The Digiday Podcast

• How Pinterest went from selling views to selling clicks and conversions, with CRO Bill Watkins

  This week's episode of the Digiday Podcast covers T-Mobile and Publicis Groupe's ad tech acquisitions amidst the "everything's an ad network" narrative, the TikTok ban tug-of-war and YouTube's new subscription service, Premium Lite. Also on this episode, Pinterest's chief revenue officer Bill Watkins walks through the platform's play for more ad dollars this year with AI-powered tools, a focus on performance marketing and balancing more ads with the user experience.

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• How to grow a creator-based newsletter business, with Puck’s Sarah Personette

  Puck’s famed journalist-centric publishing model is changing. Sort of. The news outlet debuted in 2021 with its journalists as the company’s audience-facing focal point, not the publication. People would subscribe less so to Puck than to Matthew Belloni’s or Julia Ioffe’s newsletters via Puck. And Puck’s journalists were, in part, compensated directly for the subscribers they attracted. Lately though, Puck’s newsletters have come to resemble publications in their own right. “You almost have sub-brands under Puck that are franchises anchored by core talent versus in probably that first two years, it was a newsletter anchored by core talent,” said Puck CEO Sarah Personette on the latest Digiday Podcast episode. Belloni’s entertainment-oriented “What I’m Hearing” newsletter, for example, has enlisted contributors like legal expert Eriq Gardner and, most recently, former The Hollywood Reporter editor Kim Masters. Similarly, Lauren Sherman’s fashion-centric “Line Sheet” regularly features entries from retail writer Sarah Shapiro and beauty journalist Rachel Strugatz. This development has coincided with Puck’s paid subscriber base growing by 30% in the past year, with Personette expecting the company to become profitable this year. “Putting journalists at the center of our model still exists, but what we are trying to do, as our subscriber base has experienced incredible growth over the last few years, we want to make sure that we’re rounding out the stories and we’re rounding out the coverage by bringing other journalists in,” said Personette. The expanding nature of Puck’s newsletters raises the question of to what extent does Puck’s compensation model also have to change. Puck gained a lot of initial attention for paying bonuses to its journalists for the new subscribers their articles attract as well as for the subscribers they retain. But how’s that work if an article by Masters attracts a subscriber via Belloni’s newsletter? “So [Belloni] is a franchise manager, and there are different benefits to being a franchise manager. And he also is driving a ton of his own subs. And then we also want to make sure that the individuals that are contributing to that franchise also get bonus-ed,” Personette said.

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• What this year’s COPPA update means for marketers, with privacy expert Debbie Reynolds

  In January, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission finalized an updated version of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. And for as much attention as the update may have received, it probably merits more. “It is a big deal. And I think because there’s been so much other activity in the news, people haven’t really paid attention to it,” Debbie Reynolds, a privacy expert and founder, CEO and chief data privacy officer at Debbie Reynolds Consulting, said on the latest Digiday Podcast episode. The primary reason the COPPA update warrants attention is that it requires companies to receive verifiable parental consent before they can target ads to children. Clear cut as that requirement may appear to be, complying with it may be more complicated. “Part of the confusion around privacy and the challenge companies will have with the update of COPPA is trying to figure out how to do things like how do you get verifiable quote-unquote parental consent beyond just having someone click a button to say, ’Hey, yeah, my parents said, “Yes,“’” said Reynolds. Case in point: Will ad-supported streaming services start asking for parents to share copies of their driver’s licenses before their families can sit down to watch a show? And will parents be willing to do that? “Anything that you give to these companies, they’re collecting, they’re storing. And then that brings up, do I trust this company enough to give them my ID, especially seeing the rash of data breaches,” Reynolds said. “It’s just going to be challenging going forward to see how companies really try to handle this issue.”

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• How Sundial Media Group CEO Kirk McDonald is navigating the DEI backlash

  The house built around diversity, equity and inclusion is coming apart brick by brick. Since last summer, brands, retailers, holding companies and, most recently the federal government, have been dismantling (or retooling) DEI initiatives, many of which were built up after the murder of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter Movement of 2020. The “diversity” portion of diversity, equity and inclusion has become divisive, impacting multicultural marketing agencies, Black-owned brands and diverse publications. And they're starting to feel the ripple effects, according to Kirk McDonald, CEO of Sundial Media Group, holding company for brands like Essence magazine, Afropunk festival and Refinery29. Although, he said, it’s too early to tell the full impact DEI’s retooling (or rebrand) will have on the industry in terms of media spend, marketing budgets or consumer habits. McDonald recently sat down with the Digiday Podcast to talk about how Sundial’s diverse publications, geared toward women and other historically marginalized communities, are navigating the pushback.

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• If Google's cookie phase-out ever comes, here's what a cookie-less future looks like for Mars' chief brand officer Rankin Carroll

  Google’s long kiss goodnight with third-party cookies seems never-ending at this point, as the tech giant's cookie phase-out plans still remain unclear. Seemingly, Google's plan to ask Chrome users to opt in to cookie-based tracking is reflective of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) move a few years back. Sure, marketers have long since seen the writing on the wall with this. But, as the future of third-party cookies remains rather ambiguous, marketing and brand executives, including Rankin Carroll, global chief brand officer at Mars Snacking, have started eyeing partnerships and leveraging artificial intelligence to fill in the gaps, with an eye toward a cookie-less future. “We had what we had, and it was the norm for the standard for the industry,” Carroll said on a recent episode of the Digiday Podcast. “As we move beyond that, we're focused on innovating.” In talking with Digiday, Carroll laid out Mars’ plans to scale its first-party data across brands like M&Ms and Snickers and the role partnerships play in scaling said plans. Carroll also talked about Mars' Super Bowl stunt and rehashed the company's plans to acquire the Kellanova family of snack brands.

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