Premium short-form video on the go for mobile devices? Will that pull in viewers akin to Fox’s “Empire,” NBC’s “This is Us" or ABC's “Gray’s Anatomy”?

Better still, what financial model will wireless companies like AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint or Verizon want when partnering with a Netflix, ABC or other content provider? Something that could sell sensitively priced and consumer-fluid wireless phone communication services.

Quibi, the new mobile-centric video service from Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, two high-profile entertainment and technology executives, believe they have an answer: short-form premium video.

It comes down to distribution -- and incentives. T-Mobile already has a deal offering free Netflix service for subscribers who sign up for its family mobile plan. AT&T does a similar deal for its own HBO premium TV service.

Content promotions seem great. But are we sure wireless phone services are the right way to go for long-form content -- half-hour or hour-long TV shows on a mobile device?

Of course, that’s not the whole answer. T-Mobile plans let you download Netflix episodes on two of the four major consumer devices: laptop, TV, phones and tablets.

We can be sure much of that long-form viewing still airs on a traditional TV screen. But what about other video content?

Quibi's premise is that its content will be mobile-centric -- five-minute to 10-minute bits of content. While waiting on a line at Starbucks or a grocery store, consumers will want a high-quality short-video vacation.

At a recent AT&T event in Santa Barbara, California, Katzenberg said this makes sense, even in a world of big TV shows. That’s because TV producers typically break up hour-long dramas into five minute to 10 minute segments for TV ad breaks.

But the key question is: How do you define the word "premium" when it comes to short-form premium video content? Consumers probably still equate short-form video with skateboard mishaps and cat-and-dog antics.

Katzenberg says there is room for better material. For that, you hire name talent, behind and in-front of the camera. He says many producers/actors are interested. Plus, Quibi has scores of major media investor-backing, raising over a $1 billion in funding.

Back to those wireless companies, those key distributors. Will any of these content deals have specific deal points which link to specific sales outcomes? T-Mobile has one. It pays Netflix a fee for every subscriber that signs up for the Netflix promotion.

That’s a nice lead generator for T-Mobile. But it has the powerful Netflix name attached. Can Quibi make the steep climb to big brand must-have awareness?

Advertisers have historically paid for their DSP/programmatic execution as a percentage of their media spend. This pay-as-you-go model worked for several reasons: First, advertisers needed to fluidly move their budgets between multiple niche DSPs that specialized in a specific channel, such as mobile or video.

Second, advertisers were still testing programmatic and unsure how or if their programmatic spending would scale.

But programmatic is now a mature industry, evidenced by the $31 billion in advertising spend transacted programmatically in 2018, per eMarketer, and the continued consolidation of technology vendors.

Advertisers no longer need to spread their budgets among 10 to 15 niche DSPs as six or seven enterprise-grade partners have emerged. They can meet all of their needs and allow them to consolidate spend.

Advertisers have also accepted programmatic as an essential part of their media plan with a firm understanding of how much spending they will run programmatically.

Thus, the need for a pay-as-you go pricing model is outdated. Advertisers should treat programmatic advertising as a long-term investment and seek significant cost efficiencies for consolidating their media spend.

The other challenge with the percentage-of-spend tech tax is that the more an advertiser spends in media, the more they pay technology vendors. This is the inverse of how media has historically been bought and sold.

Outside of programmatic, publishers lower their overall pricing when an advertiser spends more.

This is a competitive advantage for large advertisers, as they can secure more media inventory at lower CPM’s. Contrast that with programmatic’s percentage-of-spend model, where the largest programmatic spenders pay the most in technology costs.

Another interesting outcome of the maturation of the programmatic landscape is that more direct-sold publisher deals are being transacted via programmatic. By 2020, eMarketer projects more than four out of every five dollars U.S. advertisers invest in programmatic advertising will go to either programmatic-direct deals or private marketplaces (PMPs).

Today, an advertiser will secure pricing and inventory from a publisher and then run that via their preferred DSP. But why would an advertiser pay their DSP 10% to 15% fee on top of their negotiated rates simply to serve the advertising?

By way of example, if an advertiser secures premium video inventory from a publisher at a $20 CPM, they will ultimately pay an additional $2 to $3.50 CPM to their DSP just to serve the inventory.

Would an advertiser pay a $3.50 CPM to an ad server? With direct-publisher deals representing an increasing amount of advertisers’ programmatic spend, the percentages don’t work.

Finally, we have all been hearing about how media will be transacted programmatically, with TV receiving the most attention. While I agree with this concept, the current programmatic fee structure will hold back most advertisers from moving their TV budget into programmatic.

If tech costs for delivering a linear TV impression were roughly 1% to 2% of media costs, why would a company move its TV budgets to programmatic and spend 10% to 15%?

