NYU Stern Marketing Professor Scott Galloway presents his "week's biggest winners and losers in digital" (video above published Oct 6, 2016 by L2inc.com):
Loser: Mode Media (mode.com), which imploded last week - three years after being valued at $1 billion. The online publisher's collapse speaks to the difficulties niche media platforms face.
Mode Media (@ModeMedia) | Twitter: "7th largest media property reaching 155M monthly in the U.S. and 406M globally"
See also: Mode Media used to be worth $1 billion. Now it’s shutting down.| Recode.net and Mode Media Shuts Down, Leaving Many of Its Freelancers Unpaid | Adweek.com.
Loser: Google. Despite owning a massive head start in messaging, the tech giant squandered that lead and is now trying to play catch-up with third-party app Allo [allo.google.com].
Winner: KIND [kindsnacks.com], the fastest-growing brand in L2’s Digital IQ Index®:Food. The snack bars are bestsellers on Amazon, testifying to KIND's strategy of focusing on e-tailers alongside traditional grocery stores.
Loser: Facebook. The company overestimated video viewing time by 60-80%, motivating brands to rethink their investments in video advertising.
Auto-generated transcript via YouTube (unedited):
0:01 A loser: Mode Media, formerly Glam, which imploded last week,
0:05 three years after being valued at a billion dollars.
0:08 Earlier this year, Mode was the tenth-largest digital publisher in the US with 137 million uniques.
0:15 Originally founded as Glam, the company raised almost a quarter of a billion dollars over 13 years.
0:20 By 2015 it earned $100 million in annual revenue -
0:24 but was losing $10 million a year.
0:26 In April co-founder Samir Arora left, as did investor billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who resigned from the board.
0:34 By the way, when you leave a board six months before the company goes out of business,
0:38 that's like peeing with the seat down and then not cleaning it up.
0:41 This could be a canary in the coal mine for other niche sites that have been selling their audiences
0:45 as bottom line: Facebook and Google offer the same people that you can target with better adtech for less money.
0:51 There's Facebook, there's Google and maybe there's Snapchat
0:54 and everybody else is gasping over less and less oxygen in the room of online media.
1:00 A loser: Google. We don't say that very often around here.
1:03 The search giant just launched Allo, a smart messaging app that uses AI to provide suggestions inside conversations.
1:10 Google had a massive head start in messaging, owning Gchat and the Android operating system, which commands 80% of the market.
1:17 But they squandered that lead, leaving Facebook to dominate.
1:20
Now it's a game of catch-up for Google.
1:22 As we've said before, messaging is the next frontier for tech companies and brands.
1:27 Two technologies we're betting on: voice and messaging.
1:31 A winner: KIND, the fastest-growing brand in our Digital IQ Index: Food,
1:35 despite a recent dispute with the FDA over whether it could use the term "healthy" in its packaging.
1:40 By the way, the founder of KIND, Daniel Lubetsky, is one of the nicest people I have ever met.
1:45 I haven't seen you in ten years, Daniel, but I hope you're doing well.
1:47 KIND has more than doubled its sales each year for the past five years, surpassing other health-focused snack brands.
1:54 The brand is a bestseller on Amazon
1:56 and pays as much attention to e-tailer distribution as brick-and-mortar.
2:01 Almost a third of Americans plan to purchase packaged foods online in 2016, up from just 16% last year.
2:07 KIND has exited the suicide pact with traditional grocery-based retail.
2:12 A loser: Facebook, which overestimated video viewing time by 60 to 80%.
2:17 Brands have embraced Facebook's video offering.
2:19 Video uploads increased by 50% this year among brands tracked by L2. However, those to YouTube remained flat.
2:26 But this might make them more cautious
2:28 and speaks to the challenges of working with walled gardens including Facebook where there is no third-party validation.
2:34 We here at L2 have embraced video.
2:36 We spent a lot of money on YouTube and Facebook
2:39 and decided today that, no joke, we're going to abandon spending on the Facebook platform.
2:43 Why?
2:44 The average viewership on YouTube for us is two minutes, versus just eight seconds on Facebook ...
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