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Advertising | Perspectives | Supporter Spotlight

Preparing measurement for the post-cookie data divide

The post-cookie world is facing a measurement problem. There is plenty of talk surrounding FLoCs, Unified IDs, first-party data, contextual advertising and more. However, there is not enough conversation about how the worthiness of these solutions will be understood by buyers and sellers. 

There will likely be no silver bullet replacement for third-party cookies for some time, so teams need the ability to analyze the effectiveness of new technology and data sets. This is particularly true for publishers, who will suddenly be attempting to meet new advertiser KPIs based on a much broader range of data types and technologies.

More data, more discrepancies

Publishers have typically been in a reactive position relative to advertiser expectations. But what happens when those expectations evolve due to the industry-wide push to replicate the performance of behavioral targeting through various post-cookie solutions? Complexity will increase, and with it, there is the potential for increased friction. This will inevitably impact publisher revenues.

Discrepancy management was historically limited to the differences in first-party and third-party campaign pacing. But as new data is used and advertiser KPIs change to incorporate different technologies for the same campaigns, discrepancies will become more of a three-dimensional problem. 

Cookie-based targeting is an example of where this could get more complicated. Third-party cookies made it very simple for a sports brand to serve ads to an audience of soccer fans in the 18-36 age range. Without access to third-party cookies, advertisers will want a way to analyze the audience data that determined the age group and interests, or the context of the page, or a number of other potential factors in order to understand whether the ad was served to the right audience. This makes campaign analysis and compensation inevitably more complicated. 

Another example can be found in the case of contextual segmentation and semantic differences in classification. An alcoholic drink recipe that one advertiser may consider as “cooking” may also be classified as “alcohol ” with a different advertiser. Since publishers work with many partners, they need the ability to recognize and normalize these nuanced differences that can have a large impact on campaign discrepancies. In short, the new world we’re entering is even more fragmented, and existing publisher workflows must adapt. 

The need for measurement alignment

In a soon-to-be-released survey conducted by DoubleVerify, 47% of publishers cited measurement standards as one of the biggest challenges with relying on first-party and contextual data. The same will likely be true for advertisers, as more complex data sets will be closely tied to KPIs. This highlights the need for neutral measurement that improves collaboration and reduces friction between buyers and sellers.

Even within individual solutions such as FLoCs or Unified IDs, there have been delays and setbacks that highlight the complexity of these issues. The industry will need different types of data to fill the gap left by third-party cookies. Ensuring this data is trusted, verifiable and actionable will be a key challenge for the industry.

Ensuring post-cookie success with holistic data strategies

The looming industry changes will make it more important for publishers to address instances of data silos and manual reporting that slow down decision making and reduce transparency. This can be made possible with a holistic data strategy and tech stack that can manage the rising complexity. Publishers focusing on aggregating their data and optimizing workflows can better position themselves to be proactive and take control of how targeting and measurement impacts their business. 

In this age of experimentation where new variables lead to more complicated deals, it’s even more important for publishers to invest in tools that will facilitate the ingestion of a variety of both first- and third-party metrics holistically. Successful campaigns must account for making first-party audience data actionable for advertisers while considering key media quality metrics and any third-party data that buyers rely on. Many industry stakeholders expect first-party data to be key, but this is only the case if the data is able to be used to effectively replace third-party targeting.

What you need for a holistic data strategy

Holistic data strategies will help manage complexity in discrepancy management and ad targeting, but what does this look like in practice? To help publishers get into a holistic mindset when it comes to data and workflows, they should ask themselves the following questions:

  • Which data sources does your organization rely on now? How is it collected and aggregated?
  • Which data is valued by your top advertising partners? How will this change in the future due to cookie deprecation?
  • Does the organization have a system to connect these resources in a meaningful way?
  • What teams stand to benefit from data that they don’t collect themselves?

Once publishers decide to move forward with a holistic approach, they must determine whether they will build a technology solution in-house or purchase one that can adapt as the industry evolves. One key point to consider moving forward is the potential for automated, algorithmic optimization based on the intersection of these data sets. For publishers, it’s important to think about the long-term implications of this choice, as workflows and tech stacks are often difficult to transition out of once they are established.

No one can fully predict what’s coming next for post-cookie targeting and how those results will trickle down to publishers. What publishers can prepare for is the fact that complexity will only increase from here. With that in mind, it’s vital for media companies to prepare by evaluating their tech stack and data foundation in order to aggregate and analyze more complex data sets.

Advertising | Perspectives | Supporter Spotlight

What CTV marketers can learn from TV’s past mistakes

People working in CTV advertising often toss around phrases like “the living room of the future” and “the connected consumer.” TV technology today is pretty darn impressive and its easy to be optimistic. With content like choose-your-own adventure programming and sophisticated hardware, today’s TV tech puts the “home theaters” of even a decade ago to shame.

However, there’s also a central dilemma: The tension between wanting to innovate and wanting to play it safe in order to avoid annoying or alienating consumers. How high-tech is too high-tech for certain audiences? There are a number of emerging technologies designed to enhance the viewing experience that advertisers could leverage. However, just because they can doesn’t mean they should.

For brands, designing a campaign for unproven territory can mean designing a campaign that doesn’t work because it fails to resonate with consumers. On the other hand, if you pass up the chance to be first-to-market, someone else will get there instead. The trick is to find the just-right spot in between.

Luckily, there are some lessons to be found in some of the past few decades of innovation in the living room. As with ad overload, history can teach us a few things about marketing on CTV.

Watch for consumer adoption

First, track consumer adoption. Just because a technology exists doesn’t mean that consumers are using it. That might be because it’s too expensive, too difficult to use, or just not useful. Consumer uptake is what really matters, especially with an emerging medium. And the reality is that plenty of TV technologies promoted by mainstream consumer electronics retailers encounter lukewarm reception from buyers.

Remember curved TVs, which were hyped up back in 2013? It turns out that you can’t replicate an IMAX experience in your living room, no matter how high your ceilings are. Meanwhile, take a look at voice control, something that may have seemed like a science fiction technology not long ago. You can thank the marketing behind Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri for convincing consumers that voice control is both useful and user-friendly. As a result, we’ve found that voice-controlled ads really do engage users.

