Online video offers tremendous reach and growth potential for advertisers and publishers alike. But disparate technologies and fragmented metrics have been longtime pain points. There’s a clear need for a solution that can bring standardization, interoperability and improved efficiency to the industry.
That solution might finally be on its way with the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s unveiling of their ambitious Advanced TV initiative. Built alongside standards that have already been approved by the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), the IAB’s work could prove to be a significant step toward universal addressability, both for the myriad of devices and online services that make up the ATV ecosystem, and for the elusive bridge to linear TV measurement as well.
Standardizing and unifying all these different outlets of buying and selling ads in a way that allows everyone to compete means that everyone can win, including consumers. We have seen in the past that these types of issues are resolvable when the industry comes together and comes up with a solution that works for everyone. This could be the start of something truly transformational.
Advanced TV explained
Before diving into the IAB’s plan, it’s important to understand what Advanced TV is.Namely,Advanced TV is an umbrella term that refers to any TV device or service that isn’t part of traditional broadcast channels (or Linear TV, with some exceptions). Those products and services are often distinct from one another in subcategory, but they’re all considered a part of Advanced TV as a whole.
From an advertising perspective, the key divide between Advanced TV and traditional broadcast is addressability, which isthe ability to serve targeted ads to viewers based on their individual data, and track the success of whole campaigns based on various observable metrics. Standardizing and streamlining that process across Linear and Advanced TV is the crux of IAB’s initiative.
The grand plan for Advanced TV
The IAB released a three-year roadmap that outlines the implementation of their vision. In it, they listed five key objectives that they will use to chart its success:
Interoperability for frame accurate ad delivery and ad break management
Universal addressability and reconciliation for audience measurement
Full auditability for advertising campaigns delivery
Ad measurement for delivery and viewability verification
Omnichannel sales management for programmatic buying and selling of upfronts as well as spot buys
To accomplish these objectives, the IAB outlined the technologies that they will be deploying over the next three years to modernize the medium.
Standardized Video Watermark Signal Utilizing OM SDK
Working within digital standards like OM SDK, the IAB’s open watermark signal will collect vital measurements like viewability verification across the breadth of ATV’s services and devices. It will also allow for universal ad break management and frame-accurate ad insertion or replacement for video publishers. This is all in hopes of achieving a better ad experience for consumers who are otherwise forced to view the same ad many times over due to poor targeting capabilities.
Universal Asset Identification (Ad-ID)
In conjunction with IAB’s watermark, a universal ad identification system will be key to auditing campaigns and creatives. This will provide the much-needed ability to track both throughout the supply chain, so any ad can be identified and attached to its respective campaign. Ad-ID will also be a crucial component of bridging the tracking gap to linear channels.
2+ Impression Currency
This technology and methodology will reconcile audience measurement based on data from multiple delivery channels, including linear ones. In the future, this will standardize tokenization and reconciliation, improving universal addressability.
Programmatic Upgrades via OpenRTB
To ensure scalability on a programmatic level, IAB’s watermark will integrate with OpenRTB signaling over the next three years. This will also include developing live streaming ad break management and publisher safety guidance.
Conclusion
If IAB’s initiative can deliver on its objectives, the Advanced TV landscape could be on the verge of a sweeping evolution. One that will turn the current disparate jumble of technologies and metrics into an interconnected, holistic, and truly universal measurement system across both linear and non-linear channels. The task is great and the days are early. But it’s hard not to be excited about the possibilities, and we’ll be among those watching the IAB’s progress – and the evolution of Advanced TV – with keen interest over the next few years.
The many profound possibilities for creators leveraging artificial intelligence have been quietly heating up over the last decade. So, what really changed in the past few months? Certainly, the clever roll-out of ChatGPT only months after DALL-E 2 has thrown gas on the burner. Right now, press coverage and industry chatter are mostly focused on uncovering real-world applications offered by generative AI, which are exciting to be sure. However, wise publishers will heed lessons learned from past experiences in which their data were scraped and take an active role in preserving their business value.
