz today, but the series still publishes every Friday. It’s now one of the longest-running B2B video series.
Check out this Whiteboard Friday episode on optimizing competitors’ branded keywords:
Patagonia’s focus on shareability
Remember we said how important it is to amplify your content? Well, the team at outdoor apparel and gear brand Patagonia are pros. They create highly shareable content that’s lean on the hard sell and heavy on meaning. Their messages focus what their customers care about: sustainability, helping the environment, and knowing your impact as a consumer.
Ads like the one below — part of Patagonia’s now-famous “Don’t Buy this Jacket” ad in the New York Times — was also published in blog articles and on social media platforms, making it easy to share and thus spreading awareness and increasing Patagonia’s reputation as an authority on sustainable products and purchases.
Patagonia also operates several targeted blogs on platforms like Tumblr, like their Worn Wear blog, where customers share their own stories of wearing their Patagonia gear. Crowdsourcing this kind of content on platforms where sharing is the primary activity? It’s about as smart a content strategy as you can get. It has high shareability, brand presence on the platforms where their customers already are, and built-in social proof with every new post.
The world knows Red Bull today as a content marketing guru brand, and for good reason. Their brand personality explodes with every piece of content they create, and they utilize many different content types across channels.
The key to Red Bull’s content marketing success is their focus on selling an experience. They showcase an entire Red Bull culture rather than just talking about their products themselves. People now associate the Red Bull brand directly with high-adrenaline, extreme sports. They have capitalized on this niche to build a loyal customer base with their content.
A quick look at their YouTube video channel homepage (which has more than 10 million subscribers!) shows exactly who their target audience is. That’s effective target marketing!
Start with the resources you have. Create a strategy and commit to a high level of quality and a focused brand message. Keep growing your content strategy as you learn more about your customers. Then, engage with them and build the bridge between your brand and the people your business exists for.
Chances are that your small business has explored a variety of marketing strategies over the years. However, business owners can sometimes overlook ways to enhance their marketing that are right in front of them, such as their point of sale system.
Your POS system is actually not as unorthodox a marketing tool as it might first seem. Many small businesses have experimented with their POS system and marketing endeavors to find creative strategies with tangible results. And all your business really needs to join in on these benefits is a strong POS system and knowledge of a few best practices.
As a small business leader, you’re well aware of the importance of making the most of every resource available. With these three foundational strategies, you can begin further leveraging your POS system to not only manage your transactions, but to bring new business in:
Streamline your inventory management system.
Build a customer loyalty program.
Create a better customer experience.
Implementing strategies like these will be easier the more comfortable you are with your POS system. If you’re already familiar with the ins and outs of your system, you can likely jump right into figuring out how to maximize your daily processes. If you still need a bit of assistance, consider reaching out to your POS system’s support team for help with more complex features.
1. Streamline your inventory management system.
Knowing what is and is not selling should be one of your first steps towards taking a more active marketing approach. After all, by monitoring which items are flying off the shelves and which are moving slower, you’ll be able to gain key insight into your customers’ needs and desires.
Your POS system should keep you up to date on how your products are moving. You can reorganize and streamline your inventory management system by:
Setting reorder thresholds. When a product is popular, it’s only natural to ride the wave of its popularity and sell as much as you can. However, when something is too popular, it’s easy to run out and leave late customers disappointed. By setting reorder thresholds, you can continue marketing your top products with the knowledge that more will be in stock as soon as you start running low.
Entering discounts into your system. Almost all of us have experienced the familiar scenario of buying an on-sale item and accidentally getting charged full price. Going through the process of searching for outdated price lists slows down the checkout experience and is something to avoid when your marketing campaign is emphasizing a big ongoing sale. By entering discounted prices into your system, they’ll be deducted automatically, creating a faster purchasing experience for your customers and your employees.
Taking inventory counts with handheld devices. Taking inventory is an important but often time-consuming task. You can help your employees speed through the process and get back to other important tasks by letting them take inventory with handheld devices.
Certain types of stores can get even more creative with how they use their POS system to boost their sales. For example, some businesses, like convenience stores, can benefit from a system that lets them easily divide products that come in packs for individual sale. Doing so might help them create new deals they can market to customers or appeal to those interested in only buying a little at a time.
2. Build a customer loyalty program.
Customer loyalty is likely already part of your marketing strategy, from sending promotional emails to keeping track of your regular shoppers. A POS system with built-in customer loyalty tools can help you develop your customer loyalty program, automating many key processes for your employees.
For example, your POS system should be able to:
Prompt your cashiers to promote your program. During a hectic transaction, your cashiers might end up forgetting to share your customer loyalty program’s details. However, when your POS system prompts them automatically, they’ll always have a reminder to promote it at the right time during the transaction.