Consumers crave convenience

Second, never forget that consumers crave convenience. Integrating new tech into your advertising often isn’t worth it if it makes the brand experience more complicated for the consumer. This is particularly important when translating digital campaigns from desktop and mobile to the lean-back CTV environment.

There’s perhaps no better cautionary tale here than 3D TV. Watching some entertainment in 3D – sports, for example – seemed thrilling at first. But needing to wear specialized glasses for the experience, in addition to the added cost of 3D TVs, posed a barrier to entry that consumers weren’t willing to surmount. Then ESPN backtracked on a plan to put live sports into 3D, which eliminated the one incentive many consumers had to adopt the new tech – a more immersive sports experience.

There’s an exception to this, though. You can offset added complexity with a value exchange. If you’re going to make an ad experience more complicated, be upfront with what consumers will get in return. That might be fewer commercials for the rest of the episode they’re watching. It might be discount that they can capture with their mobile phones straight off their TV screen (or both).

Prepare to adapt to change

And finally, be ready to adapt to change. Things change fast – hardware, software and consumer habits. Five-year plans for a new medium may need to be altered in a matter of weeks.

In addition, keep an eye on market signals even if you consider them to be externalities. Some media executives and technologists were singularly focused in the mid-2000s on the HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray race to supplant the standard DVD. However, that might have distracted them from the fact that before either could “win,” streaming media became the choice of consumers worldwide. Millions of dollars were invested in technologies that were obsolete before they even hit the market.

“We’ve screwed up in the past but we won’t do it again” is a common mindset that’s been in the ad industry for decades. Typically – spoiler alert – we do screw up again. But even as we look to the future, having an eye on the past can never hurt to help avoid a few missteps.

Advertising | Perspectives | Revenue | Supporter Spotlight | Video

OTT monetization needs to adapt fast or die slow

Streaming TV may have killed cable － but where do we go from here? After the pandemic-induced streaming boom, consumers are cancelling subscriptions at record rates. As viewers grapple with rising prices and an explosion of subscription services, OTT players should embrace the potential of ad-supported streaming in order to survive an increasingly competitive market.

OTT on the up

The OTT (over-the-top delivery of TV and film via the internet) industry is booming. In 2017, approximately a third of U.S. adults cited streaming services as their main means of consuming television. Double that for people aged 18-29. During the pandemic, streaming television has continued to display incredible growth. In 2020, screen time overall was up almost a third on the previous year. Viewers watched streaming services, such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+, for one hour and 11 minutes per day. Also, 12 million people joined a service they had never used previously. Three million of those viewers had never previously subscribed to any TV streaming service at all.

A changing paradigm

The mass adoption of streamed OTT services coincides with a fundamental change in the television business model. While television has traditionally been funded largely by advertising, most streaming TV platforms have instead opted for a subscription-only model. For traditional TV providers transitioning to streaming, this choice is understandable, given the abundance of legacy technologies that cannot easily be switched towards an advertising-based SVoD. New players like Netflix, by contrast, have made a strategic decision not to offer an ad-supported subscription.

OTT overload

The subscription model appears to be working well enough for Netflix, the undisputed market leader. The problem lies in the explosion of alternative streaming platforms. In 2020, the average viewer was subscribed to nearly eight streaming services, compared to six in 2019.

Netflix raised the prices of their memberships in 2020 and may well do so again. The result is that the monthly cost for consumers of streaming tv is increasing, as both the prices and number of services go up. There is an inevitable tipping point where paying multiple subscriptions becomes too expensive for the viewer and they will choose to let some go. Many have already crossed that threshold: 36% of Americans plan to cancel streaming subscription services in the next 12 months. And the most common reason – by far – is the price of service.

Ad-supported gains ground

Although subscription dominates, ad-supported streaming services have seen substantial growth during the pandemic. Research by Deloitte found price to be a key factor in consumer streaming decisions. Most consumers (65%) want cheaper ad-supported streaming options (up from 62% pre-Covid). And, of those who did, more than 50% preferred ad-only streaming. Sixty three percent of respondents in a PwC survey said they would be willing to sit through more ads if it meant cheaper subscriptions. Providers offering ad-supported streaming now include The Roku Channel, IMDb TV, Discovery plus, CBS, and Hulu, to name a few.

Sell smarter ads

Part of the appeal of the subscription-only model lies in its apparent simplicity. For established television providers, transitioning their advertising model from cable to digital presents many technical challenges.  For those providers who have embraced ad-supported, a combination of white-glove and programmatic ad sales are the norm.

However, a new approach is also gaining popularity: self-serve advertising platforms. Inspired by the walled gardens of Facebook and Google, self-serve ad platforms allow OTT providers to sell their ad inventory through a branded, automated marketplace. This allows them to tap into the massive SME ad spend that currently drives digital ad growth. SMEs increasingly favour self-serve solutions, and for OTT brands with their own platforms, less value is lost in the infamously murky “black box” programmatic supply chain.

Roku, for instance, sells home screen banner ads, Roku screensaver ads, and video ads via their self-serve platform Roku Ad Manager. Ad Manager is designed to be a smarter, simpler, and more cost-effective way of managing channel promotional campaigns within the Roku ecosystem. It is just one of an increasing number of self-serve platforms popping up among OTT brands.

The other important aspect of ad-supported streaming is that it’s not simply a return to the dark days of regular, irritating ad breaks (as still found on linear TV). OTT providers that adopt ad-supported models are innovating the user ad experience to make it more effective and less obnoxious. Hulu, for instance, runs pause ads. This non-disruptive, non-intrusive user-initiated ad experience appears only when viewer presses pause when watching content. That’s a far cry from the ad breaks of old, and an indicator that ad format innovation is an essential part of the new streaming experience.

Ad-supported is inevitable

As OTT prices and the number of platforms continue to rise, consumers are increasingly looking for flexible, low-cost alternatives to meet their streaming needs. For OTT providers, offering only subscription models means that they price themselves out of the market for cost-conscious cord cutters.

We are not likely to return to the days of constant ad breaks and linear TV. Rather, the future lies in the flexible middle ground where consumers can pick and choose from a selection of price models: subscription, ad-supported, or a hybrid of both. OTT providers need to embrace ad-supported streaming － the sooner, the better.