As programmatic matures, the business model must change to keep up with the times. Advertisers will migrate from the pay-as-you-go percentage-of-spend tech tax to new models, such as long-term subscriptions. We’ve seen this with everything from marketing technology to media services.

Advertising must keep pace with the rest of the ecosystem.

Ro is the first and only full-stack healthcare company in the U.S.—meaning it can diagnose, prescribe, deliver treatment and maintain care all on a single platform. By owning the whole process, the tele-health brand aims to iterate quickly and provide unrivaled continuity of care between patients, physicians and pharmacists.

Ro currently houses two main branches: Roman, targeting men’s health issues like ED, hair loss and more; and Zero, specifically designed for smokers looking to quit. Ahead of speaking at the Future of Retail Conference next month, Ro’s co-founder and CEO, Zachariah Reitano, explains to PSFK how the company is able to offer its customers quality, convenience and competitive cost, sacrificing nothing by enabling a comprehensive program.

Could you speak about some of the industry as well as consumer trends and demands driving the work that you do with Ro? 

There has been a tremendous evolution in telemedicine laws, a decade-long patent cliff of some of the most important drugs of the last 50 years, reimbursement rates for physicians are decreasing, deductibles are increasing, and the barriers to starting a healthcare company have been decreasing year over year. All of these factors have created the perfect environment to start a DTC healthcare company.

The problem is that whenever you have an incredibly complex industry, the burden is often placed on the entity or person with the least control. Unfortunately, in healthcare, this is the patient. At Ro, we see this as an opportunity and, as a result, focus on taking on the complexity so our members don’t have to.

What inspired you to develop Ro? What gap did you see in the healthcare industry that you wanted to fill?

The inspiration for Ro came from personal experiences as both a patient and a family member of patients in the healthcare system. I had a heart procedure when I was 18 and other members of my family have had life threatening illnesses. We’re still here going strong and some of the experiences revealed more than a few places where Ro can have a life changing impact.

Ultimately, Ro will be the place you go when you first experience a symptom and we’ll guide you from diagnosis to delivery of treatment.

In order to deliver on this promise, and to truly innovate in the space, we needed to build the infrastructure from scratch. We built our own physician EMR, pharmacy software, patient application and even our own pharmacy fulfillment center, which now power both our men’s health vertical, Roman, and vertical to fight addiction (starting with helping people quit smoking), Zero.

What makes Ro unique, and distinct from other healthcare services?

Ro is the first and only full-stack healthcare company in the U.S.—meaning we can diagnose, prescribe, deliver treatment and maintain unrivaled care all via a single platform. By owning the whole process, Ro can iterate far more quickly and provide unrivaled continuity of care between patients, physicians, and pharmacists.

We also work with world renowned physicians to take the luxury of concierge personalized medicine and turn it into a commodity anyone can access. Our board of medical advisors includes U.S. Surgeon Generals to Chairmen and Program Directors at NYU, Cornell and the University of Minnesota. We work with them  to help understand how to operate within the healthcare system most effectively and develop some of the world’s best protocols and treatment plans that can be delivered via telemedicine.

Your site reads, “We promise to make the complicated straightforward. The expensive affordable. And the frustrating delightful.” Explain what this means, and how Ro works.

Healthcare is complex and this complexity isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. However, this is the opportunity for Ro. By owning every part of the member experience we’re able to own the complexity for members, and make their lives more simple by making ours more difficult. We take on the nitty gritty so our members don’t have to.

Do you see your services as helping democratize healthcare for the 21st-century consumer? If so, how?

Absolutely. In order to democratize healthcare, it must be better, faster and cheaper. Normally, when you start a company you must choose two of the following: cost, quality and convenience. With Ro, we can provide all three simultaneously. At Ro, a doctor’s visit costs less than a traditional co-pay, it takes minutes to speak to a doctor instead of 29.3 days, and the quality of care, for certain conditions, is much higher.

Explain your decision to focus on men’s issues in particular—do you think men have been underserved when it comes to certain topics?

We started with men’s health because ED was a challenge I faced personally. It was the first sign of a far more serious underlying heart condition. That’s something that not many people know—ED is never a condition by itself. It can be the first sign of diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and is commonly associated with obesity and depression. It can also be linked to poor lifestyle habits: smoking, drinking, lack of sleep or stress.

The plan was always to expand far beyond ED and beyond men’s health as we did with Zero, which is our vertical devoted to addiction. We’ll also expand into women’s health in 2019. We’re just getting started.

You emphasize convenience and personalization, two major trends taking retail by storm, with capabilities like telemedicine, free, at-home medicine delivery and on-demand member support. Could you speak to the decision to enable these options for customers?