“Scraping the web” is a term as old as the web itself. It’s no secret that Google’s core business was built by crawling companies’ servers to train its search engine to find and deliver satisfying results across the vast world wide web with speed and precision. The result: Google now plays the role of gatekeeper for much of the web.
The reality is that any publisher who made the radical decision not to allow Google’s crawler to do its thing would quickly become almost impossible to find online. Giving Google the free right to crawl your site is the cost of business to exist on the open web today.
Just last week Google began testing blocking news properties in Canada. As Campbell Clark wrote for the Globe and Mail earlier this week, “It’s not a threat, of course. Sometimes people just wake up with a horse’s head in their bed.”
This is yet another stark example of Google’s power. No individual publisher has the bargaining power to opt out and impact Google’s business. So no one does.
It’s not actually that different from the way in which Facebook built its social media platform into a digital advertising juggernaut. After many years scraping and collecting user data across the web and its partners – from far beyond the walls of its garden – Facebook began using AI to leverage its massive data warehouse appropriately named “The Hive” in a manner that is irreversible. Publishers are only now learning how all of this data was used, and abused, through lawsuit discovery and leaked documents.
Importantly, as was uncovered through one of these leaked documents, Facebook engineers used the metaphor of ink spilled into a lake to describe what happens to a person’s data once it makes its way into the Facebook’s data warehouse:
“We’ve built systems with open borders. The result of these open systems and open culture is well described with an analogy:
Imagine you hold a bottle of ink in your hand. This bottle of ink is a mixture of all kinds of user data (3PD, 1PD, SCD, Europe, etc.) You pour that ink into a lake of water (our open data systems; our open culture) … and it flows … everywhere. How do you put that ink back in the bottle? How do you organize it again, such that it only flows to the allowed places in the lake?”
This brings us to generative AI – 2023’s hot topic. It’s unequivocal that the Large Language Models are being trained by ingesting the work of newsrooms across the web. To better understand this fact, consider that Google disclosed that a whopping 15% of Google’s daily searches are completely new searches.
Now think about that for a moment: The most likely trigger for a novel search is an unfolding news event. That means the simple fact that these searches occur was triggered by the work of news media. And, as we know, Google monetizes answers. Particularly when confronted by a new query, Google’s machine learning algorithms lean into authority brands – those deemed likely to provide a trustworthy response. Guess who those are? You can see by looking at the top results presented by a search around breaking news: the results are called “top stories” and you guessed it: they come from media brands.
No one should doubt that a similar level of interest, intelligence, and impact on generative AI will be instigated—and answered—because of the work product of the news media, particularly given the role of Large Language Models in their training and operation.
So, if the output of newsrooms, writers, artists, and media companies were not available to scrape, what would happen to the quality of 2023’s much-hyped generative AI?
Copious effort and investment go into the creation of premium content. The use of premium content to train AI models is akin to fueling your machine with gasoline you “found” in someone else’s garage. It doesn’t inherently mean that the machine is not powerful, or useful. But that fuel was not free to create. If your machine can’t run without it, something is not quite right with the system.
Given Facebook’s metaphor, the publishing world may need to serve notice to OpenAI and its ilk before they can make the claim that the ink flow can no longer be reverse engineered. Let’s hope it is not already too late.
In November, DeviantArt rolled out an HTML tag so that an artist can inform web robots not to crawl their images to train art-generating AI. Media companies need to consider whether the right course of action is to launch a similar tag, which tells bots not to crawl and train their AI with publishers’ work. Of course, like many technical issues on the open web, this would only rein in the good robots and would not solve for bad bots.
But it is important that we make a start, before too much ink has spilled.
As we look toward the rest of 2023 and beyond, it’s clear that respect for consumer privacy will continue to greatly impact digital advertising as a whole. But this shift does not need to negatively impact publisher revenue.
Platforms blocking third-party tracking and new data privacy regulations give users the tools, awareness and the choice to protect their information by opting out of data sharing. With this, when we look at the open web as a whole, addressability has collapsed to 30%. But while big tech solutions continue to threaten to commoditize publishers, consumer privacy actually gives publishers an opportunity to reclaim data ownership.
