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Gustaf here, I head up marketing at Nudge. I’m covering for Ben this week, while he’s out enjoying the Spanish weather. ☀️
One big thing
This week, we saw Salesforce’s surprise $15.7 billion acquisition of Tableau, just one week after Google announced that they’d bought Looker. I’m not suggesting that this deal happened as a direct result of Google’s acquisition of Looker (Salesforce has been eyeing up Tableau for years), but it might have influenced its timing, and consequently, may even have bumped up the price.
Was it a frivolous purchase? It’s hard to say, the acquisition market is frothy at best. What is clear is that Salesforce is making a serious bid to step up its own work in data visualization to help enterprises make sense of the sea of data they accumulate.
The Tableau acquisition helps Salesforce in their aim to squeeze out SAP as the top independent enterprise software provider, i.e. this acquisition opens up the competition, which is a good thing for customers.
Notable stories this week
- Facebook says its YouTube competitor is growing, but advertisers want more specifics on the data.
- A study by Local Media Consortium and Local Media Association shows that branded content initiatives help news publishers rake in revenue, but some remain wary.
- Bustle Digital Group’s plans for Mic’s relaunch includes an expanded branded content studio and several new staffers.
- Reuters Digital News Report 2019 is out and the bottom line is, the pivot to paid subscriptions will probably only work out for a few media publishers. Others will need to continue to diversify their revenue streams.
- Study shows limits of ad revenue for podcasts; podcasting will need to find other revenue sources if its commercial viability is ever going to be proportional to its growing listenership.
- How female-focused publisher The Stylist Group doubled programmatic ad yields.
- Is the future silent? An interesting opinion piece by Unruly’s Phil Townend.
- Mailchimp launches its in-house entertainment studio, Mailchimp Presents.
- Twitch is emerging as a favorite new platform for pubs, with the likes of WaPo, Cheddar, and BuzzFeed all investing in creating specific shows catered to the platform (and most importantly, making money off of it!).
- Global digital music platform Boiler Room launches its own youth-focused in-house ad agency.
- News Digital Networks Australia (News DNA) releases findings from The Emotional Impact of Branded Content, a study exploring the influence of native content.
Deals/M&A
- Salesforce acquires Tableau in a deal worth $15.7 billion. Wow.
Campaign of the week
- Visa on The Guardian, with their piece titled ‘In a league of their own: the team who paved the way for women’s football 100 years ago’. Visa is one of the Fifa Women’s World Cup sponsors this year, making a stand for female empowerment and acceptance, as well as being a catalyst for the game. I really enjoyed this piece, on remembering the team who fought for women’s football a century before the Lionesses (England’s national team) laced up.
- Facebook on Adweek with ‘The New World of Sports Sponsorship’. Got to love a good ‘meta-like’ campaign when you see one.
- Submit your own and view the best campaigns of 2019.
Smartest commentary
- “The power of native lies in its ability to emotionally persuade.” – Ainslee O’Brien, General Manager of Commercial Integration, News DNA
- “Marketers should let go of the notion that gamers are a niche audience. The majority of young people today identify as gamers or play video games regularly—in fact, 66% of people over 13 spend more than an hour each day playing video games. Many of these young people, including huge numbers of millennials and Generation Z, are cord-cutters and cord-nevers, often referred to as the “unreachable.” – Walker Jacobs, CRO, Twitch
Datapoints of note
- [From the Branded Content Project study] “With one-third of respondents reporting margins over 50% and one-quarter seeing client retention rates over 80%, this data informs us that when sold to businesses that need to educate or inform local audiences, branded content can be a successful way to increase and diversify revenues”.
- 55% of publishers are profiting off of Snapchat, according to Digiday research.
- ^ Related, 51% of publishers using Google AMP said it delivered a “very significant” or “extremely significant” amount of revenues while 28% said the same about Facebook. YouTube was a key revenue driver for 25% of publishers.
- According to traffic data pulled from Parse.ly’s 2000+ publisher member sites for the month of May, demand is highest for news about politics and government, followed by sports and immigration.
Thanks,
-Gustaf
Measurement and intelligence for content-first brands.
Nudge is built by marketers and aims to serve brands investing in content-based media, across any category, looking to illustrate ROI, generate deep performance insights, and save time.
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