Not having the right quantity, dose, or drug are three of the top reasons that prevent people from adhering to their medication. Therefore, we’ve spent the resources to make sure patients can titrate their dose, optimize their quantity and find the right medication in dialogue with their physician. We enabled these capabilities because it is better medicine. In the long run, this philosophy of always doing right by the member and the physician will win out.

What will you be sharing at the Future of Retail conference?

I’m excited to discuss how we got here and what’s next for Ro. How we were able to go from 5 to 100 people and expand to more than 95% of the population in just a year.

Our goal has never been to just build a men’s health company, but to reinvent the way everyone experiences healthcare.

What’s in store for the future of Ro and men’s healthcare—what capabilities do you hope to enable moving forward?

Ro will continue to tackle more and more complex conditions faced by millions of people across the country. You’ll see us expand into women’s health and continue to expand the capabilities of Zero (vertical for addiction) and Roman (vertical for men’s health).

Ro

For more inspiring insights from pioneers like Zachariah who are disrupting their industry, come see him and an entire panel of speakers from today’s most innovative brands at PSFK’s annual Future of Retail 2019 Conference, tickets available now.

While holiday shopping is a joy for some, it can strike fear in the heart of many, and for good reason. Retailers are reducing the time and “content-fatigue” online and in-store browsers can experience, leveraging data analysis tools and AI to quickly produce relevant product suggestions based on users’ personal preferences, previous purchases and similar products.

Through guided gift lists, chatbots and more, brands are putting emphasis on content catered for consumers needs rather than maximizing options. Here’s how top retailers are marshaling AI tools to improve customers’ search experience as well as offer tailored support:

Macy’s
American department store Macy’s created personalized gift guides in the form of Instagram carousels targeting specific recipients, such as a user’s friends or family members. To join, customers have to answer questions about their interests and price range in order for the Instant Gift Guide to generate a list they can swipe through, with the final frame being shoppable.

Monetate x Bazaarvoice
Personalization platform Monetate and consumer-generated content firm Bazaarvoice partnered to increase personalization during this holiday season. Monetate will use Bazaarvoice’s shopper profiles to help brands create product recommendations aimed to turn first-time holiday shoppers into loyal customers after the holidays are over. The companies aim to use shoppers’ experiences and online behavior beyond one-time gift-buying to boost post-holiday consumer engagement strategies that improve brand loyalty.

Saks Fifth Avenue
Luxury department store Saks Fifth Avenue partnered with chatbot company Headliner Labs to launch a Holiday Gift Guide chatbot on Facebook Messenger. Users can take a quiz to see recommended gifts “For Him,” “For Her” or “For Kids.” The chatbot will ask users questions about the person they’re shopping for and, based on their answers, it will suggest gifts that can be purchased on the Saks Fifth Avenue website. Over time, the chatbot learns to adjust the gift suggestions it presents to users based on the items users have purchased or browsed.

These are just a few retailers who are providing guided recommendations for their customers for the holiday season. For more examples visit PSFK’s The Holiday 2018 Retail & Brand Experience Strategies report.

The State of Fashion 2019: A year of awakening. The industry as a whole is embracing new opportunities, even as dangers lurk.

According to McKinsey, these are some of the findings from their latest report on The State of Fashion, written in partnership with the Business of Fashion (BoF), which explores the industry’s fragmented, complex ecosystem. The report includes writing by Imran Amed, Anita Balchandani, Marco Beltrami, Achim Berg, Saskia Hedrich, and Felix Rölkens

The year ahead will be an awakening, says the report, after the reckoning of 2018, a time for fashion companies to look at opportunities and not just at surmounting challenges. The ones that will succeed will have come to terms with the fact that in the new paradigm taking shape around them, some of the old rules simply don’t work.

Included in the report are findings from the latest report on The State of Fashion, written in partnership with the Business of Fashion (BoF), which explores the industry’s fragmented, complex ecosystem. 

Regardless of size and segment, players now need to be nimble, think digital-first, and achieve ever-faster speed to market, say the writers. They need to take an active stance on social issues, satisfy consumer demands for radical transparency and sustainability, and, most important, have the courage to “self-disrupt” their own identity and the sources of their old success to realize these changes and win new generations of customers.

The first two reports, last year and the year before, laid the foundation for rigorous in-depth research and analysis, focusing on the themes, issues, and opportunities affecting the sector and its performance. The State of Fashion is now the largest and most authoritative overview of the industry, surveying more than 275 global fashion executives (approximately 30% more than last year) and interviewing thought leaders and pioneers. The report highlights the ten trends that will define the fashion agenda in 2019.

Sunny intervals but storms ahead, says the report.