Traditional adtech and legacy platforms aren’t equipped to solve this addressability crisis. And without addressability, publishers aren’t able to effectively monetize their audience. The good news is that media companies have the power to identify and solve addressability issues. Here’s how publishers can check their own addressability, step-by-step.
Step one: cookie-blocked platforms
The first step in assessing overall addressability is to determine where your users are. In the U.S. alone, nearly half of all of users are browsing in Safari, Edge, Firefox, or other cookie-blocked browsers. Further, about half of all iOS users have opted into Apple’s App Tracking Transparency framework, which also impacts audience monetization in fast-growing environments such as streaming apps. When consumers use these platforms, publishers lose the ability to target these audiences with traditional programmatic advertising.
Ad impressions that don’t have a cookie or identifier attached can signal a problem for marketers. It might even cause them to pay less for these impressions or spend elsewhere. Publishers who don’t have the ability to retain audience addressability and become a data source that advertisers need will run the risk of losing budgets.
By starting with determining how much traffic originates from one of these environments, publishers can begin to understand what percentage of addressability is lost. If we take the U.S. national average and apply it here, a publisher would be left with approximately 55% audience addressability after step one.
Step two: user-disabled cookies in Chrome
Despite Google delaying third-party cookie deprecation in Chrome until 2024, 40% of Chrome users are already browsing in incognito windows or disabling tracking cookies on their own. In the U.S., more than half of users are browsing in Chrome.
Continuing with our example, the combination of audiences choosing cookie blocking-platforms and users opting out of tracking on Chrome means that only 30% of publisher audiences are addressable. Today, 70% of the internet is effectively invisible to adtech.
As user choice increasingly becomes the default, this number will continue to grow. Google’s prominent “reject all” cookies button in the Chrome consent banner is scheduled to be implemented in more countries, as directed by GDPR. In the U.S., lawmakers are mulling over the American Data Privacy and Protection Act (ADPPA), which would have all users opted-out by default. The result is a future where users will have to take minimal action, if any, to opt out of sharing their data for advertising purposes.
Step three: first-page-view targeting
The next step in determining total addressability is evaluating publishers’ ability to target users on the first page view. Passer-by traffic varies greatly by publisher, but it stands that publishers who can’t serve an ad on the first page view then lose the ability to monetize that bounced audience.
Adtech solutions that rely on cloud-based data processing are handicapped in their ability to target an ad on first page view. However, by processing data at or near the source, media companies are equipped to capture this crucial audience. To continue our example, if a bounce rate is 30%, a publisher’s total addressability is now only 21%.
Step four: data longevity
Finally, publishers need to assess their ability to store data against particular cohorts via unlimited lookback windows. The average cloud-based platform (e.g. traditional DMPs, CDPs) relies on cookie-based lookback windows. This means that publishers can only lookback 30 days on a particular cohort, inherently capping the scale of the audience.
A longer lookback window enables publishers to build cohorts for users over an extended period of time. By building user profiles over a longer period of time, publishers can create cohorts that are reflective of seasonality, for example back-to-school shopping. This allows publishers to provide advertisers with highly relevant audience segments that rely on specific time pegs.
Maximizing addressability
Media companies that build a direct-sold business built on the unique relationships and trust they have with their users will command advertiser media spend and be well-positioned to succeed in this new era of digital advertising.
As evidence of this, Penske Media Corporation was able to realize a 46% increase in revenue from first-party data in 2022. Further, their rich audience data insights were able to deliver advertisers a 5x increase in performance (CTR) in campaigns that only used only first-party data.
As we look toward a future of digital advertising where publishers have control and users have a choice, adtech built for marketers and based on third-party data will no longer be sufficient. Publishers who take action to maximize their addressability with first-party data are able to differentiate their data offerings, prove value to buyers via insights, win RFPs, and ultimately grow revenue.
