The Digiday Podcast

The livestream shopping model is coming back around in the U.S. and is not limiting itself to the traditional television channels and "call-now" directives that QVC and HSN have done in past decades.

NTWRK, a livestream shopping company aimed primarily at Gen Z and millennial audiences, launched in late 2018 and has accumulated 2 million consumers since then on its iOS and Android apps, which are currently the only platforms that shoppers can transact on. By 2025, the goal is to increase that number to 50 million, as well as make more than $1 billion in revenue, said Aaron Levant, CEO of NTWRK, on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.

The livestream shopping platform sells physical products like art, sneakers, and limited edition products that are created in collaboration with hand-selected artists vetted by NTWRK's merchandising team. But after seeing a surge of interest around NFTs and learning the reasons behind why people pay for digital ownership of online products, Levant said his team realized that physical collectors and digital collectors overlap quite nicely within the NTWRK consumer base. As a result, this month NTWRK we'll be launching an NFT extension on its platform to further tap into these new shopping behaviors.

The compensation gap is closing, albeit slowly and unevenly. In the effort to create balanced workplaces, LinkedIn occupies the position of potential catalyst. The Microsoft-owned business-centric social network not only provides a platform with tools through which hiring practices can be made more meritocratic but also offers an example of an equitable organization. It even has an executive charged with overseeing equity strategy.

“I don’t know that any companies have started to unify all their efforts around ... a single role and actually set up a team that’s meant to focus on this,” said LinkedIn’s head of equity strategy Imani Dunbar in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.

LinkedIn’s focus on equity spans inside and outside its own walls. Internally, LinkedIn has achieved a notable level of compensatory fairness among its employees. Employees of color in the U.S. earn $1 for every $1 earned by white employees, and female employees earn $0.998 for every $1 earned by male employees. But the work is far from finished.

“We’ve been on our equity journey for a while. It’s also our forever work. It’s not something that’s like a six-month or couple-year project,” Dunbar said.

Shortly after Daisy Auger-Dominguez joined Vice Media Group as its chief people officer in May 2020, the murder of George Floyd spurred companies across the media industry to pledge improvements to their organizations’ levels of diversity, equity and inclusion. VMG then took the further step of uploading its DE&I initiatives into a dashboard for all employees to see the company’s plans and track its progress.

“Think of it as a project management app,” said Auger-Dominguez in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.

VMG’s DE&I dashboard features an entry for each active DE&I project, including links to corresponding documents, updated information about its performance metrics and progress toward those goals as well as the name of the employee responsible for overseeing that project.

“It not only creates transparency around accountability, but it also creates connectivity that can galvanize other employees that are interested in any of those particular projects [to see], ‘Oh, here’s the person I should be talking to,’” Auger-Dominguez said.

In keeping with the dashboard’s purpose of keeping employees up to date on VMG’s DE&I efforts, the company removes completed projects and adds new projects as its overall efforts evolve. Heading into 2022, some of those newer projects will likely concern VMG’s return to the office and the part DE&I plays in an in-person workplace. However, Auger-Dominguez is cognizant of not categorizing every initiative under DE&I, which can have the effect of putting it in a silo.

“I don’t want to start adding everything to DE&I, so everyone’s just like, ‘Oh, is that a DE&I initiative?’ No, actually it’s the other way around: Everything has a DE&I lens, but not everything is a DE&I initiative,” Auger-Dominguez said.

In February, digital video publisher Team Whistle unveiled Magnet. The Eleven-owned media company billed Magnet as a social content agency rather than the more typical branded content studio label that publishers have opted for in the past.

In the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Magnet lead Danielle Johnsen Karr explained that the company felt the studio label could constrain the roughly 35-person agency’s prospective client base.

Magnet provides a lot of the same services as the typical publisher branded content studio, such as short-form video production and editing down clients’ long-form content, Johnsen Karr acknowledged. But the social content agency also provides influencer marketing and channel management services and is looking to secure longer-term relationships with advertisers that extend beyond the scope of a given campaign.

“We felt like if we landed in that studio space, while we do all have those offerings, it might just sort of limit us in where we were going to reach some prospective clients, especially when we wanted to get into those longer-term remits with certain opportunities,” said Johnsen Karr.

If Magnet does not fashion itself a branded content studio and describes itself as a social content agency, does that put it in the realm of traditional creative agencies? That designation would fit Johnsen Karr’s background, having come from the agency world and worked for agencies including McCann NY, Deutsch NY and 360i.

“Good question. We’re probably not seeing ourselves as your typical creative agency. We do offer a lot of the services. What we don’t want to be doing is more of that day-to-day management,” Johnsen Karr said.

Social content agency it is.

At this point, TikTok has gone from an experimental digital channel to a must-have in most marketing strategies. Ad spend on TikTok is expected to grow in the coming year — as much as 25% over this year — as the short-form video app looks to bridge the gap between its cultural impact and ad revenue.

While TikTok has become a staple within the culture of social media, agencies and brands are still figuring out what to make of the platform’s marketing and advertising potential. Spend on the platform has yet to reach Meta or Google levels. But one of the brands making a bet on TikTok and shelling out ad dollars there is Thrive Market, a membership-based online grocer.

Doubling down on the last two years of organic growth, Thrive Market scaled its TikTok spend across influencer marketing and paid ad units by more than 250% this year versus last year, according to Amina Pasha, Thrive Market's CMO. (She did not disclose further specifics.)

In the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Pasha talks about how TikTok spurred membership growth for the grocer, plans for ad spend on the platform next year and testing into connected television.