We live in a world where there is no shortage of data: first-party, third-party, and zero-party. However, most publishing organizations run the risk of boiling the ocean with too much data at their disposal and too little actionable insights to be gleaned from it. In my view, data visibility can bring alignment across multiple departments of a publishing organization and steer the organization towards common goals.
This post is about two specific use cases and actionable insights from first-party data that publishers can use to optimize their editorial and subscription strategies. These tangible use cases can help you seed a solid foundation for a data driven organization.
Using data to optimize editorial strategy
Most publishers rely on last touch attribution to understand which content converts users to subscriptions. No matter what attribution methodology you use, there are gaps in coordination between the editorial and marketing teams at most media organizations – which ultimately results in leaving subscription revenue on the table. Let’s take this 2×2 scatter plot as an example:
The ability to plot each piece of content on a conversions versus pageviews scatter plot can distill strategic outcomes for the entire organization. Each quadrant on the scatter plot leads to actionable insights for different departments:
High Conversions – High Pageviews: This segment of content is being marketed well and is generating high conversions. Maintaining status quo with all departments is recommended with content falling in this quadrant.
High Conversions – Low Pageviews: This segment of content is being marketed poorly but has high conversions. The marketing team should take action to promote this content across all of its channels.
Low Conversions – Low Pageviews: This segment of content is not converting. The action is on the editorial team to reconsider its strategy for this type of content. Alternatively, the subscriptions team can consider trying a lower priced offer for this type of content to test if the conversions go up.
Low Conversions – High Pageviews: This segment of content can be earmarked outside the paywall to maintain a healthy balance of site traffic.
The main takeaway to consider here is not about data collection but more about data representation and the importance of data visibility within the entire organization in near real-time. A simple graphic like this can help editorial and marketing teams understand what actions need to be taken. Still, there needs to be alignment on common goals, constant coordination, and outcome based service level agreements (SLAs) in place to execute on any editorial strategy.
Using simple data points to convert never-subscribers
Almost every publisher has two main types of audiences: ardent fans and casual users. For the sake of simplicity let’s call them subscribers and never-subscribers. To convert never-subscribers, you first have to know who they are. The good news is you don’t necessarily need sophisticated AI to understand who your never-subscribers are. There are many simpler options and proxies at your disposal.
Assuming you track the digital footprint for anonymous users, you can track which users have rejected your subscription paywall once or twice in the last 30 days. It is a clear indication that the user is casual in nature and potentially seeks another offer in order to convert to a paying user. Lowering the hurdle to a bitesize offer might be a prudent move at this stage.
Another proxy to identify never-subscribers would be to dissect the sources of your site traffic. Other than direct traffic, you will have traffic coming from social media, chat apps, content aggregator sites, search, paid media, etc. Attributing a scoring mechanism depending on the source could quickly help decipher if the anonymous user is a potential subscriber or not. For example, you may find Twitter users have a higher propensity to subscribe but Facebook users are very unlikely to subscribe. With this in mind, you should show a lower threshold offer to users landing from Facebook.
If you have global audiences, you could dissect anonymous users by geography. For example, you might say that domestic users are more inclined to take my all-you-can-eat subscription while international users will require a lower entry barrier. With this in mind, I might offer an introductory bitesize subscription option.
Here is an example that publishers can use to segment their audiences from very basic traffic data:
At the end of the day, if you are in the digital subscriptions business, your objective is to maximize your recurring revenue. This requires you to understand the lowest payment threshold an individual user is willing to commit to. With that information in hand, your marketing team must make a concerted effort to re-engage the user to move up your value chain.
About the author
Abhishek Sharma is a Co-Founder and CTO of Fewcents, a plug-and-play solution for publishers and creators to collect small payments in 80+ currencies. He has 18 years of experience in strategic consulting, vendor management, project and delivery management, business analysis, solution design, and application development. He specializes in building high-frequency trading systems, integrating with payment partners such as Paypal, Stripe, etc, and working on regulatory risk engines using big data technologies. Prior to this, Abhishek worked at DBS Bank, Credit Agricole, and MSCI Inc.