Create new customer profiles. When someone signs up for your loyalty program, your point of sale system should allow you to easily create a new profile for them. Then, all of their subsequent purchases should be automatically tracked with no additional input required, aside from the customer’s phone number or email address.
Alert customers when they’ve earned a reward. A loyalty program will only feel like it’s worth it if your customers know when they can start making use of their rewards. Make sure your POS system sends notifications to your customers automatically about their rewards.
When your POS system can handle these basics, you can start getting creative with your customer loyalty ideas. For example, you might test out the tried and true punch-card system or experiment with loyalty tiers based on how long customers have been a part of your loyalty program.
3. Create a better customer experience.
One of the strongest, most persuasive marketing tools out there is word-of-mouth. Of course, this can be difficult for your business to control directly, but you can influence it for the better by creating a positive customer experience.
Customer experience is impacted by several factors from the moment customers walk through your doors to when they leave with their purchases. There are many ways you can improve this experience, from having an organized store layout to hiring friendly and knowledgeable staff. Your POS system can ensure that the last interaction they have—checkout—is a positive one, by:
Speeding up the process. While there might be a few rare individuals who enjoy waiting in line to check out, most of us appreciate a quick, convenient checkout experience. Make sure that your POS system actively helps you move through your lines faster instead of serving as an obstacle for finalizing sales.
Collecting customer data for next time. Knowing who your customers are and maintaining positive relationships with them is key for creating a loyal customer base. Your POS system should be able to track data on who your customers are, what they’re buying, and when they’re buying it. Doing so can help you create customer profiles, while also providing information about what items you might want to put up for sale soon.
Using suggestive selling. Lots of us make lists when we go shopping because it’s so easy to forget one or two items, even when they’re important. Your POS system can prompt your cashiers to recommend or suggest items to customers when they scan one item that usually goes with another. This is suggestive selling and it can earn your business more sales and help your customers remember key items they might have forgotten to buy.
By following these best practices, your business can begin to build a positive reputation in your community, while also retaining customers who enjoyed their time shopping with you. While your marketing efforts should aim to expand your overall customer base, retaining past customers is just as important for growing your business sustainably.
Your marketing efforts require dedicated time and planning, and with the right strategies, nearly every aspect of your business can help them succeed, including your POS system. Ensure you have a POS system in place that can create a more positive experience for both your customers and your staff to reliably retain your customers while attracting new ones.
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Eating Disorders Counselor of Portland - Food Is Not The Enemy
Eating Disorders Help in Portland-Do you Suffer from Body Shame due to Binge Eating? Food Is Not The Enemy can Help with Over Eating Issues Caused by Trauma, Located in Portland, Or 97202 Call Anne Cuthbert-Licensed Professional Counselor for Private Eating Disorder Counseling at (503) 766-3399
Eating Disorders Counselor of Portland - Food Is Not The Enemy
Eating Disorders Help in Portland-Do you Suffer from Body Shame due to Binge Eating? Food Is Not The Enemy can Help with Over Eating Issues Caused by Trauma, Located in Portland, Or 97202 Call Anne Cuthbert-Licensed Professional Counselor for Private Eating Disorder Counseling at (503) 766-3399
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There’s a new addition to Google’s plan for life after the third-party cookie: it’s called Topics, and it replaces one of the more controversial aspects of its original plan — Federated Learning of Cohorts. It works by identifying five topics that represent a person’s interests for that week based on their browsing history. To start, there are currently 350 available topics, although that will grow over time.
Google is pitching Topics as an upgrade on the much-maligned FloC. Less is revealed — the topics are controlled and the sharing of them is more restricted, it has claimed. How that translates into a utility for advertisers and publishers is anyone’s guess currently. Google’s initial reveal is light on details.
Here’s a rundown of some of the obvious, burning questions the industry is yet to get to the bottom of in understanding Google’s latest proposal for ad targeting sans third-party cookies.
Will Topics be good for brand advertisers?
If Google’s Topics’ announcement is taken at face value, the answer will be “no” it won’t be good for brand advertisers.
The kind of aggregate browsing labels that Topics will deliver will mostly not be relevant to brand advertisers’ goals, especially when it comes to reach and frequency. In particular, frequency reported could be a tough one to believe in if Google is only tracking users broadly based on topics of interest. Simply put, the approach seems a bit odd.
“Does Google seriously believe that the average person’s attention span only covers five topics in a week? In an average week, most users will think about work, eating out, entertainment, commuting, potentially about holidays, health and wellbeing,” said Farhad Divecha, md of digital marketing agency AccuraCast.
That’s six things already, and they’re all fairly wide and applicable to everyone today. Five topics will feel really limited and might preclude other topics being targetable — unless Google includes some mechanism to ignore the everyday topics and only focus on new topics of interest. Doing so could create a different set of problems for advertisers who want to target users based on those everyday topics, said Divecha.