About the author

Johan Liljelund is the Executive Vice President at DanAds based in Sweden. Johan is an entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience in developing technology towards the media industry and a pioneer in the digital advertising industry enabling publishers to streamline and efficient their internal processes on a global market.

Advertising | Perspectives | Revenue | Supporter Spotlight

Two ways publishers can increase digital ad revenue from news content

The media is covering news from more angles, and at more depth, than ever before. The Tokyo games generated a flurry of content that spanned fashion, mental health, gender equality, politics, and more. (And let’s not forget the athletes and actual events!)

The summer games reflect how big news events typically branch out across industries, lifestyle categories, etc. Sometimes, the link between what would be considered a critical piece of news and everything else is tenuous.

Unfortunately, in the pursuit of absolute safety and stringent brand preservation, many advertisers err on the side of caution. They employ rigid brand safety practices that lead to overblocking, which diminishes the yield publishers need to bring the important conversations to the fore. As a result, many advertisers sit on the sidelines as journalists explore the various facets of evolving news. Unfortunately, that even includes topics that could be on-brand for many advertisers.

News content holds digital advertising’s future

The advertising industry’s pullback associated with Covid-19 coverage early last year illustrates the negative impact this can have on publishers, advertising brands, and the overall consumer experience. In early 2020, traffic to major U.S. news sites jumped more than 50% compared to the same period the previous year. However, that increase in visitor time and attention did not provide a corresponding revenue increase because many advertisers were steering clear of any content referencing the virus.

The root of the problem lies in the “blocklist.” This simplistic brand safety tactic prohibits ads from being served based on keywords appearing in URLs or nearby content. According to news reports, “coronavirus” was the number-one term on industry blocklists. In fact, more than three thousand advertisers have blocked ads from appearing near it.

Despite these challenges, there is ample opportunity for publishers to move the conversation past purely transactional ad sales and take more active control of their content strategy. By offering curated inventory packages that are both contextually relevant and brand suitable, publishers are able to address advertisers’ brand safety concerns. They can provide also advertisers with greater control over the audiences they are reaching and the content they are aligned with.

Adapting advertising to the news ecosystem

Overly restrictive blocklists impact publishers and advertisers, yet the news will always have complexities and nuances. However, according to GroupM, “There are simple ways to advertise in news without compromising brand safety. But to avoid hard news, or even bad news, flies in the face of the facts.”

Adapting to fast-paced news cycles requires you do the following:

1. Gain insights and control

Evolve from the brand safety of yesterday. Focus instead on understanding the context of the content surrounding brand messaging. Contextual Intelligence tools help advertisers and publishers understand and evaluate billions of webpages and other digital content. This allows them to evaluate supply and identify brand-suitable environments for advertising based on overall page context, not a single word or meta data.

For example, many advertisers might decide they are comfortable with ad placements around current content related to topics like personal hygiene, cleaning, telework, streaming entertainment, food delivery, education, cooking, books, games, or exercise. While each marketer needs to determine its own standards for brand suitability, this type of related content may be appropriate.

In an interview, Edwin Wong, SVP of Insights & Innovation at Vox Media, noted that: “When quality content is matched with people’s passions and interests, it creates a much richer picture of who the audience is, why they are there and what motivates them. When we do this right, we no longer base contextual targeting on just the individual, an individual action, or an individual piece of content, but on what our platforms deliver for the audience holistically. It changes the retroactive perspective of targeting and makes context targeting future-facing.”

2. Provide meaningful ad measurement

Establish baseline metrics

Two primary benefits emerge from consistent monitoring and accounting for viewability, invalid traffic, and brand-safety reporting across your campaigns. First (and very importantly), you protect your advertisers’ brand dollars. Second, effective brand safety will be dynamic. Brand suitability takes page context and intent into account to address continuous content evolution.

Life beyond verification

Connect your campaign to data sets that reveal meaningful impact so that attention becomes an outcome to pursue in tandem with traditional KPIs such as viewability and verification. More broadly, marketing campaigns need an industry ready for new metrics to gauge cross-channel impact beyond just verification.

Measure across channels 

Publishers and platforms will look to brands to maintain consumer loyalty and trust in their expertise. This calls for both robust content and multichannel dissemination.

Evolve KPIs to gauge true engagement and impact

Innovative marketers who experiment with formats beyond traditional social media posts and editorial-style content learn more because verification alone won’t tell you about impact post-view. As marketers seek further control over their ad spend and a better understanding of campaign efficacy, measuring advertising outcomes like consumer attention will become crucial.

When you move measurement beyond ad verification to attention, you’ll show advertisers how your inventory helps them drive success and hit their KPIs. That’s a surefire way to keep them coming back for more.

Drive more revenue through agility

Changes to ad targeting, data collection, and privacy regulations will continue to challenge the digital advertising ecosystem to evolve and bring new solutions to market that support its future. The ability to stay agile and adapt to the changing industry will be critical for publishers while increased collaboration across the ecosystem will provide not only innovation, but an increased customer experience and the need every stakeholder to rise to the occasion.

Advertising | Perspectives | Supporter Spotlight

How AI can provide publishers with the identity advantage

The post-cookie era of digital advertising is approaching. Google may have postponed its plan to remove third-party cookies, but the result remains the same: industry players must prepare for a huge amount of industry upheaval. Most notably, there will be a significant drop in data availability.

Publishers – with direct access to audiences and first-party data – are widely acknowledged as being best-placed to survive in the ecosystem’s data-frugal future. But having valuable first-party data at their fingertips won’t be enough for them to flourish. Moving forward, publishers must discover new ways to optimize their offerings, enhance their monetization strategies, and heighten the value of the user experience.

With technology powered by artificial intelligence (AI), publishers can harness the capabilities needed to become digital advertising’s main providers of quality, first-party data. They will also be in a position to build of scalable, privacy-safe data solutions. By combining the power of AI with valuable first party data, publishers have a significant competitive advantage.

AI helps publishers leverage their pair of aces

Publishers were already holding a pretty good hand, with content and consent their figurative aces. Publishers build trust among their regular users by generating high levels of audience engagement and loyalty through the production of editorial content. This, in turn, helps them earn consent from logged-in users to gather and use their first-party data.