For the better part of the last decade, there has been a clear case for revenue diversification as the key to sustainable success in media. Dependency on one or two revenue models is risky, especially amid times of economic uncertainty.
Revenue diversification is particularly critical as ad-supported business models provide less and less return. Programmatic ad buying increased efficiency. However, in many cases it has led to lower CPMs for media companies. As a result many have increased the number of ads per page, which limits advertising’s impact. Now, even that option is under threat as the digital media industry faces the challenges that come with cookie deprecation.
As important as it is, revenue diversification is challenging. Media companies have seized the opportunity to launch more revenue generating products over the past few years, including newsletters, podcasts, leadership communities, and live events, to name a few. Each of these products generates additional revenue, which is great. However, they also provide a precious resource: better audience data and insights. That said, not every organization has the ability to fully leverage these insights to further capitalize through diversification.
Media companies that have a unified view of their data can better engage with audiences and drive them to new revenue-generating activities. Unfortunately, they rarely have a single view of reader and customer activity. The key to revenue diversification is uniting these viewpoints to maximize engagement and better understand and promote the products that are going to continue driving revenue.
Seizing the diversification opportunity
Before we dive deeply into the challenge, let’s spend some time laying out the opportunity, because it runs wide and deep. Media companies have explored myriad ways to drive revenue, from old-school methods like selling branded merchandise, to the new school, such as branded streaming services.
While the roadmap will look different for each media entity, there are three diversified revenue streams that every company should consider.
Live events
The first is events, which are experiencing a comeback as attendees get more comfortable with in-person interactions. Events are a way for a media brand to translate its content and expertise into a real-world experience. By building events around popular content topics and leveraging editorial staff as on-stage talent, media companies can create an engaging, replicable experience that drives revenue. While the pandemic may have paused in-person events, it showed that digital and hybrid events are a viable business model going forward. This opens the door to even greater scale for an events business.
Ecommerce
Second is Ecommerce. More than opening an online store, the opportunity lies in integrating seamless opportunities for readers and subscribers to make purchases as a part of their engagement with the content and media brand. Many media companies leverage affiliate programs to match their content to products and monetize that connection.
More advanced media companies integrate products and ecommerce links directly into their content so that they get credit for these sales, as opposed to having their audience buy a product elsewhere. By leveraging the trust in their media brand, they can promote products and drive sales, which helps both the media company and the retail partner.
Community
Finally, there’s the media company’s community. This isn’t simply about building a dedicated members-only portion of a website, or a unique newsletter. Community is about more than creating an environment. It’s about exciting brand advocates and aligning with activists in an organic fashion.
In fact, there is a very large opportunity to build multiple communities that are aligned with a media property. Larger organizations can no longer view their audience as a monolith. Readers visit sites for a variety of reasons, and the larger audience may be composed of several smaller segments that engage with different content topics. Each of these audiences represents an opportunity to unite and align with a formal community, complete with targeted content, newsletters, events, and other revenue opportunities.
The roadblock to diversification
The challenge for any large media company is getting a single view across all of their readers so that they understand how to strategically market and promote these new revenue streams. Big media companies likely have numerous disconnected back end technologies that offer a view into their readers and how those readers behave on a site, interact with newsletters, or what they consume at events.
This happens because companies often use point solutions to manage the individual revenue streams. These systems may have different information on the same individual reader, but the media company can’t unite those views and get a full picture.This siloed data is much harder to use across different internal disciplines.
For example, consider an event attendee with an interest in crypto. The business publication running the event wants to own the crypto reporting and thought leadership space through newsletters and interest-based communities. Right now, they don’t have a way to promote additional content, newsletters, podcasts, or subscriber communities to the attendees once they leave the event, because that data isn’t accessible to any of the other teams.
The event revenue is great, but there’s a missed opportunity for deeper engagement.
Engagement is the key to new revenue streams
I’ve written before about how the relationship with the content consumer matters more than ever. This is especially true with revenue diversification, where the goal is to use existing content and expertise to drive more revenue. Whenever audiences interact with content, it creates data that helps better understand their interests, which helps media companies identify new revenue opportunities.