While evergreen issues around trust and a focus on the audience experience peppered the first in-person DCN Next: Summit since 2020, emerging opportunities – and concerns – around generative AI were also focal at the event. Held at the Fort Lauderdale beachfront Conrad Hotel, the 2023 summit hosted a wide range of speakers from inside and outside the DCN membership to discuss the business and future of media, brand mission, omnichannel strategy, consumer preferences, and the impact of the challenging economic and regulatory climate.
Surveying the regulatory landscape
DCN CEO Jason Kint kicked off the event with a focus on current key regulatory issues that impact digital media. He emphasized that the focus must remain on aligning content experiences, advertising behavior, and data usage with consumer expectations. He also looked at the current state of antitrust regulation.
As Kat Downs Mulder, SVP and GM of Yahoo News put it: media brands have a responsibility, in asking consumers for their information through sign-ons, “to be protective of our asks and thoughtful about what we request.”
Shoshana Zuboff, author of the book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Kint’s points were hammered home by Shoshana Zuboff, Harvard Business School professor and author of the book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Zuboff delineated the history of privacy erosion leading to tech companies’ engagement in a “secret massive scale extraction of human data” and how regulation is a driving factor in reining it in.
The current drive towards antitrust and reining in the dominance a few players have over the ad market was a focal point for Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee, who addressed attendees via Zoom. He discussed a bill he is reintroducing “in a few weeks with bipartisan support,” which is designed to restore and protect competition in digital advertising and improve advertising transparency.
“Unfortunately, big tech behemoths like Google have inserted themselves as middlemen into this relationship, extracting monopoly rents not just on their own properties, but from every corner of the entire internet ecosystem.”
How brand focus empowers growth
The impact of emerging regulation is far from the only challenge media executives currently face. Speakers touched on inflation, supply chain disruption, European conflict, U.S.-China tensions, the ongoing impact of Covid, climate concerns, labor challenges, the erosion of trust in institutions, and the fight for free speech.
However, Almar Latour, CEO, Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal publisher (pictured at top) said that challenges like these actually drive brands closer to their mission. For his brands, that mission is to go deep with products to provide truth relevant to different aspects of the business world, he added. This strategy is one he believes will lead to subscription growth.
Producing great products consumers love and return to over and over is indeed a driving factor in subscription strategy, as illustrated in a discussion between Julia Beizer, Bloomberg Media CEO and chief digital officer and Mulder. She noted that consumers value connecting with authoritative voices in brand podcasts and newsletters.
Bloomberg Media CEO and chief digital officer Julia Beizer, & SVP and GM of Yahoo News Kat Downs Mulder in conversation with Axios’ media reporter Sara Fischer.
Indeed, building an infrastructure on the foundation of staying true to one’s brand is key to success, according to Bonin Bough, Group Black co-founder and chief strategy officer.
Brand, however, is not some vague marketing tool. Scott Mills, BET president and CEO said that maximizing brand requires a comprehensive data-driven ecosystem encompassing linear, streaming, and digital platforms.
Advocating for truth and accuracy
Maximizing brand value requires providing consumers with a source of much-needed, trustworthy information – particularly when others seek to tamp it down and create a void that is often filled with dis- or misinformation.
Scott Mills, president of BET
Addressing Florida’s Department of Education rejection of the AP African American History course, Mills noted that such actions will “drive us to allocate more of our resources or more of our attention to ensuring that our community—and people who value and respect our community—have access to accurate information.”
Clearly, the need for accurate information is a global one, though journalistic approaches and press freedoms vary widely. In his work as the manager for East and Southern Africa at the organization Journalists for Human Rights, Dr. Siyabulela Mandela has found that offering training to local journalists not only empowers them, but helps their work better serve local communities. He said that improving journalism’s role of providing checks to those in power is critical at a time when “there seems to be a shift from more democratic ways of doing things towards more totalitarian ways.”
Dr. Siyabulela Mandela, Journalists for Human Rights
Mandela advocates for an approach that enables Western journalists to reframe stories in East and Southern Africa and the Middle East with a more contextual focus on human rights by leveraging his organization’s local knowledge base. He favors the idea of a collaborative exchange program for mutual training with journalists from East and Southern Africa. Each, he pointed out, has much to learn from each other.