For fashion players, 2019 will be a year of awakening. Growth cannot be taken for granted: the McKinsey Global Fashion Index forecasts growth of 3.5 to 4.5 percent, slightly below 2018 figures. By geography, the most optimistic about the coming year are executives in North America. By segment, the most positive are executives from luxury brands, reflecting their strong growth trajectory in 2018. In all other regions and segments, executives are notably pessimistic, reflecting the potential challenges ahead.

The caution in the economic outlook is reflected in the BoF–McKinsey State of Fashion Survey, with 42 percent of respondents expecting conditions to become worse in 2019.

The rise of the ‘superwinners’

Polarization continues to be a stark reality in fashion: fully 97 percent of economic profits for the whole industry are earned by just 20 companies, most of them in the luxury segment. The top 20 group of companies has remained stable over time. Twelve of the top 20 have been a member of the group for the last decade. Long-term leaders include, among others, Inditex, LVMH, and Nike, which have more than doubled their economic profit over the past ten years, According to estimates from the study, each racked up more than $2 billion in economic profit in 2017.

This caution is one of our ten trends to watch in 2019. Another is that India is on the rise—its growing middle class, powerful manufacturing sector, and increasingly savvy tech have made it an essential destination for fashion companies. 

The third trend is Trade 2.0: a warning that companies should make contingency plans for a potential shake-up of global value chains. The apparel trade could be reshaped by new barriers, trade tensions, and uncertainty. However, there may also be new opportunities from growing south–south trade and the renegotiation of trade agreements.

On the consumer side, the report projects the end of ownership, as concerns about sustainability grow and consumers and companies alike worry about how to alleviate their impact on the environment. 

Sustainability, which breaks into respondents’ list of the most important challenges for the first time, is evolving from a tick-box exercise into a transformational feature. And consumers are also pushing for greater transparency into supply chains. At the same time, they are demanding ever-quicker and more seamless fulfillment, from mobile shopping to drone delivery.

The speed of change

Overall, the industry continues to hover in a state of flux, and the fortunes of individual players can turn with frightening speed. As the ten trends indicate, says the report, new markets, new technologies, and shifting consumer needs present opportunities, but also risks. The report predicts that 2019 will be a year shaped by consumer shifts linked to technology, social causes, and trust issues, alongside the potential disruption from geopolitical and macroeconomic events. Only those brands that accurately reflect the Zeitgeist or have the courage to “self-disrupt” will emerge as winners.

The vitamin and supplement industry is notoriously opaque. Free of many of the regulations subject to the food and pharmaceutical industries, manufacturers have little legal responsibility to prove and report the efficacy of their products. Ritual founder Katerina Schneider decided to create a better, more transparent product for women, helping to usher the direct-to-consumer movement into a previously unsexy category limited to drug store shelves.

Ritual launched with just one product, a Women’s Essential multivitamin. With its design-led packaging, subscription model and accessible price point, the buzzy brand has become one of the most visible among new products catered to (largely millennial) women. In October, Ritual announced the release of a new Essential Prenatal formula, solving for another important stage in many women’s lives. PSFK spoke to Schneider about her goal to ultimately create products for women at all ages and life stages, developed in direct conversation with her dedicated consumers via social media.

PSFK: Could you speak about the broader trends that you’re seeing impacting retail today, and any trends that you’re leveraging in your work?

Katerina Schneider: There are a couple of interesting trends that are impacting retail. One is companies are able to build really high‑quality products by going direct to consumer, and really bypassing middlemen.

One of the interesting things that we’ve been able to do as a company is source the high‑quality ingredients from all over the world, and offer them up to women at a really accessible price, which I think is having an impact on retail at large. For us, it’s really great because our mission is to give women the best there is, and create products that are accessible.

Another trend that’s impacting retail currently is our company’s abilities to interact directly with customers on the fly. We’re really excited, because at Ritual, we have this direct relationship with our customers. We literally respond to every single Instagram post, every ad.

By leveraging our team of in‑house scientists, our team of customer experience executives, together we can thoughtfully and concisely answer a lot of our customers’ questions and build trust.

Platforms like Instagram, Facebook have allowed us to build really loyal and almost cultish followings of women who are committed to doing better things for their bodies. That is definitely having an impact on retail as well.

Could you talk a little bit about how consumer perception of wellness has changed and why it’s become more important?

We all want to do what’s best for our bodies and want to take care of them. I know that when I was four months pregnant, I cared more than ever what I was putting in and on my body. I was a healthy person before that but took it to the extreme even more because it was my responsibility, not just for myself, but for the child that I was carrying.

At that time I really dove deep into wellness and got rid of products that I really couldn’t get behind in my house: deodorants, toothpaste, sunscreens, cleaning supplies. When I took a look at the vitamins that I had been taking every single day for my health, I was pretty shocked to find what’s inside.