It’s possible to find new revenue streams without a unified view of the audience. However, media companies are leaving money on the table if they don’t try to better unite their customer view in order to understand engagement.
The disappearance of third-party cookies and identifiers is reshaping digital advertising as we have come to know it. Add regulatory requirements related to personal data processing into the mix with evolving user attitudes toward advertising targeting and we have a challenge on our hands. Thus, publishers and advertisers must rapidly transform to continue to understand audiences, personalize content and ads, maintain the monetization, and preserve and measure the profitability of their investments. Luckily, there are already solutions to help meet these challenges.
The first possible solution relies on taking full advantage of first-party data. However, in the context of collaborative use cases, concerns related to security, privacy, and confidentiality beyond the technical limitations linked to their sharing remain. So, how can an advertiser enrich, share, or activate its data on external sites without risk? How can a publisher make its data available to an advertiser for audience extension outside its proprietary environments? Data clean rooms provide one possible solution.
What are data clean rooms?
Data clean rooms are platforms that allow advertisers and publishers to compare their proprietary data without one party having direct access to the other’s data. More concretely, the different stakeholders have access to a secure, virtual environment in which their data is matched with others’ data. Even if none of the participants has direct access to the data, the results of these “matches” allow them to enrich their understanding of their audiences, refine their segmentation and activate this data — safely and on a large scale. Without cookies and complex integration into the existing technology stack, this is done automatically.
It is important to note that each player remains in control of their data and can change their settings. Participants specify who can access the virtual room, which data is accessible and activatable, and over what period.
Targeting and activation capabilities of walled gardens on the open web
Data clean rooms are not new. They have already contributed to the success of online platforms operating in walled gardens. Web giants like social media networks who have amassed massive repositories of first-party data with the aim of giving advertisers a way to reach users behind their wall.
As our industry enters a privacy-centric era, driven by more data regulation and advances in technology, we’re quickly seeing interest in data clean room capabilities spread across the open web.
For content and service publishers, this technology represents an opportunity to offer data similar to walled gardens, increase the value of their inventories, and win back market share. In addition, advertisers can benefit from the same targeting (precision and volume) and activation (retargeting and prospecting) capabilities offered by the major platforms in premium and brand-safe environments.
Better data activation
A collaborative data strategy – one that is based on first-party data – allows advertisers to manage their advertising investments in a secure, privacy-conscious way and ultimately achieve better results. To optimize their budgets and increase the performance of campaigns, advertisers need to understand their audiences in detail while respecting the confidentiality of personal data. To do this, the use of their proprietary data is an essential first step. Second, advertisers and publishers must seek to enrich this data with similar and/or complementary audiences. For example, to communicate with car enthusiasts, a car manufacturer is interested in combining its own data with a publisher whose car section attracts a large audience or specializes in topics related to bank loans.
The most common uses of data clean rooms are to retarget users and increase the reach of a campaign. In the first case, the advertiser’s data is compared with a publisher’s to retarget everyday users. Machine learning and predictive analytics technologies built into the data clean room model the two parties’ data using a “lookalike” or “statistical twin” method. This method creates new prospecting opportunities as the advertiser can find new audiences with similar behavior to existing targets.
The use of data clean rooms is a win-win approach for all stakeholders. However, data clean rooms require a sufficient volume of data and an independent and reliable technological partner.
The bottom line is this: the digital advertising industry is being reshaped and rebuilt. It’s a new world where no one approach will suffice. Only a portfolio approach that is made up of multiple solutions – clean room data matching, first-party data, persistent IDs, contextual targeting, etc. – will ensure success without third-party cookies.
The annual Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism is a must-read for anyone in the news, media and digital publishing industries. Clocking in at 164 pages, the latest study, which came out today, covers a cornucopia of topics, informed by an online survey of more than 90,000 digital news consumers in 46 countries.
DCN members will want to read the complete report when they can, but ahead of that, we wanted to share some of the most relevant findings for digital content companies. To do this, I read the full report, identifying key trends and corresponding with the lead author, Nic Newman, to discuss these areas in more detail.
