Complex Networks Spotlights the Power of Influence

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Complex Networks, currently being acquired by Buzzfeed, has been building up its audience insights business—Complex Collective, consisting of a panel of 30,000 young people across its properties—since 2019. Since then, it’s published four reports on audience trends to inform campaigns for its ad clients, ultimately driving more revenue. So far, so good: Complex Collective has its own P&L and is generating revenue well into the seven-figures, Aaron Braxton, svp, business intelligence and performance marketing, general manager of Complex Collective, told Adweek. He wouldn’t share specifics. The latest report takes a more academic look at what drives influence, looking at audiences across its four brands—Complex, music title Pigeons & Planes, food vertical First We Feast and sneaker title Sole Collector—noting tidbits like influence doesn’t equal the scale of someone’s following. “Travis Scott holds the most authority among this audience, not because has however many followers, but because he is deeply selective of what he’s involved in,” Braxton told Adweek. “True influence uses authenticity, authority and trustworthiness to align with what audiences want to speak to. It’s not extending the dollar, it’s continuing the narrative.” Understanding the audience, while always important, is taking on greater urgency. Recent media and marketing earnings reports paint a varied picture for digital ad recovery, highlighting concerns about possible media inflation and an economy stunted by the delta variant. How long the positive trend for digital ad revenue will last is unclear. In the first quarter of 2021, revenues at Complex Networks fell 14% year-over-year, mostly due to the winding down of the go90 partnership, Verizon’s mobile video streaming platform, according to BuzzFeed’s filings. Advertising revenue at Complex increased by $0.5 million, or by 5%. Former clients include the Biden for President campaign To make its marketing efforts more precise, Complex has been expanding its business intelligence efforts, shown by Braxton’s promotion in July to include more marketing adjacent units in his remit. While there’s nothing new about using audience data to inform content strategies and ad offerings, the signals that are read and the ways of collecting them are more sophisticated. “Because of the success we have engendered, it made sense to apply more analytics and insight structures to other business units close to marketing functions, as well as operation and content functions,” Braxton said. “We’re not directive, but there’s an opportunity to go much further in executing marketing analytics driven by efficiency.” The custom reports typically take two months to put together, mostly drawing on in-house expertise, and are freely accessible for brands and agencies. Roughly two dozen clients have come back to Complex for further work. As well as revenue generated from custom research, it has also run under a dozen solicited research reports for advertisers. These typically are about a third of the size of the custom reports and take anything from three weeks to two months to create, depending on the scope. Complex Collective’s research around young, diverse undecided voters—and what would motivate them towards the election polls—was used by the Biden for President campaign and also drove Complex Networks’ company-wide voting campaign, spanning editorial, events with Crooked Media, social and video. The Biden Campaign was a client of Complex. Thousands of segments Using its panel and gleaning audience behavior, Complex builds first-party data-based audience segments to sell to advertisers, who are increasingly struggling to efficiently find the audiences they need on the open web, generating revenue. Complex has built well over a thousand audience segments, like sneakerheads or music fans, out of its audience for marketers to target. Post Covid lockdowns, Complex noticed a spike in “high-value transactional journeys" among its audience, said Braxton, and set up a segment for audiences with this behavior for the sales team to shop to interested potential marketers. Former clients include Banana Republic and the Ad Council. In the last 12 months, spurred by Google's dropping—and delaying—of third-party cookies in Chrome, publishers have been much more proactive with ad agencies in how their first-party data is unique and valuable. But finding commonalities between how Complex and, say a publisher like Hypebeast, defines a fashionista makes buy-side media dollars go further. “The questions I ask publishers about their first-party footprint is how are you acquiring the data—is it contextual-based or tied to a degree of logging in—what is the longevity of the data, how are those segments defined, what attributes make up one segment versus another and how consistent is this across publishers,” Dan Elddine, svp, data & technology, North America at Essence, told Adweek. “The question is always how do you scale these types of conversations?” Google Grants a Stay of Execution in the Death of the Cookie

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Complex Networks Spotlights the Power of Influence

Its audience insight unit is generating revenue well into the seven-figures

Lucinda Southern

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Lucinda Southern