Worse still, what happens when users turn off the feature?
Will there be truly no interest or topic-based information for advertisers, and subsequently no reach and frequency information for them to lean on either?
Topics’ Privacy Sandbox stablemate FLEDGE, or First Locally-Executed Decision over Groups Experiment, might have some answers. The feature is meant to support remarketing by letting someone’s browser, not the advertiser or ad tech platform, control the advertiser-defined interest groups associated with that browser. It’s possible the same mechanism may be used to track frequency. But Google hasn’t been clear if this is the case.
But surely this is an actual improvement over FLoCs, right?
Sort of. Topics works to block digital tracking cookies and instead focuses on the individual, rather than overall browsing history trends for groups of people. This allows for users to be more anonymous while also allowing for an easier way for people to opt-out if they so choose. “It is still too early to tell if this will go far enough for privacy advocates and yet still allow for the relevant targeting that marketers want,” said Scott Sullivan, chief revenue officer at ad tech vendor Adswerve.
For now, what little has been shared about Topics suggests it will be an improvement on FLoCs when it comes to privacy, since it will eliminate the issues with potential fingerprinting via those cohorts.
On the flipside, the benefits aren’t so clear. On the contrary, it looks they will be drastically reduced since the source of the data is domain-based and transient instead of contextual and relatively persistent, said Loch Rose, chief analytics officer at Publics-owned Epsilon. In fact, it’s not clear how much better Topics is than detailed IAB labels, except that it carries across sites to a certain degree, added Rose.
So Google has taken privacy issues off the table at the expense of precision. What might this mean for ad prices?
So let’s recap. It appears that Topics will: a) seriously degrade targeting; b) quite possibly frustrate frequency capping and also c) substantially constrain measurement.
Given the above, it would seem that in a competitive market, there would be substantial downward pressure on pricing for Topics-based ad buys. Should this happen then it seems reasonable to assume that Google will prioritize its own economics first, then focus on those of publishers before dealing with ad tech vendors, said Gartner analyst Eric Schmitt.
“It may conclude that while reducing (perhaps modestly) the fees associated with Ad Manager, AdSense and AdX will put a small drag on its own economics (priority number one), it will go a long way towards preserving relationships with publishers and inventory suppliers (priority number two), and ultimately it will be independent ad tech vendors that suffer the most,” he continued.
It’s not hard to see how in this hypothetical scenario the first casualty of the media cost savings that advertisers will be looking for will be the fees associated with cookie-based targeting, data management and processing, including identity resolution/onboarding, measurement, and attribution. Much of this work is provided by independent ad tech vendors.
“My sense is that they are the ones who will feel the squeeze first,” said Schmitt. “Demand-side platforms and supply-side platforms will also presumably come under pressure, as the (cookie-based) bidstream dries up, as the simpler, Topics-based model facilitates more direct buys between advertisers and publishers.”
How does Topics gel with Google’s recent moves towards greater control over user privacy?
It certainly appears to keep Google in the driver’s seat when it comes to managing user privacy on the Chrome platform, as opposed to making Chrome into a neutral offering that respects user privacy by default, said Rose.
It may even be enough to ameliorate some of the antitrust concerns leveled at the company recently, especially the more than a dozen state attorneys general in the U.S. , led by Texas AG Ken Patton — concerns that were stoked by ethics researchers last year as the potential discriminatory and harmful impacts of FLoC came to light. Indeed, Topics grants an ability for users to be a bit more anonymous, with only 350 potential topic categories, which is in direct response to the feedback Google received about FLoC.
That said, questions remain over how easy it will be for consumers to enable or opt out of those settings. Google was at pains to stress the “transparency and control” people will get via Topics, which sounds great in theory. It could also be a vague way of saying this is something that people will have to opt out of, which most don’t do even when they don’t particularly like being tracked.
Is it enough to impress publishers?
Not quite. Google must be clearer about Topics’ controls and value proposition for publishers is the overwhelming initial response to it from that part of the market.
Epsilon’s Rose expanded on the point: “This still seems like a recipe for taking data from valuable publishers and allowing it to be used to deliver advertising on other publishers, which will incentivise publishers with the most valuable inventory to opt out — assuming that Google makes it possible for them to do so.”
In other words, publishers don’t see Topics as an improvement, but rather a change. The ultimate purpose of the update is the same as ever for Google. Which is to say it wants to impose a new model in the value chain at the operator level.
As explained by a chief digital officer at a publisher in Europe: “Google always considers that user’s data are the advertisers property, but the reality is that the users, in fact, the audience is the property of the editors, and the navigator has no rights to impose a model on the editor,” the exec continued on condition of anonymity because they did not want to be seen to be openly critiquing Google. “Floc or Topics, means cohorts or individual user — it does not change a lot for the editors,