That’s why I started Ritual. All women deserve to know what they’re putting into their bodies and why. That’s where this idea was born. When you think about what’s going on in wellness today, which is very a plethora of brands or a plethora of companies trying to get women’s attention.

It’s important to pause and understand what we actually need and what we’re missing from our diets and dive into the science and research, which is exactly what we did. We spent years just researching women’s diets to identify what nutrients were missing today not 50 years ago. That’s how the idea of Essential for Women was born.

We like to distance ourselves from [industry trends] and have created products that are really around health and foundational health, and less around unproven trendy ingredients. For us things like folate, for iron, for magnesium are really essential and important.

Could you talk a little bit about how you discovered which nutrients were essential and which ones were just unnecessary?

We define an essential nutrient as something that is absolutely critical to a woman’s life and to her health. We identified nine essential nutrients during her life that are really key and we looked at 12,000 studies, government data, everything that was available to us.

We identified the nutrients that were really essential: folate, K2, MK7, magnesium, vitamin D3, boron and iron. What was interesting in one of the things we found that it wasn’t even just the ingredients, but it was the ingredient forms that really mattered.

For instance, over a third of women have a gene variation where they can’t properly utilize synthetic folic acid, which is very common in most vitamins. We identified methylated folate that we source from Italy. It’s a fourth-generation folate that bypassed gene variations and got in readily.

It sounds like you’ve done a tremendous amount of research. You have all of the science backing your products. How are you communicating this to your consumers?

We’ve definitely done the research. I’m personally on a mission to redefine what it means to be a health company in this day and age. I really believe that it starts with evolving the conversation on transparency. With our products you can see where every ingredient comes from in the world and why it’s there.

Being an online direct brand, you can go on our site, go on the Ingredients tab and literary see where everything comes from and why it’s there. We even have interviews with every single manufacturer and supplier as well as some of the key studies that we reference when making our decisions. It’s not as if transparency was something we thought would be nice to market.

It was something that we really believed in because as we started digging through the forms of ingredients out there and the ones that we decided to put into our product, we got so excited that we couldn’t help ourselves. We wanted to share that information.

We wanted to share why we have D3 from wild harvested lichen, why we have omega‑3s coming from EPA and DHA, from algae, why we have a methylated folate from Italy and K2, MK7 from Norway. We are so obsessed with our ingredients that we’ve evolved the conversation on transparency into almost traceability and really created a first of its kind traceable product. We want that to be the norm. Not just for our industry, but for other industries as well.

We go above and beyond to make sure that women are informed because knowledge is obviously power. That’s something we’re really proud of.

Could you talk a little bit about how you’ve tried to reimagine the multivitamin and turn it into something positive?

When I started the company I was skeptical of vitamins as a whole, but I did my research. I hired some of the leading scientists in the industry. Our scientific team is lead by a Harvard‑trained physiologist as well as one of the leaders in the nutraceutical industries, who has over 30 years of industry experience and a PhD in biomedical sciences. We hired this really credible in‑house team to build a product that we could really get behind and identify that we really do need vitamins.

Let’s start from the ground up, starting with understanding if we need vitamins in the first place. It turns out we actually do. Most of us are lacking in the same nutrients, which was fundamentally shocking.

We don’t believe that women should be taking five, six, seven different pills to reach optimal health. We surveyed hundreds of women and identified that most women did not want to take more than two capsules a day.

We created this bead‑in‑oil encapsulation for Essential for Women, which has the dry ingredients separate from the oil ingredients. All the ingredients are layered on top of each other preventing interaction. Then there’s a delayed release capsule that has a no nausea design, bypassing the stomach and getting released in the small intestine for tolerability. It’s also beautiful. That actually happened to be a byproduct of doing the right thing.

We wanted to celebrate that and put it in clear bottles, so that when women who’ve been to their medicine cabinet they didn’t have a stock of different bottles hanging out there. They had one single vitamin that they were really excited to take. Then finally we wanted the aroma to be pleasant.

We wanted it to be something that you looked forward to. We sourced fresh peppermint oil for Essential for Women from Yakima, Washington and put it in an empty tab in the bottle. That’s something that really pleasantly delights our customers.

Then for the prenatal we used lemon oil. Women commonly crave citrus during pregnancy. We thought that would be an interesting thoughtful touch as well.

Your branding is so simple and almost gender-neutral even though this is a vitamin designed for women. Was that a deliberate choice or were you trying to attract a certain type of consumer? 

One of the things when we looked at design that was really important to us was simplicity in an industry where things are incredibly complex, and you have so many choices, and you have to sift through so much information. Design allows us to surface the most important things by showing people and not just telling them.