Evolving with the times
In addition to providing content that continues to address the needs of audiences, speakers discussed how innovation in storytelling provides creative and impactful ways to engage and inform audiences.
For Emblematic founder and CEO Nonny de la Pena, that means finding new ways to use virtual reality. Nicknamed “the godmother of VR” de la Pena illustrated techniques and showed behind the scenes insights into how some of the most powerful VR stories have been created. However, despite her enthusiasm, she said that given the fact that creators of misinformation often leverage powerful tech, it is essential to establish immutable provenance for footage to make it difficult to manipulate.
Alice McKown, publisher and CRO of The Atlantic
Encompassing non-traditional strategies to engage new audiences requires portfolio diversification, noted Alice McKown, publisher and CRO of The Atlantic. While the company has digitized its entire archive of 30,000 articles from its 165 years, it also has expanded efforts into creating new ways to leverage its IP, including immersive art exhibits, video, podcasts, book publishing, and events.
Hannah Yang, Chief Growth Officer, New York Times
The National Geographic also has instituted strategies to evolve with the times while staying true to the brand’s core attributes. The magazine still attracts a relatively small, but incredibly loyal following, according to editor-in-chief Nathan Lump. These days, however, National Geographic brand reaches millions of people via social media, the National Geographic Channel on Disney Plus, virtual reality, live events, a travel business, consumer products, books.
Given the many ways that the brand now reaches audiences, Lump pointed out that National Geographic is the biggest it’s ever been in its 135 years. National Geographic boasts 714 million global followers across the major social platforms alone.
For The New York Times, Chief Growth Officer, Hannah Yang told the audience that its impressive subscription growth is achieved through three well-defined missions: a subscription growth mission to meet financial goals; consumer-facing mission offering desired options such as games and cooking; and platform mission to ensure that all parts of the business have the technology and data perspective they need to thrive.
What’s next
“There’s never been a better time to monetize audiences,” noted Alex Michael, managing director of LionTree Group. He stressed the value of omnichannel strategy and bundling while discussing the investment opportunities his company is leaning into this year.
Richard Plepler, founder, EDEN Productions
The power of omnichannel was echoed by a number of speakers, including board member Robin Thurston, Outside Interactive founder and CEO. He said, “The concept of single sign-on omnichannel helps connect the dots and create value.”
Richard Plepler, founder, EDEN Productions and former HBO chairman and CEO, reminded attendees of something he’s advocated for many years: quality over quantity. “More is not better; only better is better. I am not of the belief that tonnage gets you more subscribers – what gets you more subscribers is when brands deliver on their promise.”
As DCN members map out strategies for 2023, innovation and audience focus remain constant. However, to win amidst contemporary challenges developing a seamless omnichannel strategy, while staying to brand mission, will be key to attracting new consumers and retaining existing ones.
Any publisher will tell you how costly it can be to create innovative, attention-grabbing content that resonates with audiences and moves them to engage. But the stakes are even higher when it comes to distributing this content: failing to deliver content effectively can mean depriving it of the attention it deserves, undermining the utility of your initial content investment.
Distributing content is a critical step for publishers and media organizations of all types in delivering quality news and entertainment to audiences and driving revenue through advertising or subscriptions. Yet the channels most often used are noisy environments where user attention is limited and competition is boundless. When not approached strategically, using data as a guide, content distribution can be a laborious, frustratingly inexact science with erratic results.
But publishers are increasingly adopting an effective solution: Artificial Intelligence (AI). Providing immense value in many operational aspects of the newsroom, AI is also transforming how publishers distribute content to maximize reach and performance. Below we’ll look at four key ways in which AI is driving this transformation.
1. Automate content delivery workflows to save time
Frequent and repetitive processes can often be broken down into discreet actions which can be automated to save time.
