The bonkers Ozy Media scandal is all about data: Datacenter Weekly

Welcome to Ad Age Datacenter Weekly, our data-obsessed newsletter for marketing and media professionals. Reading this online? Sign up to get it delivered to your inbox here. Ad spending surge “U.S. ad spending will surge by 23% this year to $278 billion and maintain a healthy clip of 12% growth in 2022,” Ad Age’s E.J. Schultz reports, “surpassing $300 billion for the first time with nearly all major industries returning to pre-COVID marketing investment levels, according to a new forecast” from Interpublic Group of Cos.’ Magna. Essential context: Schultz notes that Magna’s forecast comes with a big caveat: “It assumes that supply constraints affecting multiple industries won’t worsen and that COVID restrictions that have held back sectors such as travel, restaurants and theaters will continue to ease.” Keep reading here. See also: “Bed Bath & Beyond's results highlight supply chain struggles,” per Bloomberg News (via Ad Age). Macroeconomic data in a nutshell • “Consumers Ramped Up Spending in August as Inflation Remained Elevated,” The Wall Street Journal reports. • “A key measure of inflation surged to a new 30-year high,” per CNN. • “September was a terrible month for stocks. Here’s what you can expect in October,” an opinion column published by MarketWatch. • “Initial jobless claims unexpectedly rise,” per Fox Business. Previously: “U.S. advertising employment increased by 1,700 jobs in August as nation’s job growth slowed,” from Ad Age Datacenter. Subscribe to Ad Age Datacenter for essential data and insights on all of the most-advertised brands. Ozy’s odd math The media world has been obsessed with the unfolding Ozy Media scandal this week in the wake of the publication of a rather shocking piece by New York Times media columnist Ben Smith on Sunday, Sept. 26. If you haven’t read it yet, please do—because it’s about an absolutely bonkers scandal that involves the impersonation of a YouTube executive by an Ozy co-founder on a Feb. 2 conference call with members of Goldman Sachs’ asset management division. Smith’s column carries the headline “Goldman Sachs, Ozy Media and a $40 Million Conference Call Gone Wrong” and the subhead “The digital media company has raised eyebrows for its claims about its audience size for years. Then came the strange voice on the phone.” The “strange voice” makes for great drama, but what this is really about is “claims about its audience size.” In other words, this is a data scandal. Ozy Media calls itself “a modern media company,” and it insists that old-school metrics, such as Comscore web-traffic stats, don’t properly reflect its reach across platforms, including social media and video. OK, sure. But Datacenter Weekly, for starters, checked in with social video analytics firm Tubular Labs about Ozy Media’s video performance across YouTube and Facebook. Bottom line: It’s ... underwhelming. Some key stats: • Ozy Media ranks 84th in the U.S. against other digital-first media companies on YouTube and Facebook, with just 2.7 million unique viewers in August, according to Tubular Audience Ratings (TAR), which tally de-duplicated viewers. To put that in context, Ben Smith’s former employer, BuzzFeed—which, as Smith revealed in his column, once engaged in ill-fated acquisition talks with Ozy Media—had 122.2 million unique views in August. • Digging deeper into Ozy Media’s performance on YouTube, Tubular has a stat it calls ER30, which is a measure of user engagements per view during the first 30 days. “Engagements” tallies likes, comments and shares. According to Tubular, ER30 for Ozy Media content on YouTube “is less than 0.1x compared to a baseline average” of 1.0x on YouTube. That’s a data-driven way of saying that Ozy Media has remarkably low engagement for its YouTube video content, which is a red flag that can be indicative of “paid boosting,” according to Tubular. Meanwhile, as Morning Brew’s Jacob Donnelly has noted on Twitter, Ozy Media has seen a curious recent surge in Instagram followers, as tracked by HypeAuditor: Ozy's IG growth. https://t.co/3lJ4C6Kcbh pic.twitter.com/rv9QiQW5Oy— Jacob Donnelly ☕️ (@JayCoDon) September 27, 2021 Hmmm. There’s going to be a lot to unpack in the weeks and months ahead as the Ozy Media drama continues to unfold, but for now, here’s just some of this week’s fallout from Smith’s Times column: “Ozy CEO Carlos Watson Steps Down as Host of Documentary Emmy Awards Following Controversial Report” (Variety, Sept. 28); “Ozy Media suspends Samir Rao after report of fake investor call, and Katty Kay resigns” (Bloomberg News/Ad Age, Sept. 29); “18-hour days and panic attacks: Former Ozy staffers allege an abusive environment” (CNN Business, Sept. 30); “Sharon Osbourne says Ozy Media founder Carlos Watson lied when he claimed the Osbournes invested in his company” (CNBC, Sept. 30); “Major Ozy Media Advertisers Suspend Ad Campaigns Amid Tumult” (The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 30); “Ozy Media chairman quits after bombshell NYT report” (BBC, today). Marketing on purpose Datacenter Weekly readers are invited to download a free copy of “Brand Purpose,” a new white paper exploring how to build great, purposeful brands that are authentic, meaningful and differentiated with a foundation to stand for the future. The report examines how consumers value brands with a purpose, what media choices can say about a brand, and what Gen Z expects from brands and employers. Ad Age Datacenter produced “Brand Purpose” based on data and analysis from Kantar. Get it here. Hot data “COVID-19 was hard on cold medicine sales,” Ad Age’s Jack Neff reports. “All that mask wearing and social distancing meant fewer people getting colds and almost no one getting the flu. But it was great for Kinsa smart thermometer sales, with the brand’s units in market quadrupling to 4 million as more people needed to take their temperatures more often. Now all the data produced by Kinsa is powering marketing for Reckitt’s Mucinex cold medicine in a volatile market by showing where people are starting to get sick before outbreaks peak.” Keep reading here. Previously: Ad Age shared a link to the application form for Kinsa’s then-newly-announced Access to the US HealthWeather Public API in the April 20, 2020 edition of Datacenter Weekly. Subscribe to Ad Age Datacenter for essential data and insights on all of the most-advertised brands. Just briefly After the cookie crumbles: “Cookies and ad IDs—everything marketers need to know about killing cookies,” from Ad Age. Power vacuum: “Is Sheryl Sandberg’s Power Shrinking? Ten Years of Facebook Data Offers Clues,” per The Wall Street Journal. Pandemic data: “Messy, incomplete U.S. data hobbles pandemic response,” from The Washington Post. Breakthrough insights: “What we can learn from D.C.’s [COVID-19] breakthrough data,” per Axios. Data disaster: “Children born today are likely to face seven times more extreme weather events than their grandparents,” The Economist reports. Impersonal data: “Companies are hoarding personal data about you. Here’s how to get them to delete it,” from The Washington Post. See all the winners of Ad Age’s 2021 Small Agency Awards here. The newsletter is brought to you by Ad Age Datacenter, the industry’s most authoritative source of competitive intel and home to the Ad Age Leading National Advertisers, the Ad Age Agency Report: World’s Biggest Agency Companies and other exclusive data-driven reports. Access or subscribe to Ad Age Datacenter at AdAge.com/Datacenter. Ad Age Datacenter is Kevin Brown, Bradley Johnson and Catherine Wolf. This week’s newsletter was compiled and written by Simon Dumenco. Subscribe to Ad Age Datacenter for essential data and insights on all of the most-advertised brands.

The bonkers Ozy Media scandal is all about data: Datacenter Weekly

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