The big question is how do you show trust? We believe that great simple design can do that because it’s thoughtful. We put so much care, effort and thoughtfulness, almost obsession into design as the way that we do with research in our ingredients.

I believe that great branding has allowed us to build out trust with our customer. It is incredibly gender-neutral, but I’m not sure anymore what the opposite would be. As someone who appreciates great design, this is the design that speaks to me as a woman.

One of the interesting challenges we had as well was launching the prenatal and how do we speak to women visually that are thinking or trying to conceive? Women typically are served up advertising that is flowery and pink. Not that there is a problem with pink, but I prefer yellow. Women don’t often look empowered in a lot of the current advertising especially if it’s geared towards millennial women we expect something different. Other brands, other categories or brands are marketing to us in a different way.

With our prenatal campaign we really tried to show empowered women. We only showed a few women that were actually pregnant, because the campaign was around pre‑pregnancy.

Your product offering is tightly curated, with just the Essential for Women and now the new Essential Prenatal. Why did you decide to launch with just one essential multivitamin instead of offering a broader range?

When it comes to our product philosophy and when it comes to vitamins and supplements, we believe in what you need versus what you want. When it comes to vitamins as a whole, our vision is to have one single vitamin forever and ever that really just evolves as a woman’s life stages change. What she needs today can change if she’s thinking about getting pregnant. It can change after she’s given birth and can change after she’s gone through menopause.

The vision all along and since the beginning is one single ritual, which is one single vitamin that fits into her life as seamlessly as brushing her teeth. We want to elevate vitamin‑taking to that level.

Essential Prenatal is like Essential for Women’s sister in a way. Instead of nine essential nutrients, there are 12. One of the really exciting things about the Prenatal and the Prenatal campaign that we recently did was opening up the conversation around getting women ready for pregnancy versus before, most companies were advertising to women when they were already pregnant.

That’s a really huge shift because it turns out that a study referenced by the CDC as a national study, close to 45% of pregnancies are unplanned and yet the first 28 days of pregnancy are when the neural tube forms. It’s really critical that women have their nutritional status optimized when they’re thinking or trying to get pregnant. This campaign was a huge movement for us to not just educate women about Essential Prenatal but starting to get women to think about their nutrition beforehand.

You mentioned that you envisioned Ritual as this companion that consumers can have. Do you have any other future offerings planned?

We really see ourselves as not just a vitamin company but a habit company. That means that we want to change the way that a woman interacts with the products that she uses every day and the experiences around them. In the future, we’re rethinking a lot of things.

We’re really shifting behaviors and we’d hope to do that around other products as well. What’s important to us first is to finish what we started in the vitamin category, which is really putting a stake in the ground when it comes to women’s health, women’s health research, identifying her needs, what she really needs, and what her body needs at different life stages.

You mentioned before that you and your team reply to every single comment on social media, which is amazing. Could you talk a little bit more about how you’re trying to build community with your brand?

Answering comments and being conversational on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, has allowed us to form really a community online that is responsive and thoughtful.

One of the things that we’re really excited about is that we’re skeptics building a brand for other skeptics. We want our customers to be label‑readers, we want her to be a cross‑examiner and to question things. We want to do that together. One of the things that platforms like Instagram have allowed us to do is go a little deeper through content and storytelling both visual and conversational every single day.

Instagram stories have allowed us to do that as well as even content on our own site and developing our own content hub which we lead our customers from social platforms to content, to articles on our site to go deeper if they want.

You mentioned you’re talking with consumers when you’re developing your products. Could you talk a little bit about how you incorporate consumers’ feedback into your research and development process?

As far as the products go themselves and the vitamins and the nutrients, that is solely based on research and studies. Those are developed with our in‑house scientific team. As I mentioned before, our chief scientist is a Harvard‑trained physiologist. Our VP of R&D has PhD in biomedical sciences. Together, our scientific team has come through thousands of studies to identify women’s needs and what they need today based on the latest research.

As far as R&D goes, it’s very much an in‑house thing. We want to be an authority on that as much as we love customers’ feedback and direction. When it comes to the experience of taking the vitamins, when it comes to packaging, when it comes to collateral, when it comes to what they’d like to see more or less of as far as content, all of that, for us, is crowdsourced.

One of the most exciting examples for us has been our omega‑3 story. We were excited to be using omega‑3s from algae that had both EPA and DHA in Essential for Women. Algae is the food of fish. It has a pretty pungent smell overall, just like fish oil does. We did not want to budge on the quality or the type of omega‑3s we wanted to use.

