Attention Capital's Joe Marchese on the crisis -- and opportunity -- in how we measure eyeballs on the internet

03/17/20 • 35 min

Much of the ad industry's ways of measuring eyeballs on the internet is flat-out wrong, according to Joe Marchese, co-founder and CEO of Attention Capital.

"Every Q4, there's more ad impressions in the digital world," Marchese said on the Digiday Podcast. "Do you think more people are watching more ads in Q4, or do you think we're just trying to shove them in there?"

Attention Capital sees an opportunity in all that bloat and fabrication. It's a holding company with a portfolio that so far includes Girlboss and Tribeca Enterprises -- organizer of the Tribeca Film Festival -- which it invested in alongside James Murdoch.

Those may seem like unrelated assets, but they fit Marchese's standard as companies that have built confidence in their ability to "curate some aspect of the world," he said. "In this world where trust is eroding, the curator brands kind of become king."

Marchese joined the Digiday Podcast to discuss his other criteria for brands worth investing in, why Wirecutter is the model to beat and the attention you get when the word "capital" is part of your company name.

Much of the ad industry's ways of measuring eyeballs on the internet is flat-out wrong, according to Joe Marchese, co-founder and CEO of Attention Capital.

Previous Episode

BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti: 'We've transformed how BuzzFeed makes money'

BuzzFeed is in the midst of change.

A few years ago most of the company's revenue came from native advertising -- in 2020 that category will bring in just 20%. Other parts of the revenue pie -- commission on purchases driven by BuzzFeed content, as well as BuzzFeed's own branded products -- have grown enough for the company to bring in $320 million in 2019, and for BuzzFeed to forecast profitability.

"Over the last three years we've really transformed the way BuzzFeed makes money," BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said on the Digiday Podcast.

Peretti joined the Digiday Podcast to discuss the growing transparency coming to attribution, affiliate revenue and BuzzFeed News' intangible benefits.

Next Episode

GroupM’s Brian Wieser: 'Every brand should figure out how to be useful'

The coronavirus pandemic brings uncertainty to the advertising business as much as anywhere else, but GroupM's Brian Wieser sees it as a chance for marketers to take action versus relying on slogans.

"Every brand should be trying to figure out how they could be helpful," Wieser said on the Digiday Podcast. He pointed to GM's exploration of its capacity to build much-needed medical equipment and luxury brand LVMH's pivot to manufacturing hand sanitizer for hospitals. Or think back to the financial crisis, when Hyundai rolled out the "Hyundai Assurance" program that delayed car payments for those in a tight spot.

If companies act uprightly and "want to talk about it and publicize it, they're going to benefit from it from a goodwill perspective, from governments, from society, from consumers -- whether they're in the market or not," Wieser added.

Wieser, the global president of business intelligence at GroupM, also sees in China a potential bellwether for the advertising industry's looming challenges around the world -- and the best case scenario for how this unfolds in Western economies.

Fourth quarter earnings -- and guidance about expectations for 2020's first quarter -- by Chinese giants like Alibaba, Baidu and Weibo help with the math.

The upshot from those companies was a "20 to 30% decline in the relevant advertising-related line," Wieser said. And because January was a mostly normal month, one can attribute that expected slide to just the two following months. That said, China is showing signs of getting its economy back on track after its remarkable success in combatting the virus.

Wieser joined the Digiday Podcast to discuss the three representative countries to model expectations on, why television will probably do better ("or at least less bad") than other media and the big opportunity for businesses of all types to generate goodwill in the midst of crisis.