Consider the example of social media publishing:
Despite the significant changes underway at social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter in recent times, social media is still one of the preeminent means for publishers to distribute content to audiences, offering an efficient way to reach billions of people of all ages across the globe.
Publishing content to different social platforms is a manual, time-consuming process. It involves selecting the best content to share, creating posts, writing adapted share messages, selecting hashtags, choosing images, analyzing performance and extracting insights for your publication’s social media content strategy. And, of course, all this should be done with specific social platforms in mind (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and a growing list of newer platforms). By applying AI, publishers are able to automate this entire process, saving immense time while ensuring content is optimally delivered to audiences across social media platforms.
Another increasingly common example is with email newsletters, a burgeoning area of investment for many publishers. Where applications of AI were previously restricted to send time recommendations, AI is now transforming the entire process of delivering content via email by fully automating the creation, sending and optimization of emails. Publishers are now employing AI to automatically curate, build, send, test and optimize their newsletters, all without requiring human input. The time gained from this level of automation is evident, and can be reinvested into the creation of new, engaging content.
2. Optimize content performance with powerful machine learning
Determining which content will perform best at any given moment, in any given channel, is something that arguably exceeds human ability. But unprecedentedly powerful algorithms can now integrate audience data and real-time trends. This offers the ability to pinpoint which content will attract attention and engagement, and the best time to publish to capture this attention.
By applying AI in this way across key channels, publishers are maximizing their content’s performance:
Machine learning algorithms deliver newsletters with personalized content, sent at optimal times determined by machine learning, to achieve higher open rates and click rates.
AI determines which content is most likely to go viral on social media, and determines the precise optimal post time to gain higher visibility and more user engagement.
Machine learning systems identify which creative elements are likely to generate the most advertising clicks, and tailor ads to viewers on the fly.
AI understands visitor behaviors and personalizes website content for a tailored user experience.
There are many other examples of how AI is transforming the content distribution strategies of publishers and media groups, with exciting new applications of AI surfacing every day.
3. Automatically maximize your content’s lifetime value
A key aspect of any content distribution strategy is knowing when, on which channels, and how often to redistribute existingcontent. In addition to planning and managing the distribution of new pieces, publishers must also constantly think about opportunities to recycle and redeploy content from their archives, whether these are evergreen pieces or seasonal features that can be reused each year. Republishing content in this way is an effective strategy for maximizing the value it can drive across its lifetime.
Publishers can use AI to fully automate this republishing process and ensure that relevant content is reused at the opportune time. One example is the automated resharing of content on social media: AI algorithms monitor current social audience data and trends on each platform, then check a publisher’s content archives to determine which existing pieces should be republished, and the precise moment to generate a new wave of traffic and engagement. Leveraging AI to effectively and automatically manage content redistribution can help publishers squeeze the most return from content over its entire lifespan.
4. Test and learn with AI-driven insights
Running tests is a critical practice to optimize performance over time. But planning and executing tests, collecting and cleaning data, and analyzing results, then transforming them into action has traditionally been laborious. Publishers are now using AI to gain efficiencies with the testing process on various content distribution channels.
Email newsletters are a prime example, given that they have multiple elements available to test such as layout, font, colors, image size, content order, subject line and more. Implementing tests on each email blast, then collating data and identifying trends and larger patterns can be expertly handled by a machine. And in most use cases, AI can be employed to not only collect and analyze test data, but also to automatically iterate and implement improvements based on test results, ensuring content achieves continuous increases in performance.
Unlock content’s full potential with AI-powered delivery
Distribution is a decisive stage of the content life cycle, with the potential to make or break the performance of a piece of journalism. Getting distribution right – and across an increasing number of channels – is time-consuming and requires data and strategy to execute properly.
Fortunately, with AI technology, publishers and media organizations can bypass much of the cumbersome, manual work involved in delivering content at scale. Adopting AI for content distribution can mean more accuracy and consistency than a human can provide, and this enhanced intelligence can have a significant impact on your publication’s bottom line.