We quickly surfaced that. Our community and our customers wanted an option to pleasantly take their vitamins. They’ve been frustrated in the past by omega‑3s not smelling great in that experience, but they knew they needed them. We created this Minty Tab by feedback from our customers. It became a huge product innovation for us. That was interesting.

Could you talk a little bit about how you’re using a DTC subscription strategy to make the experience more seamless for consumers?

We are leveraging direct‑to‑consumer in several ways to thoughtfully make a better experience for our customers. The first is price. When creating Essential for Women with our scientists and talking to our manufacturer, they were shocked that my goal was to try to get it to under $30 because they knew how expensive some of our ingredients were. Through the direct‑to‑consumer model and bypassing the middlemen, we’re able to offer a $200 product at a $30 price point.

If you were to go to Amazon and you were to cobble together our Essential for Women formulation, everything from our omega‑3s with EPA, DHA to our ferrous bisglycinate iron to our K2 MK7 coming from Norway—it’s a pure crystal—to our D3 from wild‑harvested lichen, it would cost you over $200. It would take you a lot of time.

We wanted to create a really accessible product at an accessible price point. Going direct is interesting because we’re able to have more predictive models in trying to understand our customer. If they’re going to stick around, we know that we can have a certain cost of goods that maybe other companies can’t that are in retail. Some of our customers, we feel like our life‑long customers. That’s good for us. It’s good for them. That’s one of the things that’s really exciting.

The second is going deeper in the customer journey. If you were to buy a multivitamin off the shelf, you might not really know what it’s for. You might think it’s to grow your hair or to make your skin nice, whatever that may be. That is not what we’re about as a company. Our whole thing is building a foundation. Some of the best benefits are the ones you can’t see. It’s things that impact your long‑term health like your organs, or your blood, or your brain.

Something we’re really excited about is going deeper on that foundational health journey. I think the third thing is that we all forget to take our vitamins sometimes. I know I do even though I’m the CEO of this company. Even if we have really good habits, and we’ve built them in for whatever reason, there’s days we forget.

We are committed to building the most seamless, incredible experience for women knowing that they have those days. We all do. Things like snooze, things like allowing women to pause their subscription, when they need to for whatever that may be, are things that we’ve built into the experience. We also allow women to cancel at any time. These days, I think you have to be competing with Amazon for a level of service and the seamlessness of service.

I’m really proud of what we’re building because it not only allows women the convenience of their vitamins coming to them when they need, it allows them the convenience of going deeper and the storytelling that we provide. It allows them to ingest that over time.

Ritual

Ritual is driving value by fostering transparency and quality while prioritizing its customers’ needs. For more examples of similar inspiring retailers, see PSFK’s  reports and newsletters.

As part of The Media Insight Project, the American Press Institute recently revealed the results of a survey intended to find out 

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Surveying more than 4,000 recent subscribers at 90 local newspapers across four circulation categories, the study found nine types of readers. It takes more than 70% of them over a month to decide to subscribe to a publication. Almost 50% of respondents reportedly took at least a year. 

The surveyors found the time it took varied across readers and was determined by their stage in life and interests.

Types of readers included:

-Topic Hunters

-Locally Engaged

-Social Media and Mobile Discoverers

-Life Changers

-Coupon Clippers

-Print Fans

-Friends and Family

-Journalism Advocates

-Digital Paywall Converters

The in-depth report offers strategies to publishers looking to covert each type. For example, the report found that Digital Paywall Converters care most about unlimited access and were willing to subscribe after hitting their allotted number of stories. The suggestion for snagging a subscriber? Make the process as easy as possible across multiple devices and ways to pay.

According to the report, these types of subscribers can also be Topic Hunters, are usually young and male, and are likely to subscribe to large metro newspapers.

Coupon Clippers, who enjoy leafing through a publication and also hunting out discounts, were one of the smallest but most distinct groups uncovered. This group is best reached through bloggers and sites popular with coupon enthusiasts, skews female, suburban, Republican or Independent, and likely became a reader through a Sunday edition.

In addition to reader profiles, the results offer resources across nonprofit organizations and newsrooms that further clarify the mystery around locking in subscribers. The study is just a first step in getting to know and understand a publication’s audience and turn them into loyal subscribers.

While plant-based foods were oh-so-trendy this year, chicken in a variety of formats (and even pork) were also among the foods that saw the largest jumps in popularity this year, according to a “Year in Food” report from Grubhub.

The online and mobile food ordering/delivery service based the report on an analysis of more than 16 million orders placed for delivery or pickup on its platform, and a nationwide consumer survey on ordering and eating habits.

The top 10, in order, were bean burritos (orders up 276% versus 2017), poke (up 205%), chicken sliders (up 189%), baby back pork ribs (up 165%), chicken burritos (up 164%), chicken sandwiches (up 160%), cauliflower rice bowls (up 155%), chicken and waffle sliders (up 45%), parmesan chicken (up 139%), and buffalo cauliflower (up 124%).