It is a decade since the first Digital News Report was published. Newman reflects that, since then, we have seen a relentless decline in consumption of traditional news sources such as TV, radio, and print and the growing importance of digital and social media.
“This has brought [a] greater variety of sources and perspectives than ever before, especially for educated and interested news consumers,” Newman says. “But at the same time,” he adds, “we see those that are less interested [in the news] often feeling overwhelmed and confused.”
It is against this backdrop that major themes emanating from the latest report — including growing news avoidance, as well as declining interest and lower levels of trust in the news —need to be considered. With that in mind, here are four developments publishers cannot afford to overlook, and recommendations to help tackle them.
1. Respond to the implications of news avoidance
Issue:
One of the biggest topics explored in the report is news avoidance. “Selective avoidance” is on the rise globally, with growing numbers deliberately steering clear of content that is often seen as difficult and depressing. Long-running and recurrent stories — such as those covering politics, the war in Ukraine, or the COVID pandemic — are also driving audiences to disconnect more frequently from the news.
Implications / Solutions:
To avoid audiences checking out, publishers need to recognize that some approaches in practice can be off putting. Therefore, they may need to offer a different content mix and tone. Addressing this is challenging, Newman says, because audiences also want — and expect — the media to cover difficult stories. Nevertheless, Newman identifies three areas where journalists and publishers can tackle several core reasons people often give for news avoidance: accessibility, negativity and bias.
First, he argues, we need to make news content more accessible and easier to understand. “This is one of the reasons why young people and less educated groups selectively avoid the news.” He also notes that content is typically produced for avid news consumers.
“Avoiding jargon and insider speak will help,” he says. More explanation, directly asking for — and addressing — audience questions, as well as producing fact-based content for video and podcast formats, could also be useful.
Secondly, telling stories differently might mean embracing approaches such as solutions and constructive journalism, as part of a mix of formats and content styles. Newman suggests outlets consider “finding more ways to cover difficult stories that provide hope or give audiences a sense of agency around stories like climate change.”
Lastly, we need to rebuild trust and credibility. Over a quarter (29%) of news avoiders believe the news is untrustworthy or biased. That rises to nearly four in ten (39%) in the United States.
“Some of that is about partisanship,” Newman says, “some is about sensationalist chasing eyeballs and clicks.” Potential remedies include “signalling opinion more clearly,” as well as “not labeling everything breaking news when it isn’t,” an approach CNN has recently broached.
2. Double-down on revenue diversification
Issue:
Increasing reader revenue is a key strategic goal for many publishers. However, much of the digital spoils generated by subscriptions are enjoyed solely by the biggest national brands. In the U.S, around half of paid subscriptions go to just three titles: New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. More widely, fewer than one in five digital news consumers (19%) in pays for content.
Implications / Solutions:
This “winner takes most” dynamic can make it difficult for smaller and local publishers to compete. Furthermore, the rising cost of living may also mean that some audiences will look to cut back their expenditure on paid-for content.
That’s a development Newman says news providers are alive to.
“More publishers are recognizing that subscription on its own will not be enough,” Newman says, “especially as further growth is likely to [be] constrained by rising prices and the squeeze on household budgets. Developing multiple revenue streams will provide resilience and help publishers weather the coming storm.”
This impending subscription storm is not unique to news publishers, but all media players. A chart on page 21 of the report outlines this tension. It shows that while 14% of digital news users in the U.S. think that they will have more media subscriptions in the next year, a further 14% of users believe they will have fewer subscriptions in the same period.
3. Ensure you have an effective first-party data strategy
Issue:
As the experienced product marketer Aphrodite Brinsmead noted last year, browser updates and privacy regulations impact the ability to use personal identifiers and capture customer data through third-party cookies. Subsequently, Brinsmead reflected, “the race is on for publishers and brands to leverage first-party data.”
However, news consumers appear to be wary about providing personal information, such as email addresses, to publishers. Just under a third (32%) of the report’s sample indicated they trust news websites to use their personal data responsibly. This drops to fewer than one in five in France (19%) and the USA (18%).
Implications / Solutions:
Most publishers understand that they need to develop their first-party data capabilities. But knowing you need to get to grips with this, and effectively doing so, is not the same thing.