About the author
Ashley Kibler is the Marketing Director at Echobox, the leading solution for publishing automation used by 1,500 publishers and media groups worldwide to automate and optimize content curation and distribution.
It might be a cliche, but this year really is looking like a pivotal moment for the media industry. As we enter 2023, America’s top publishers face a rapidly changing landscape. To survive and thrive through increasingly uncertain times, many publishers are working hard to upskill their talent, reorganize their priorities and teams, and implement new campaign management technologies. In this article we will take a closer look at these strategies, exploring how leading publishers are adapting to the most pressing challenges and opportunities of our time – and whether they will be enough.
Upskilling employees and poaching tech talent
It’s an undeniable reality that media jobs are evolving so that they increasingly resemble tech jobs. The digitalization of publishing has made it increasingly difficult for individuals to succeed without a base level of tech competence—from search engine optimization to content management systems, and analytics to automation.
Publishers can no longer afford to be slow to learn or implement new technology. Market-leading publishers have two options: either upskill their existing workforce or seek out new talent with strong technical credentials.
In our circle of clients and partners, we’ve seen both. And, when it comes to finding new talent, there is a growing trend for traditional publishers to poach from the tech industry. The benefit is that not only do they bring the competences desired, but also a fundamentally different, digital-first mindset that many publishers recognize will be invaluable this year. E-commerce, for instance, is increasingly of interest to publishers who are embracing self-serve ad sales. Understanding the basic mechanics of cart abandonment, checkout optimization, and prospect nurturing are great ways to make ad sales more profitable and reduce manual workload.
Reorganizing priorities and teams
The second strategy we are seeing implemented across leading publisher brands is reorientation across multiple levels of the organization. For a long time, the business model of publishers has supported extensive, high-cost sales teams. With increased competition from everything from new social platforms to streaming television—and an uncertain economy—sales will never be the same. The traditional seller of print ads is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Many digital-first publishers are skipping sales teams altogether, where others are upskilling and redirecting focus to self-serve processes.
We’re already seeing major layoffs from the likes of CNN, NBC, the BBC, Vox Media, and more. But at the same time, publishers cannot afford to sacrifice growth. So, they are looking for new and more efficient ways to bring in revenue, and to design teams and projects that prioritize profitability. Buzzfeed for example, who laid off 12% of their workforce in December, saw their stock rocket upwards by 150% when they announced that they would be integrating AI into their core business, using generative text models to create new content.
New technology and automation
As ad sales teams come under increasing pressure and reduced headcount, publishers are looking for new, more cost-efficient ways to capture ad revenue and streamline their ad operations. At the same time, hyper-localization, made possible by new technologies, is pushing publishers to reconsider how they interact with audiences, and what targeting options to offer to advertisers. One growing area of interest is self-serve campaign platforms. Designed to allow publishers to sell ad inventory directly to advertisers (as opposed to the opaque supply chains of programmatic, and the labor-intensive processes of direct sales), self-serve platforms are on the rise.
Leading publishers that have launched new advertising projects recently include The Wall Street Journal, McClatchy, and Rogers Sports & Media. All of these publishers, regardless of their specific audiences or heritage, share one pressing concern: to re-establish quality publishing as an alternative to Big Tech’s advertising dominance of the past decade.
At the same time, brands like Disney have led the way in developing proprietary ad technology, giving themselves greater flexibility and control over their ads business. Disney’s Audience Graph for example, based on first-party data, offers advertisers access to over 1,800 segments with visibility into 100,000 audience attributes. Having control over that aspect of the process allows the company to have more freedom and command, which enables them to focus on fulfilling the advertising needs of their clients and their own business objectives.
Where do we go from here?
All of this to say that publishers are looking ahead at a year full of uncertainty, rapidly evolving technology, and a shifting landscape that will see many tried and tested revenue models becoming outdated. From our experience with clients and partners, we can only offer this advice: be bold, but not reckless. Experiment, but be cautious not to get swept up in new trends without due diligence. And above all, keep your eyes and ears open – too many publishers are focused on their own internal struggles rather than framing them within the industry at large.