Publishers’ first-party data strategies, therefore, give them a solid basis to achieve reach with known audiences. However, it is broadly acknowledged that consented data has its limits. At best, only one in 10 users are willing to share personal information, such as age and gender. However, almost a quarter (23%) are reluctant to do so regardless of how it could improve their online experience.

Consequently, optimizing reach beyond known users relies on publishers taking different approaches to data, aside from adopting log-in walls. To increase the effectiveness of their strategies, data processing and enrichment solutions driven by AI and machine learning are vital. Publishers looking to preserve the availability of their online content will find these especially advantageous. But all publishers stand to gain from their benefits.

Predictive modeling is one of the most valuable capabilities made possible by machine learning. The removal of third-party cookies will make deterministic data less accessible. However, with consent, publishers can leverage their logged-in user attributes as a robust analytical base for predictive models. These models then allow publishers to extend addressable reach with accuracy. This helps them target unknown audiences that exhibit similar attributes to their logged-in users.

The quality of these predictive models is also very high. For example, Ad Alliance – Germany’s number-one advertising sales house – achieved 70% market reach in a campaign for e-commerce company, OTTO (up from 32% for standard run of network campaigns), with 92% accuracy in age segment targeting.

Contextual is the trump card

To boost reach and engagement even further, publishers can also feed real-time contextual insights into their data solutions to enable privacy-friendly targeting. Contextual analysis upholds user rights to data privacy by utilizing inferred characteristics rather than declared ones.

AI technologies accurately predict audience preferences based on the content they consume. This information can then be used to personalize targeting and the user experience. For example, French publisher, Le Figaro, utilized 1plusX’s real-time audience targeting, contextual targeting and first impression targeting solutions to strengthen relevance, maximize impact, and enhance the user experience, all while adhering to data privacy regulations.

Bringing users’ content consumption into the mix, publishers can then use advanced AI analytics to develop precise, interest-based audience segmentation. This further improves targeting capabilities, resulting in stronger alignment between ad content, editorial content, and user intent. By leveraging data enrichment and machine learning capabilities on top of its contextual targeting tool, Le Figaro was able to deliver precise targeting solutions to connect with first-time users. As a result, the publisher generated an average campaign reach increase of 38% across campaigns from all verticals.

Publishers play a key role in shaping how the ecosystem accesses and uses first-party audience data sets. But simply being the gatekeepers of user data won’t give them the competitive edge they need. AI-powered solutions allow publishers to support privacy-centric advertising and optimize their own revenue streams.

With the enhanced capabilities of predictive modeling, publishers can make the most of their consented data and expand their reach to unknown audiences with a high degree of accuracy. By combining this with contextual data, they can deepen the personalization of the user experience and maximize the effectiveness of targeting methods with heightened relevance. Thanks to AI, publishers can ensure they have the optimal solution to identity challenges in the post-cookie era.

Perspectives | Supporter Spotlight

Four global publishers explore the opportunities in digital publishing’s new normal

With wide-ranging changes pushed within a very short time span, the publishing world had to rapidly transform many workflows and strategies during the pandemic. We saw trends accelerate and tried and true strategies hold strong. 

Fastly’s SVP of Engineering Nick Rockwell (the former CTO at the New York Times) sat down with a group of senior technology leaders from four global digital publishers earlier this summer to reflect on this challenging period. 

Panelists:
  • Jorge M. Ibarra, CIO/CTO, El Pais
  • Mariot Chauvin, Head of Engineering, The Guardian
  • Marco Kaiser, CTO, Zeit Online
  • Sacha Morard, CTO, Le Monde

Here are a few of the key takeaways from the discussion that publishers everywhere can leverage as they adapt to the new normal.  

Traffic surged and content strategies shifted

Unsurprisingly the four news outlets all saw large traffic spikes at the onset of the pandemic. Traffic records were shattered. What may be a surprise, though, is that though it is tapering off, visitor numbers are higher overall to this day.

A closer look at viewer behavior confirmed that expected content cannibalization took place. Readers flocked to COVID-19 coverage and spent little or no time with other sections of the website. To address this, they decided to expand the coverage of Covid-19 with additional content such as infographics, which are still being referenced by news sources to this day. However, this audience behavior also drove the creation of a “Covid-19-free content” hub, where readers could educate themselves on other world news and topics.

El Pais saw the record traffic extend into other areas such as sports coverage, educational content, and even radio broadcasts.The Guardian observed a similar trend. The site experienced a 25-day streak with more than 20 million visitors. Traffic surpassed 366 million visitors in one month alone – up 50% from the previous record. Like the other participants, they are seeing sustained higher traffic levels with readers being particularly interested in culture, education, food, and crossword puzzles.

Subscriptions numbers are up. Ad revenue, less so

A common thread among the digital publishers on the panel was that they were quick to move Covid-19 news outside their paywalls. (Note: The Guardian does not have a paywall). Therefore, it might be surprising that a news outlet such as Le Monde saw subscriptions jump 3x. 

Prior to the pandemic, Le Monde set a long-term goal of reaching one million subscribers by 2025. During the pandemic, they reached 300,000 paying subscribers and found themselves fast-tracked to reach their target. 

Still, not all business metrics were positive. Several of the panelists which were already experiencing ad revenue declines saw this trend accelerated by the pandemic. El Pais converted to a subscription model in March of this year, which worked well in terms of timing. However, it’s too early for them to comment on the success of the switch.

Zeit Online also saw a 2-3x increase in online subscriptions during the past 18 months. Interestingly, the uptake extended into the paper version (Die Zeit). In particular, they experienced an increase in non-subscription papers sold at kiosks, train stations, etc.

Strategies remain and are reinforced

One might think the recent 18 months had CTOs and engineering teams rethink strategy. But that was not necessarily the case. All four panelists indicated that the pandemic confirmed some strategies that were already in place. However, it spotlighted outdated technology and workflows and sped-up previously planned changes.

The Guardian, for example, already had a cloud migration underway. So, things like running and maintaining systems remotely were already possible because of the programmable content delivery network (CDN) in use. Currently, they are focusing on three specific areas:

  1. Improving SEO optimization to help secure ranking at news aggregators;
  2. Building a fast and responsive website that can effectively compete; and 
  3. Continuing to implement tooling that can help collect data to constantly optimize conversion. They recognize the importance of understanding new audiences to find out what motivates and converts them.