“The low numbers (28% average) who have currently registered with a news site show that most news websites simply do not have a clear enough value proposition to get people [to] give up their data,” Newman argues.
This principle aligns with the subscription challenge publishers face too. It is hard to convince audiences to pay for content if the same material is available elsewhere for free. In these circumstances it seems not even inclined to hand over their email address to access it.
To remedy this, Newman suggests, “publishers will need to use a mix of competitions, events and special features to get those numbers up. They also need to persuade people that they will treat personal data responsibly.”
4. Do things differently if you want to reach Gen Z
Issue:
As we outlined recently, Gen Z is a demographic with its own outlook and media habits. The Digital News Report reinforces this, with Dr. Kirsten Eddy, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Reuters Insitute, commenting on the growing gulf seen in the media behaviours and preferences found among many younger audiences compared to other demographics.
Implications / Solutions:
This cohort is less interested in traditional news subjects like politics. It also has a weaker connection with news brands. “They are also more skeptical of traditional sources,” Newman advises. “They are also shaped by social aspect of news ‘who is telling the story’ and what others think about it.”
As a result, this is a demographic more likely to seek out diverse voices online. They are less concerned about impartiality and more comfortable with journalists expressing opinions on social media. A preference for more visual social networks has meant that across all markets the use of TikTok for news consumption has jumped among 18–24s from 3% in 2020 to 15% in 2022.
“But they are not simply all TikTokers,” Eddy cautions, recommending in a dedicated essay (found on pages 42-45 of the full report) that publishers connect with the topics young people care about, and develop content that is aligned to the style and tone of specific platforms. Publishers should do this, in preference to “expecting young people to eventually come around to what has always been done.”
The big four (and much more)
These four issues – reaching younger audiences, addressing issues of news avoidance, ensuring you have an effective first party data strategy and the need for revenue diversification – matter to publishers large and small. As a result, these were the topics that emerged as most critical upon first read of the Digital News Report 2022.
They are, of course, just a fraction of the actionable insights that can be gleaned from this weighty annual research study. Readers may also want to delve further into issues such as trust, polarization, as well as data related to the consumption of podcasts, online video, email news and attitudes towards coverage of climate change.
Both the immersive web and Web3 are coming. Publishers need to make sure they are prepared for any changes that will inevitably impact their data.
But before we start, it’s important to make the distinction between the immersive web and Web3. They are not the same thing.
As a new iteration of the web based on blockchain technology, Web3 will, according to many, revolutionize the internet by transferring the ownership and power of private data to users. It aims to “decentralize” management. As such, it promises to reduce the control of big corporations, such as Google or Meta, and make the web more democratic. It is defined by open-source software. It is also “trustless” (it doesn’t require the support of a trusted intermediary) and is permissionless (it has no governing body).
Meanwhile, the immersive web or metaverse (which many conflate with Facebook’s new branding as “Meta”), is a version of the online world that incorporates advanced technologies to enhance user engagement and blur the line between the user’s physical reality and the digital environment.
But what are the implications for data-driven companies?
With Web3, the most obvious data implication is that publishers will now have to deal with distributed data and new applications, which will require new connectors. It will also impact yield management. The simplest example is downstream royalties (i.e., publishers rewarding customers for the resale of their data and passing that cost along to advertisers).
Meanwhile, the immersive web’s key impact will be the explosion of data volumes, which by some estimates will push global data usage by 20 times by 2032.
The jump from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 was massive enough. But the leap to the immersive web is likely to see an exponential increase.
So, when moving from terabytes and petabytes, to exabytes and beyond, what components do you need to unify your data?
Velocity and scale
Everywhere you look, there are data automation solutions promising access to “real-time” or “near-real-time” data. But the question shouldn’t just be: how can I get real-time access to data? Things are a bit more complicated than that.
Rather, you should be asking:
1. How can I scale ongoing operations by having a data integrity engine that I can trust to continually scale, as my disparate data sources increase in number, and as my data sets explode in volume?
