Introducing a 'Brand' New Way to Pay

As an early “participant” in the Great Reset that ushered in the Year of Efficiency I have had ample time to reflect on the state of our industry and deliberate where my efforts to ensure its continued success are best placed. My immediate instinct was to hunt for the next big corporate gig as has been the trajectory of my career so far. But in navigating this gruelling and frankly uninspiring search I came to an epiphany. The solutions to address the many flaws and gaps that we in the industry have long known about are at hand and it is the mission driven companies that are addressing them head on where I can effect the most change.?

What do I mean? It’s no secret that the nirvana of cost effective, perfectly targeted, data secure advertising is a mirage. All the participants across the value chain–brands, agencies, platforms, content creators, consumers begrudgingly deal with a subpar system that is high on waste and low on satisfaction. During my time at Twitter, for example, we made hay for years off a 2017 Havas study that said 75% of all brands could disappear tomorrow and no one would care. We convinced brands to spend up and down the funnel and did our utmost to showcase the power of single-digit percentage uplifts in awareness, follower counts, or conversions. With the advent of ATT and GDPR, our tasks became even harder and the success metrics more questionable.??

The issues plaguing the highly interconnected world of content creators, distribution platforms, and brands go well beyond this one example, of course. Indeed, I would argue that these are the most challenging times since the advent of digital consumption two decades ago. Most of us are no strangers to recessionary forces, industry consolidation, and massive disruption of the status quo. Certainly the hardships we all experienced in the dot com bubble burst of 2001 and GFC of 2008 aren’t easily forgotten. But in 2023 the confluence of industry specific crises exacerbated by regulatory and macroeconomic forces have pushed us to a point of no return. If companies want to survive and more importantly thrive change must occur.?

The list below is far from exhaustive but represents the severity of the challenges facing industry players today:

• GDPR is now being localized in every country and major ad market around the world. While this is welcome from a privacy standpoint, consumers are being offered a blunt ax instead of a finely tuned scalpel to manage their data and without elegant solutions they will likely opt out of targeting altogether, which is a suboptimal outcome itself.
• The cookies that Tony Soprano presciently warned us all about are surely going away, albeit not fast enough. That irrelevant, annoying ad you keep seeing is about to get so much worse.??
• Ad-driven social media is in upheaval with geopolitical concerns arising worldwide around the origins and alleged biases of certain platforms, the aforementioned ATT, subscale players delivering inefficient results, and walled gardens becoming even more impenetrable. All this after a majority of content companies pivoted their enterprises to rely heavily on the traffic from these platforms only to get the rug pulled out and overspent on whatever flavor of the month dominant social platforms were pushing (e.g. AMP, Instant Articles, Live Video, Discover, Reels, Shorts, Spaces, etc).
• In a bit of deja vu, legacy content companies especially those in digital news are reverting to their early 2000s playbooks of dedicated homepages and trying various modes of monetization whether it be direct ad sales, paywall subscriptions, microtransactions, or even donations. The only truly successful digital news paywall right now is the NY Times one contributing over 50% of their revenues. But even they have just shy of 9 million paying digital subscribers who flock to the site as much for their Cooking, Product Review, and Games subsites as their core news. There is a steep drop to the number 2 and 3 players who have ~70% fewer subscribers each.?
• On the subject of paywalls and subscriptions at large this can best be summarized as death by a thousand subscriptions for customers and for the platforms the lopsided equation of ever rising CACs vs. anemic LTVs.
• With the world abuzz around AI in 2023 the upsides are limitless but the concerns go well beyond loss of jobs. Copyright ownership is certainly paramount as is the less talked about though equally important implications on Search and referral traffic. The next iteration of Search promises to deliver concise summaries of what the user wants but at the sacrifice of publishers who put the effort and resources into creating that information in the first place.?

The good news is that the demand for timely, relevant, informative content remains robust. Moreover, brands and consumers are hungrier than ever to be matched appropriately to each other and deal in a fair value exchange. Add to that the ever rising costs of living, everyone is looking for ways to optimize costs.?

This is where a company like Bounty Media and its innovative solution for brands, platforms, and users comes in. Bounty is a game changer for zero party data acquisition. Unlike other walled garden services that currently dominate the lead gen landscape, Bounty connects brands directly with users, in every app or platform they use, both online and offline. In trading verified data for desirable rewards, Bounty offers the right incentives when consumers need them the most. Our recent case studies show a 3-4x uptick in participation via our qualification system. More importantly, our approach eliminates any prospect of bad or inaccurate data. Through our ID, phone and email verification for every user we ensure that real humans are responding in real-time to questions that come from the brand directly.?

For platforms, Bounty is equally appealing. Any telco or digital wallet or direct-to-consumer service app or content ecosystem that features a paywall knows the pain of managing churn, reining in customer acquisition costs and raising lifetime value. We are in an era where switching costs are literally zero and time poor customers are inundated with offers for their attention and money. Bounty’s solution helps alleviate many of these woes while also giving them unique insight into their users.?

What truly sets Bounty Media apart is our approach to the customer. We take a transparent and respectful approach by going directly to the source and treating consumers as the savvy individuals that they are. Empowering customers with information and sovereignty over their data will, we think, lead to a far superior experience and unlock much more value for all concerned. Bounty’s solutions change the paradigm from who can shout the loudest at the consumer hoping to delight them to who can listen the best to the consumer and then with more confidence delight them. In doing so, we can achieve the holy grail of accurate and actionable data that creates a positive flywheel of brands knowing how and when to spend, platforms actually getting users to use their services consistently, and happy customers consuming.?