Zeit Online also found that some strategies remained consistent, although acquiring new subscribers and converting trial subscriptions took a backseat. They are planning to catch up on this, though, as there’s obviously a strong desire to capitalize on the additional visitors. 

As far as news aggregators and SEO optimizations go, Zeit Online is currently analyzing the long-term effect of stories being picked up. As Kaiser put it, “We saw the sheer power of platforms like Apple News and Google News. If you get your story listed there, you have a strong increase in traffic. That’s great but it’s fly-by traffic. People will read the article but then they are gone again. It’s hard to convert them. It made us look at what’s really a qualified visitor for us – someone we can convert into a subscriber. It’s an interesting question: How do we engage these fly-by visitors”

The changing needs of the newsroom

As with strategy, the pandemic accelerated the switch from legacy and stationary systems to those able to offer remote access. While a portion of these publishers’ workforce already worked remotely, it was the minority. And, for several panelists, the exercise to get hundreds of laptops in very little time was a daunting task. As many newsrooms are built on proprietary content management systems, they offer very few options for remote access at the scale needed, and new systems had to be put in place.

Interestingly, both Zeit Online and The Guardian have seen newsrooms adopt tools from engineering and other parts of the house to increase productivity and bring together dispersed teams. These include things like stand-ups, JIRA tickets, and other agile tools that for years have helped keep track of progress.

The panel offered a rare opportunity for a discussion between four of the largest European news organizations. In addition to the topics I’ve covered here, their discussion touched on topics such as online security, potential negative effects of the changed workflows, and more. (Feel free to check out the whole thing here.)

It’s obvious that the pandemic profoundly impacted digital publishing. However, it looks like the changes it triggered were not all bad. The switch to a cloud-based workflow has proven especially useful for this segment and the media workflow has likely been changed for good. It remains to be seen if the increase in subscribers will remain but with added visitor and subscriber insight as well as an increase in appreciation for quality content, publishers are rightly optimistic. 

Advertising | Perspectives | Revenue | Supporter Spotlight

What publishers need to know about the crypto ad market

While the cryptocurrency market has been growing at a steady rate over the past few years, it has recently exploded – and shows no signs of slowing down. Estimates show the industry will hit $4.94 billion globally by 2030. That’s more than triple its size of $1.49 billion in 2020. 

With such a large market, it’s a no-brainer for advertisers whether they be crypto platforms, providers or innovative merchants – to take advantage. There may be no bigger sign that the door is wide open than the fact that Google, just this summer, loosened restrictions on crypto ads after banning them in 2018. As money flows into the category and advertising becomes more accepted and possible, it presents a big opportunity for publishers to capitalize on a growing and lucrative ad market. 

Meet the crypto advertisers

According to our own data at MediaRadar, we’re seeing that bear out. In 2020, there were just 27 digital currency companies who purchased ad digital display or print ad space. In 2021 that number increased 159%. New companies include BitYard, Anatha, BitTrust IRA, Phemex Limited, and Gemini. Existing advertisers, like Coin Mobile App, Hex.com, Bakkt Marketplace, Nexo, and Celsius Network, continue to spend. This growth will only continue and to the benefit of the overall ad ecosystem. 

Source: MediaRadar

Supporting the industry is the increased credibility it has seen in recent years. We know Google has shifted its view on it, but it’s not the only major company. 

Tesla invested $1.5 billion in Bitcoin back in February, and that caused the cryptocurrency market cap to surpass Google’s stock. Tesla founder Elon Musk has always been a crypto advocate – despite brief moments of doubt. In fact, his backing of certain currencies has caused them to skyrocket. 

Breakthrough business

Beyond bleeding edge players like Tesla and Musk, legacy businesses like McDonald’s are now accepting crypto for payment. So, there’s a more accepting audience for crypto ads. And, with all the different cryptocurrency formats out there, it’s easy for advertisers to try and market one people haven’t tried yet. The same goes for crypto platforms. 

However, in such a crowded market, how do crypto brands break through? What are advertisers doing to market crypto to the public, especially when there are plenty of people who still don’t know what crypto is or how it works? And what types of publishers are benefitting? 

This year, crypto companies advertised across digital and print formats, with most spent on digital (86%). However, 14% of spend has been in print. In 2020, there was no investment in print, which marks a substantial year-to-year change. 

This indicates that the industry is growing and is striving to reach a broader demographic by advertising in The Economist, Bloomberg Businessweek, Car and Driver, and The Globe and Mail. Note, of course, the audiences of these publications. They’re often more business and tech-savvy. Also, they likely follow the crypto category or are more receptive to trading crypto than the average person. Publishers that feature these audiences can win ad dollars from the growing number of crypto brands eager to invest. 

Follow the money

Still, while crypto is beginning to mainstream and broaden its outreach, crypto advertisers haven’t shifted to the ultimate mass marketing channel – linear TV. There has been some experimentation, of course. However, according to our research, TV was the least popular channel for cryptocurrency companies. In comparison, the majority of advertising spend from traditional banking services in 2020 and 2021 – think Capital One, Chase Freedom, Chime Bank, and CitiBank – has been on TV ads. 

Beyond the channel, the format in which crypto brands deliver their message is similarly important. One way to engage their audience effectively is with contextualized messaging. According to BuySellAds, “those in the cryptocurrency industry are more likely to engage with advertising from contextual advertising networks that display contextualized messaging and is relevant to what they’re viewing, is honest, and doesn’t utilize forms of tracking.” The best crypto ads are native and tightly aligned to the format and content. For publishers seeking to partner with cryptocurrency brands, this is critical intelligence when pitching formats and capabilities. 

Moving forward, enterprising publishers can take advantage of the crypto ad explosion. With a growing number of competitors, platforms and players, there is a massive opportunity here to build business and grow revenue. 

Advertising | Perspectives | Supporter Spotlight

Zero-party data is a publisher’s secret weapon against big tech changes

Every time there’s a big change in how Apple, Google, or Facebook works with publishers, a touch of panic can be felt in the air. Yet, we’ve all survived seismic shifts from these companies. From Facebook’s deprioritization of publisher content in 2016 to Apple’s recent iOS 14.5 release, we’ve absorbed the shock and made it through. But, as an industry, we always act like the next change might be our last. Now, Apple is specifically coming for email. It’s placing limitations on location and IP targeting that could make it more difficult to use personalization for some iPhone audiences… and the cycle repeats.