Poke bowls actually lost a bit of their edge this year: Last year, they were #1, as the result of a 643% surge in orders.

Avocado toast, the darling of 2017, didn’t make this year’s top 10.

Also conspicuously absent, even in our protein-obsessed culture: beef items of any kind.

Breakfast, late-night and dessert trends

The report also identifies the trendiest breakfast items: peanut butter acai bowls (350% more orders than in 2017), detox juice (up 193%), bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches (up 190% more popular), breakfast burritos (up 141%), and French toast (up 106%).

Those who order late night snacks apparently have iron stomachs (dominated by young adults, no doubt). The item showing the greatest jump in popularity (up 169% versus 2015) was stuffed jalapeños, followed by spicy miso ramen (up 167%).

The other favs: sliders (up 148%), French toast (up 119%), and (back to spicy again) lamb shawarma (up 70%).

Trendy desserts, perhaps unsurprisingly, were still mostly of the traditional, comfort food variety: brownies (orders up 413%), Oreo cookie cupcakes (up 316%), baklava (up 261%), salted caramel cookies (up 243%), and cobblers (up 238%). Still, plants managed to make a splash here as well: vegan brownies came in at #6, with orders up 211% versus last year.

Survey highlights

Some of the findings from a survey of nearly 2,000 respondents across the country who had ordered food in the past three months:

*Fast-casual restaurants accounted for 40% of orders, followed by quick service (32%) and casual dining (24%).

*80% of orders are for home delivery 35% for work, 32% are with friends, 18% are on vacation, and 14% are during travel for work.

*The top reasons to order: Didn't feel like cooking (43%), satisfying a craving (30%), during at-home game/movie night (25%), and family-night dinners (24%).

*59% of men, compared to 36% of women, ordered pickup or delivery at least once a week during 2018.

*44% of women, versus 36% of men, prefer ordering/picking up from fast casuals. In comparison, 41% of men, and 36% of women, prefer QSRs/

*Pizza is the item that men (39%) and women (38%) agree on nearly equally as a top choice. Top ordered foods among men are burgers (31%), BBQ (24%) and Chinese (23%); top choices among women are Chinese (32%), Mexican (27%) and burgers (25%).

*69% of women, versus 54% of men, tend to be spontaneous when it comes to ordering. When they've had a long day, 48% of men and 34% of women report that they’ll splurge on something more expensive than usual.

*Perhaps confirming the end of the “date” as it was once defined,38% of women and 31% of men say that they view ordering delivery or pickup is “a great way to spend time together,” and 34% of couples surveyed order pickup or delivery for a "date night at home.”

*Even more telling, fully 90% of all respondents said that they prefer it if their significant others share the same food, and 42% consider it a potential relationship breaker if they don't. Men care even more than women, with 54% saying that shared food preferences "of course" matter, versus 31% of women saying the same.

Streaming video has become a big part of the offerings from major mobile providers.

AT&T offers HBO and WatchTV to its subscribers for free, while T-Mobile offers Netflix and next year, a new service powered by Layer3 TV. Verizon has offered a subscription to Apple Music.

For the mobile giants, it is about value, providing a compelling package of content and service that makes users willing to switch carriers or stay subscribers. For the streaming companies, the deal provides scale, potentially adding millions of users to their services, even if they were acquired at a bulk discount.

Now, a new entrant into the streaming fray is eyeing that bundle as a part of its business plan. Quibi, the streaming service founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg and being led by Meg Whitman.

Quibi is planning to have both ad-supported and ad-free offerings, but it is also looking to mobile carriers as a way to quickly scale up.

Speaking at an event hosted by Variety this week, Whitman confirmed the company was interested in cutting deals with one, or multiple, carriers to offer their service (presumably the $5 per month ad-supported tier) to their customers.

Sahil Patel reported the company ultimately hopes to have between 60% to 70% of its revenue from subscriptions, both direct from consumers and those sold through intermediaries, like a mobile carrier.

It’s an unusual strategy for a new OTT entrant, but Quibi, which has raised $1 billion from investors that include almost every major media company, is not launching small. By being bundled to every subscriber of say Verizon, Quibi would have low-friction access to more than 150 million people.

Quibi is also in the process of ordering and shooting thousands of original shows ahead of its launch, slated for sometime in 2019. The company is not currently interested in acquiring libraries of shows, although it may use IP from some of its investors in its series.

“The biggest challenge is the volume of content,” Katzenberg said at the Variety event. “It’s a tall order to do this in the next 12 months, but that doesn’t mean we are not going to try.”