Building one data pipeline manually is manageable. But having the flexibility to add more pipelines, and connectors, becomes unsustainable without automation. For example, it can take up to a month to build each new connector manually. Unfortunately, that means the data from each new integration (Facebook, Snapchat etc) is out of date by the time your teams can access it. And if you need multiple new APIs for multiple different purposes – all at the same time – chaos reigns before you know it (and with no clear end in sight).
Any publisher attempting to keep up with the influx of new and ever-changing APIs on the horizon in Web3 needs to build a strong and workable data unification platform, now.
2. How long will it take to build a strategic data asset in the first place, before my teams get access to the data?
There’s no use in having access to real-time data in six months’ time. To make informed business decisions, your teams need that data right now. However, in reality, the majority of publishers embarking on building (or buying) their own data unification platform accept that they’ll need to wait for months before they can get close to any actionable data. For example, it might take six data engineering personnel a period of three to six months to code a bespoke platform that is useful to their individual business teams.
In an age of automation, where real-time data is key to keeping up with the competition, these time frames are no longer acceptable.
Smart data pipelines
Typical data pipelines are “dumb.” That means that they’ll pull all the data you need, but also a whole lot you don’t. For example, you might only need to access 100GB of your 1TB dataset to transform into actionable data. But without building a smart API for the job, it will end up pulling the full terabyte, which you will then need to store in your data warehouse.
The costs of exponentially larger data volumes can soon spiral out of control if left unchecked. Instead, you need to build APIs for specific cuts of the data that your teams need. This is what we call a smart data pipeline.
While the pace of adoption of Web3 is still unclear, the immersive web is just around the corner. It’s imperative that data-driven companies are prepared for what’s coming. That’s not just a few more rows of data to process and store, but a tsunami of new and larger data sets that will become overwhelming overnight without the right infrastructure in place.
For any publishers still attempting to carry out their data operations manually, they need to look to automate, wherever possible, before it’s too late.
About the author
Navid Nassiri joined Switchboard as Head of Marketing in 2021. Switchboard’s data engineering automation platform aggregates disparate data at scale, reliably and in real-time, to make better business decisions. In his role at Switchboard, Navid is focused on driving growth and brand awareness through innovative marketing strategies. Navid is a seasoned entrepreneur and executive, including leadership roles at PwC and NBCUniversal.
Bugs Bunny and Michael Jordan co-starred in Space Jam. Bill Cinton was re-elected to serve a second term as President of the United States. Tiger Woods became a professional golfer. The Summer Olympics were hosted in Atlanta. And washingtonpost.com went live. What do all of these events have in common? They all took place in 1996.
It has been 25 years since those first readers could get their news from The Washington Post online. Back then, Post articles couldn’t be “googled,” since Google — as a company — would be founded two years later. And sharing a news article with friends couldn’t involve Facebook or Twitter, as these networks wouldn’t come to market for eight and 10 more years, respectively… TikTok was only the sound an analog clock made and early-social media adopters were closer to Tom being their first friend on MySpace than influencers going viral and becoming millionaires from creating content on Instagram, Snapchat and/or YouTube.
News consumption was a one-size fits all paradigm: heard or seen via broadcast news on TV or radio, read from printed ink on paper, and skimmed from websites that were effectively static brochureware representations of their print big brothers (with some supplemental content online). There was no personalization. The model was one-to-many: here are the top things reader X, Y and Z need to know to stay informed. That model is changing and has changed. And The Post has shown success in personalizing the news to readers’ interests through My Post, newsletter subscriptions and much much more.
Stay tuned, Washington Post readers are about to see more personalization in 2022!
Creating and distributing the news: then vs. now
An “Apple-to-Apple” Comparison of Reading The Washington Post on December 20 in 1996 and 2021 through then-Modern Apple Technology:
The December 20, 1996, homepage of washingtonpost.com on an Apple Macintosh
Rhe December 20, 2021, home screen of the WashPost iOS app on an Apple iPhone
Change is good. But change needs to be managed. A lot has changed in this last quarter century at the intersection of media and technology. The Post has responded to change by building new systems that manage how content is created, distributed and amplified. But one thing has remained constant — great reporters and editors create great journalism.