Yet, like all of the sky-is-falling fears before it, Apple’s latest move is nothing to panic about. The truth is that these changes are merely a distraction from the real work that publishers do every day to connect with their audiences through great content and great experiences. If change occurs to a specific algorithm or a particular measurement metric, that doesn’t alter the core of the business, which is to deliver value to an audience.

Embrace change for good

The old saying that “change is the only constant” is a well understood truth within the industry. But these changes tend to happen in rapid succession, making it near impossible to keep up if publishers are always in reaction mode. Nearly every year, digital experiences a seismic shift — from GDPR and other privacy regulations to pending cookie deprecation from Google. Rather than cling to what we have, we should be working to create stability from the inside out.

For example, open rate data will become skewed with the Apple iOS 15 release. It’s the core metric used to determine opportunity, in particular for advertisers. When this metric is threatened, fear rears its ugly head. If we can’t effectively track opens, should we begin to track clicks? If we do, does that mean publishers like Axios, who have a product-oriented approach to newsletters, should entirely scrap their email strategy that works? Should they start prompting their readers to “click to read” simply so they can track that user? Of course not. That fear should not determine a course of action.

Audience behavior won’t change. The desire to consume quality content in quality email experiences won’t change. The needs of our audiences must remain at the forefront of everything we do. 

As an industry, one way to do that is to collectively accept that KPIs will change — on both the buy and sell side. The sooner we do, the sooner we can collectively move forward. Together, publishers can meet to determine a matrix of KPIs, and discuss with groups like the IAB which metrics are in danger and how to push up more stable metrics so that everyone, including advertisers, can move forward despite industry changes.

Stability through zero-party data

Change might be the only constant, but audiences are the only source of the truth. Both publishers and advertisers rely on audience engagement to hit their goals. Yet few use direct audience insights as a source for measurement and KPIs. The more publishers understand their audiences, the better they are positioned to create stability for the long run.

Zero-party data is the best way to make that happen. Defined as data that publishers explicitly receive from their audience as part of a clear value exchange, zero-party data is more valuable than first-party data such as search or browsing preferences.

More than ever, people are aware of the value of their own data. In a 2021 Merkle survey, 76% noted that they would be willing to fill out a short survey in order to get a better online experience. Taking a page from retail, personalization is proven to lift sales. Thrive Market, an online grocery store, weaves data collection into their entire online experience, using quiz elements to guide shoppers and then shape the content and offers they get in return.

Value remains constant

This focus on the direct value exchange between consumer and brand can be applied in the publishing world to great effect. Rather than just passively observe what readers pay attention to, more brands should be actively asking, engaging, and personalizing. The data that’s collected not only improves content personalization and audience targeting, it creates a foundation of insights that can be used to optimize reader experience. And that data is only as good as the last ask, publishers need to continually ensure they’re up to date on people’s ever-changing preferences.

Zero-party data shows how engaged audiences are, how much they’re willing to share, what they like, and what they want. For example, The Independent collected insights from subscribers in a New Year’s wrap-up newsletter that ended up producing a brand new newsletter focused on climate change. The team asked subscribers about which topics resonated the most in 2020. While the pandemic ranked at the top, they were surprised to see how many also cared about news about the planet.  

Publishers have survived so much change in the digital world and we can certainly survive more. But rather than just focus on surviving, let’s actively build out a position of strength and move away from the passive, reactive moves of the past. When given the chance, people want to engage with publishers to make their experience better. Let’s own our own success, once and for all by actively prioritizing that relationship. 

About the author

Allison Mezzafonte has worked in the media and publishing industry for 20 years and is currently a growth consultant, as well as a Media Advisor to Sailthru. A former publishing executive for Bauer Media, Dotdash, and Hearst Digital, Allison serves as a strategic partner to media clients.

Advertising | Perspectives | Supporter Spotlight

3 Digital advertising resources to help publishers optimize sales

In an advertising ecosystem that often can seem complex and opaque, digital publishers must find ways to stand out from other websites that offer advertising.

The industry has developed several resources to foster greater supply chain transparency and help publishers take greater control of their inventory, stand out for their commitment to quality and earn more revenue. It is important for digital publishers to be aware of these resources and integrate them into the selling process to maximize revenue opportunities.

Here we look at some of these resources and share how they benefit publishers and buyers.

1. Private marketplaces

Programmatic technology has made it easier for marketers to buy advertising at scale. However, not all exchanges provide them with publishers that have been vetted by a trusted organization.

Private marketplaces give buyers access to quality inventory while participating publishers also benefit from higher CPMs and by knowing the ads placed on their sites are from legitimate marketers.

You’re probably aware of TrustX, a premium private marketplace developed by Digital Content Next. It offers buyers access to inventory directly from more than 250 member publishers, bypassing resellers and intermediaries. Similar exchanges are taking hold globally including The Ozone Project in the U.K. and the Maple Network Exchange in Canada. By joining a premium private marketplace, publishers can find strength in numbers and greater exposure to buyers looking to buy inventory from quality publishers.

2. Industry programs

Several organizations have created programs to identify publishers that have taken steps to stand out, whether that’s by providing transparency, offering quality local journalism, or integrating industry standards and best practices into the buying process.

The Alliance for Audited Media’s Digital Publisher Audit is an in-depth, continuous audit of a publisher’s website traffic and business practices to verify that a publisher is effectively minimizing ad fraud risk. This new assurance solution addresses ad fraud at the publisher level and complements other industry initiatives like private marketplaces. We include all AAM-audited digital publishers on the AAM Audited Domain List, which can be downloaded from AAM’s website. It can also be found at the IAB Tech Lab Transparency Center, a resource that buyers can access to learn more about sellers and the compliance programs and industry standards they adhere to.

The Local Media Consortium is an association of local newspapers, broadcasters and online news outlets committed to quality journalism. The LMC Local News Advertising Inclusion List includes thousands of local media advertising opportunities for national brands.

