AGENCY WORK HIGHLIGHTS

INDUSTRY UPDATES

Ad Vendors / Platforms

• Telegram will now allow ads in a limited capacity, on public channels or groups that have more than 1,000 subscribers. Telegram requires an advance payment of €2 million to start publishing ads, €1 million of which is a refundable deposit. Telegram won’t provide personalized data profiles of its users, so you can’t target individuals with specific ads. However, you can select language, topics, and target channels as parameters. (The Next Web)

• Twitter Blue, the company’s subscription service, is adding new features while expanding to new countries and platforms. The service launched in June in Canada and Australia on iOS, and is now also available in the US and New Zealand and on Android and the web. One feature lets people view ad-free articles on participating websites and gives a portion of revenue from Twitter Blue subscriptions to those sites. (The Verge)

• Facebook is eliminating the ability to target based on users' interactions with content related to health, race and ethnicity, political affiliation, religion and sexual orientation. The changes will go into effect on Jan. 19, 2022, when it will no longer allow new ads to use those targeting tools and will be fully implemented by March 17, 2022. (Politico)

• Demand for CTV ads rebounded strongly this year thanks to the launch and expansion of new ad-supported streaming services. CTV ad prices are significantly higher than last year, which has driven up the overall spend. At this point, all major networks have ventured into CTV: Disney has Hulu, ViacomCBS has Pluto TV, and Fox has Tubi. YouTube and Roku also command a large share of CTV revenues. Hulu makes more ad revenues from CTV than any other company collecting $3.13B in 2021. It's followed by YouTube at $2.54 billion and Roku at $1.58 billion. (eMarketer)

Cinemas / Theatrical

• AMC Theaters, the world’s largest movie theater chain, recorded a $224.2M net loss, or $0.44 per share, on $763.2M in revenue, a significant YoY improvement. AMC hosted just under 40M guests in movie theaters in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East during Q3 2021, which bodes well for 2022 performance. (THR)

• A decline in movie theater attendance will reduce the budgets of the IP-driven blockbusters everyone seems to demand, and lessen how many get made. Consulting firm Kearny says "Marketing budgets may become a wild card. Marketing can swing profitability on large titles as well as smaller titles. The interesting trick is where do you invest your dollars now? Do you double down on tentpole franchises or spread marketing budgets across your portfolio and attempt to get more leverage out of a variety of content assets?” (Observer)

• Disney says “flexibility” remains paramount to its 2022 feature film releases. "We're sticking with our plan of flexibility because we're still unsure about how the marketplace is going to react when family films come back with a theatrical-first window,” said CEO Bob Chapek. "While COVID will be in the rearview mirror, I think changing consumer behavior is something that’s going to be more permanent. So we’re reading that on a weekly basis and will make our decisions going forward accordingly.” (THR)

Festivals / Awards

• The European Film Academy announced nominations for the 34th European Film Awards, which will be handed out in Berlin on December 11. Julia Ducournau’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner, Titane; Florian Zeller’s 2020 drama and double Oscar winner The Father; and Jasmila Zbanic’s Quo Vadis Aida?, which was nominated for an Oscar at the 93rd edition, are tied with four mentions each. (Deadline)

• Simu Liu, Greig Fraser, Jude Hill, Natalie Morales and the cast of “CODA” will be honored at the fifth annual Hollywood Critics Association Film Awards on Jan. 8. Liu is being honored with this year’s game-changer award for his history-making role in Marvel’s “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.” (Variety)

Live Events/ Attractions

• Legoland California announced that it will open the first Lego Ferrari "Build and Race" attraction next spring. Guests will be able to build a Lego Ferrari car to race at one of three tracks. Participants then can scan their car digitally and compete in a virtual lap on a Legoland track inspired by Ferrari's Fiorano Circuit. The experience also will include a photo op with a life-size Ferrari F40 model developed by Lego. (Theme Park Insider)

• Technical rehearsals have begun at Genting SkyWorlds, an outdoor theme park at Resorts World Genting in Malaysia. An official opening date for the park has yet to be announced. Analysts expect it to attract three million visitors annually. (Blooloop)

• Americans who visited a museum in the last three years had a 20.8% higher household income than the average American, regardless of race or ethnicity. For Asian visitors, median HHI is 10% higher than among all Asians. For White non-Hispanic cultural visitors, it's 12%. For Hispanic visitors, it's 39%. And for Black and African American visitor, it's 69%. (Colleen Dilenschneider)

  

OTT / Streaming

• Local subscription OTT players in Australia are seeing strong growth amid increasing competition from global players. Stan, Binge, Kayo Sports and Optus Sports surpassed a combined 5m subscriptions in Q3 2020 and Ampere forecasts that between them they are on track to hit almost 10m subscriptions by the end of 2026. (Ampere Analysis)

• Amazon launched Prime Video Channels in Australia last Tuesday and with it, AMC+ made its Australian debut (supported by an Allied media campaign, of course). (Sydney Morning Herald)

• Europe's largest commercial TV network, Germany’s RTL, is launching RTL+, a multi-faceted streaming service which will combine video, e-books, podcasts, digital magazines, and music. (THR)

• Netflix has started testing a new iOS app feed for kids that’s designed to show short clips taken from its library of children’s content. The “Kids Clips” feature uses a similar interface to TikTok or Instagram Reels in an attempt to surface child-friendly content. But while competing services are primarily formatted for viewing in portrait, Kids Clips’ videos are designed to be viewed in landscape. (The Verge)