And finally, The Trustworthy Accountability Group sets standards that promote greater supply chain transparency and includes organizations from across the industry including brands, agencies, publishers and tech providers. The TAG Registry lists members that are committed to increasing trust in digital advertising.

By taking part in these programs, publishers can be easily identified by media buyers who access these resources to build inclusion lists and prioritize quality partners.

3. Supply chain validation

Publishers also can use industry tools to easily gain insight into who sells their inventory and discover ways to make the process more efficient.

The IAB Tech Lab develops solutions to bring greater transparency to the supply chain through tools such as ads.txt (app-ads.txt) and sellers.json. The organization recently launched a new service that analyzes publishers’ ads.txt files to validate who is authorized to sell their inventory. Supply Chain Validation allows publishers to verify that their ads.txt file adheres to technical specifications by alerting sellers when issues arise such as an incorrect or missing entry, which can lead to missed revenue or an unauthorized sale. The service also compares the publisher’s ads.txt file to their selling partners’ sellers.json files to determine if there are any inconsistencies between the two. The results are then published in the Transparency Center and are also available from the IAB Tech Lab via an API.

As a premium publisher, it is important to integrate industry solutions into your selling strategy to stand out to advertisers. Putting the right processes in place will give your site — and your ad sales efforts —the best chance for success.

Perspectives | Supporter Spotlight

These next-level user experiences lead to more loyal, registered users

When it comes to the future, increasing user registrations and building robust first-party datasets should be at the forefront of every publisher’s strategy. Building first-party data unlocks a publishers’ ability to increase user loyalty, activate their audience, monetize their content, and improve their editorial strategy.

However, according to a recent survey from Teads, 65.3% of publishers say they are not planning on increasing the usage of logins to gather first party data. Why is that? According to the report, they’re worried about a “potential disruption of user experience.”

It’s a valid concern: 67% of customers say poor user experiences are a reason for churn.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Many leading publishers are leveling-up user experiences on their website by creating social experiences and using personalization to create a seamless registration and log in process. These publishers stand to attract and grow an audience of loyal readers. Let’s take a look at how they’re doing it.

Three tactics to engage loyal audiences

1. Give users a reason to register with immersive social experiences 

Stand-out content will always drive readers to a publisher’s website. Increasingly, though, readers are looking for other ways to interact and engage once they’re done reading an article.

Today, the publishers who are creating social experiences on their website see more registrations and greater retention rates. At OpenWeb, we’ve found that publishers who create these experiences have users who spend 35% more time on-site. They are 450% more likely to return month-after-month, and drive 4x the revenue as the average user.

There are a number of ways that publishers can create social experiences. Many are adopting engagement tools like one-click polls where readers can weigh in on the article they just read. Others are producing interactive ask-me-anything style interactive forums (AMAs) with authors or journalists. Another effective social experience is hosting a comments section. When publishers invite readers to interact in quality conversations where they feel valued, they’re more likely to register and return again and again.

2. Use active personalization to provide value and keep users coming back

Users not only crave engaging social experience, they’re loyal to publishers who “get” them.

That’s why more publishers are creating personalized content experiences to drive registrations and loyalty. In fact, 88% of marketers believe that audiences now expect personalization. One of the most effective ways that publishers can provide value to their users is through active personalization, or personalization that allows users to self-select their favorite authors, topics, and more.

Readers who receive targeted content tend to stay on-site longer, return more often, and view more content. They also provide publishers with more information about their content preferences, allowing publishers to take advantage of rich first-party data insights. One of the great things about personalized experiences is that, with the right tools, just about any publisher can create them—even those without a comments section.

3. Optimize your first party data success strategy

First-party datasets will play a pivotal role in every publisher’s future. In fact, they’re absolutely critical for any sustainable strategy, particularly in light of cookie depreciation. Through exceptional user experiences, publishers will drive more registrations. This will, in turn, allow them to collect more robust and accurate first party data which ultimately enables them to provide additional value to their audiences. In other words, all roads lead to a loyal, active community.

Time to interact

So if you’re still contemplating how to navigate the cookieless future, start by evaluating your user experience and ask these questions:

  • What opportunities are there to create social experiences and build a thriving, active community?
  • How can we leverage personalization to provide targeted content experiences for readers?

With this approach, publishers stand to see more registered, active users and higher retention rates, like Salon has. Thanks to immersive social experiences on their website (including a comments section), they built a loyal community of active users—and boosted their retention rate 4X.

The bottom line? Give users exceptional experiences and see exceptional results.

About the author

Joel Bejar is the Vice President of Business Development at OpenWeb. 

Advertising | Perspectives | Supporter Spotlight

Two truths and a lie: Why what you think you know about identity will hurt you

Current uncertainty about the tech underpinning digital media has left most of us wondering what happens when cookies disappear on Chrome. It’s easy to forget that Safari and Firefox deprecated cookies a long time ago. This, in turn, created a natural test bed for newer and better post-cookie technologies. The good news is that these changes create opportunity and prospects for a better industry. If you are a publisher, here are two truths and a lie for you to consider, and five ways to ensure your business is not disrupted. 

Truth one: Don’t count on FLoCs

Google has said its FLoCs are private and can be used as a proxy for enhancing traffic with data. But, Google has only released the results of a single test on this black box technology, which has murky methodology and opaque applicability. Even Google’s publicized test showed results less effective than cookie-based advertising.  

Meanwhile, Google has been hit with criticisms that FLoCs use consumer data without consent. The company postponed its testing in Europe, where the technology may not comply with GDPR. Over the summer, it became evident that Google is becoming mired in uncertainty around the technology. It’s actions also raised concerns around Google’s market dominance. Bottom line: If you were counting on FLoC, you may want to take another look at your options.

Truth two: Don’t count on context

The same can be said for those leaning towards going all in for context. These state-of-the-art circa 2006 solutions don’t just limit the breadth of data you can associate to a profile. However, they almost always curb the concept of identity to a single domain. 

Contextual providers are telling you that without cookies, third-party data will vanish (which is not the case). First-party data will be much more valuable, they continue. The thesis is that first-party data is like gold, becoming more valuable when it becomes more scarce. This ignores a fundamental economic truth in marketing: A marketer can afford to pay only her target acquisition cost and not more. A dearth of data means the marketer may need to pay a lower CPM on less-enhanced impressions. If she can afford to pay $5 CPM for “women”, then $2.50 will be the max that can be paid for “people”. Those digital impressions aren’t like gold — they are more like gold-bearing ore. The value depends on the assay. 

Lie: Programmatic was/is/forever will be bad

Contrary to what we often hear, programmatic has been good for non-gigantic and independent publishers. Most non-giants don’t have the scale to hire a sales force, or the traffic to attract marketers without aggregation, or enough contextual insights to sell that traffic for what it was worth. Smaller publishers rapidly adopted programmatic five years ago because it gave them the opportunity to be paid based on what their traffic did somewhere else.

Programmatic is often criticized for data leakage in the bidstream and allowing buyers to come in with more insights on traffic than the publisher. But let’s remember the volume of impressions surfaced in the auction gives sellers inherent protection against cherry-picking. If impressions are better characterized via third-party data, bidders can find that auto intender among a “lover-of-cats” crowd that had been relegated to air freshener promos. The publisher selling the cat lover should want that asymmetric knowledge in order to get the best bid.

Five ways you can prepare for a cookieless future

So how in this new and changing landscape, should publishers sustain monetization when cookies are completely gone? Here are my top five recommendations of the very real steps publishers can take to prepare for 2023. 

  1. There’s a chance that Google has pushed back the cookie deadline because it needs more time to refine its own tools, with the intent of preventing or abolishing third-party ID interoperability. Take every opportunity to be vocal about your right to bring your own tech to the party.
  2. New identifiers emerging in the marketplace will promise scale and interoperability — but you’ll need to test any solution early. Real interoperability is elusive, but out there, so exercise caution. 
  3. The industry may see great value in the 40% share of the browser market that Chrome doesn’t own. You can start testing solutions with Safari and Firefox today. 
  4. Delaying the adoption of new identity solutions may simply prolong the headaches from the third-party cookie model. Third-party cookies are costly to sync, carry privacy risks, and take more time to show ROI than newer technologies. Don’t hope for Google to provide another reprieve.
  5. Definitely use context in your strategy.  It’s data. You have it. Use it. Context should be part of the monetization equation. However, be realistic that context alone won’t save you. It simply can’t compete with technology that delivers richer information across domains. Don’t get hung up on old solutions just because they’re familiar or wrapped in a sexy new buzzword like “edge computing”.

It’s not all doom and gloom for publishers in the next two years. For independent publishers, the cookieless future is filled with opportunity. Just don’t embrace the false narrative that your traffic is inherently gold. You need the right tools to make sure your assay is strong, realizable, and increasingly lucrative.

Advertising | Perspectives | Supporter Spotlight

9 criteria for driving business results with analytics in 2022

Even before Google sent brands and publishers slow-walking to wean themselves off third-party cookies back in early 2020, both the buy- and sell-side had a data problem. 

The issue has been that publishers and brands have historically managed audience data in siloed systems. Therefore, critical information surrounding ad revenue, subscriptions, content engagement, and customer profiles is all stored separately. 

However, to create truly relevant experiences for consumers, any digital businesses must be able to tie all this data together in privacy-compliant ways to achieve a full picture of the customer journey. The IT department no longer governs data and analytics to the degree that it once did. So, commercial teams like marketing, sales and finance now have the opportunity to more heavily influence these areas than ever before. 

Time to get your data analytics in order

Next year will be the last full one brands and publishers have before third-party cookies expire. So it is the perfect time to fully get your data analytics in order. Here are nine criteria to consider when rethinking your strategy. 

1. The ability to customize your data model

To begin piecing together data from multiple touchpoints, it’s important to first introduce a unified data model approach across the organization. A tailored data model that covers the entirety of a business’s objectives as well as those of the different company stakeholders provides access to a reliable 360-degree view of customer data. This enables any team that needs to tap into the data to create immediate value, improving speed to market and the ability to react to trends faster.

2. Access to live, quality data

Whether you want to integrate with other technologies or enlist your data science team to work on a special project, you want to ensure you have streamlined access to fully denormalized, real-time data. This reduces query time and improves targeting and personalization, while avoiding the costly joining of disparate databases.

3. Enriched data that does deeper

Make sure you can automatically correct, enhance and remove data based on third-party metadata and advanced processing rules, with no retagging necessary. This will allow you to do more with your behavioral data to explore different perspectives that can inform your business decisions. 

4. A universal tag for data hygiene and cleanliness 

Tag health is critical for proper data cleanliness and consistency. Many businesses have multiple tags running. That increases the number of server calls and overall time spent on tag management. By instead leveraging one universal tag, you can duplicate traffic across various sites to a virtual site with 100% accuracy and for half the cost. 

5. No data sampling

Data sampling is the practice of analyzing a subset of your traffic data, which is used to estimate the overall results. Instead of gathering all the data, you only get access to a limited sample. That means that any analysis you carry out after that will be an assumption based on existing patterns. Having a complete set of data to analyze boosts accuracy and can unlock previously undiscovered audiences.

6. Compliance with all privacy regulations

This might seem like a no-brainer, but with evolving and emerging laws, it’s easy to fall into violation when it comes to data privacy. Ensure whatever tool you work with is compliant across all of the global privacy regulations and that you can tweak your consent model as needed. 

7. Integration across your stack

Your data is only as good as it is useful. If you are using disparate systems to manage and activate it, there is a chance of data loss, inaccurate customer views and privacy non-compliance. Ensuring interoperability across all systems streamlines execution and management while reducing business risk. 

8. Democratization of data

Once you know your data is clean and accurate, make it available to everyone in your business who needs to act on it. You want to keep the end user experience in mind when choosing the right tools. Whether you use dashboards, data exploration tools, smart alerts when anomalies occur or direct API feeds for personalization, make sure they are user-friendly.

9. Professional services help

Even if you have an in-house analytics team, ensuring all of your data flows through your systems well might require additional support. The best technology vendors will have robust professional services teams  that can help you implement your analytics strategy. This includes determining your KPIsand measurement approach in addition to  best practices that drive both compliance and results.   

It’s prime time to harness the true power of all the data at your disposal. With the right technology and talent, you can fast be on your way to turning insights into action that drives additional business value — more website traffic, subscriber, and revenues. 

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