• Starting November 12, 13 movies including Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Avengers: Endgame are being presented in IMAX’s Expanded Aspect Ratio on Disney+. IMAX typically uses a squarer 1.43:1 format, but the Expanded Aspect Ratio being offered in this update will be 1.90:1 to better fit the 16:9 ratio of modern widescreen TVs. (Digital TV Europe)

• Disney+ subscriber growth slowed in Q3, as the service hit 118M subscribers, an increase of 2M. Growth also slowed at Hulu and ESPN+, with Hulu adding only 700K subs to 39.7M, and ESPN+ adding 2.3M subs to 17.1M. Disney also saw its average revenue per user (ARPU) continue to fall at Disney+, hitting $4.12 per subscriber, down 9% YoY, while Hulu's ARPU rose by 1% $12.75, and ARPU at ESPN+ was up 4% to $4.74. (THR)

• Last week, Disney slashed the price of a Disney+ subscription to $1.99 for one month, one of several promotions which led up to Disney+ Day on Nov. 12. New and eligible returning subscribers in eligible countries could sign up for one month of Disney+ at the discounted price through Nov. 14. (THR)

Retail / Lifestyle / Travel

• Visitation to US airports has steadily increased as consumers get more comfortable with travel and the US opened for vaccinated international travel. While not completely back to pre-pandemic levels, it's nearly there. (TSA)

  

• Sotheby's and Christie's combined have sold over $165M of NFTs in 2021. Those sales figures for the world's leading auction houses account for about 5.5% of their contemporary art sales. Quite a leap, given NFTs have only taken off in the last year. (Reuters)

• Before Amazon Prime Day, there was Alibaba’s Singles Day—a mega Chinese shopping event that runs November 1-11. Last year, Singles Day generated nearly three times as much in sales for Alibaba as Cyber Monday, Thanksgiving, and Black Friday combined did across the US. Analysts expect this Singles Day to top last year’s but only by a slim margin, in part due to pandemic-related supply chain disruptions. (Morning Brew)

Podcasts / Audio / Music

• TikTok owner ByteDance's latest attempt to go global is with a music-streaming app designed for overseas markets. Resso, which is only available in Brazil, India and Indonesia, now has more than 40M MAUs split more or less evenly among the three countries. By comparison Spotify, which is available in 178 countries, had 381M MAUs as of September. Resso had 84.7M downloads YTD, up from 36.5M for all 2020, when the app officially launched. (The Information)

• Audible will roll out six scripted comedy podcasts in the coming months, as it looks to expand its entertainment offerings and appeal to more consumers. Scripted podcasts let Audible invest in stories that could be repurposed for other areas of Amazon, such as Amazon Prime Video. For example, "Evil Eye," which began as an Audible podcast in 2019, was later adapted into a horror movie that was released on Amazon Prime Video last year. (The Derrick)

• Universal Music is working with collector Jimmy McNelis to convert four of his NFTs into a band called Kingship. Kingship consists of four digital characters, all part of an NFT collection known as the Bored Ape Yacht Club, one of the most successful NFT stories of the past year. 10:22PM, one of Universal’s labels, has hired a team of crypto artists and animators to turn the two-dimensional apes into three-dimensional beings. The company will record music for Kingship that it releases on streaming services. The “band” will perform and participate in video games, virtual-reality applications and across the constellation of digital experiences known as the metaverse. (Bloomberg)

Social Media

• Instagram has seen a dramatic slump in use by young Australians, according to confidential internal documents. The research shows the fall in use was greater in Australia than in other markets including the US, France, Britain and Japan. (The Australian)

• YouTube starting hiding public dislike counts on videos across its site last week. The company says the change is to keep smaller creators from being targeted by dislike attacks or harassment, and to promote “respectful interactions between viewers and creators.” The dislike button will still be there, but it’ll be for private feedback, rather than public shaming. (The Verge)

• NBCUniversal has partnered with Holler, a conversational media company focused on the peer-to-peer messaging space. As part of the deal, the two companies created shareable stickers on Venmo that apply Holler's Suggestion AI to analyze the context of user payments and serve up a relevant piece of flair. NBCUniversal continues to expand its social monetization offerings to account for changing consumer habits, with a clear eye on the mobile category. (Marketing Dive)

Video Games

• Three in 5 adults who play video games are interested in film, TV or book series based on their favorite games. The share of avid gamers (those who play video games for at least seven hours per week) interested in such adaptations climbed to 69%. (Morning Consult)

• A new UK study revealed most game studios have already started exploring blockchain technology for their upcoming titles. The new research surveyed 197 video game developers in the US and the UK. The results showed 58% of developers are beginning to use blockchain technology, and almost half (47%) have started incorporating NFTs. (Cointelegraph)

AND NOW THE GOOD STUFF

• The UK government published its national AI strategy, which outlines its long-term vision for the technology and its impact on society.

• Rodney Brooks, the creator of the Roomba, throws cold water on the idea that AI will surpass human intelligence in the near future.

• A unique look behind the curtain at how one VC fund increased returns.

• How Peloton uses design and gamification to keep people on the exercise platform.

• If you think gentrification is about new coffee shops and high rents, you are missing an essential aesthetic element.

• Watch out for the Trisolarians! Scientists might have found the first-known planet orbiting three stars at once.