Another constant is that quality journalism will be seen or heard by consumers looking to stay informed. And it can shine through the cloudy haze of mis-and-disinformation maliciously shared online.
Although these constants of good journalism from trusted institutional brands and other media players communicating the news remains, how consumers get their news has certainly changed with the times. In today’s digital new media landscape, according to The Pew Research Center, “more than eight-in-ten U.S. adults (86%) say they get news from a smartphone, computer, or tablet ‘often’ or ‘sometimes.’”
As a media AND technology company, The Washington Post has not just followed consumers to their preferred destinations, it has been a leader in creating content and bringing it to readers — readers who may have an interest in politics can get their Daily 202 newsletter emailed to them; food enthusiasts can cook with confidence with Voraciously recipes and guides; podcast listeners can subscribe to Post Reports, Please Go On, Can He Do That, and other audio format news; and over 1.2 million fans of @washingtonpost on TikTok can be informed and entertained by short, witty, videos by a creative team of content creators.
All of this work needs to live somewhere. Platforms, tools and services power this news before it reaches readers’ smartphones, computers, or tablets. The Washington Post has had to understand not just the scalable infrastructure needs of today to deliver this news where and how readers want it, but technology leadership has also had to set the organization up to be successful in the future with new and expanding infrastructure and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) resources. It’s like the old sports adage — Wayne Gretzky wasn’t the fastest skater on the ice in the NHL and he wasn’t the biggest professional hockey player. He was the greatest because he played not to where the puck currently is, but where the puck was going.
The Post’s aspiration and northstar is to not just continue to deliver excellence in journalism, but also to equally deliver excellence in engineering and innovation. The Post is playing to where the innovation puck is going by as, Deloitte Insights suggests, “designing systems in which humans and machines work together to improve the speed and quality of decision-making.” The Post is doing this to improve the reader experience through personalization and to allow company leaders to turn more data into actionable intelligence at scale.
“I’ve always understood and appreciated the work that The Post contributes to the journalistic space, but interviewing [for my role at The Post] quickly made me realize the sophistication behind the engineering effort supporting that mission.”
— Washington Post Data Engineer Jack Miller, who joined The Post in 2021.
Data, data, everywhere. Data, data, time to share.
Moore’s Law highlights the correlation of computing power essentially doubling every two years. That’s become more of a rule than a law over-time. Another rule that has held steady is the total amount of data created or copied doubles roughly every two years — therefore, The Post has seen a whole lot of redoubling of total data since 1996 and Post engineering leadership expects that trend continue in the coming years.
Inside-and-outside of the newsroom, The Post — as a business — relies heavily on data-informed decision making at strategic and operational levels. Over the years, in addition to the increased need to approach data management in a holistic way, The Post has experienced a significant increase in subscriptions and traffic across various platforms and channels. This increased data volume and velocity coupled with new sources and complexities has created new challenges (and opportunities) to turn raw, siloed and unstructured data into business intelligence.
To address these challenges/opportunities and gain maximum journalistic and business benefits from reader interests, The Post began to develop a more integrated approach to data management in 2021 under the leadership of Beth Diaz (Vice President of Audience Development & Analytics), Venkatesh Varalu (Head of Data and Analytics), and in collaboration with leaders across Subscriptions, Advertising, Newsroom, Marketing, Finance, Product and Engineering.
This data was available and accessible prior to 2021, but The Post began to manage it in a more innovative, agile and programmatic way. Under this new approach, customer data is being positioned to power various marketing and reader personalization efforts through enhanced workflows, automations and data activations via homegrown tools or services and vendor platforms. The Post is calling this macro-initiative WaPo 360.
“I’ve always been a huge fan of data. Working as a newsletter analyst, I got the opportunity to explore The Post’s various data sets to answer interesting questions about how our readers behave, and to find evidence of what works best for keeping them engaged,” said WaPo 360 Senior Data Engineer Patrick Haney. “It was a fantastic experience. However, while working with these data sets, it became almost immediately clear that they weren’t arranged in an optimal format for analysis. Answering simple business questions could take hours instead of minutes due to the siloed nature of each data set, along with the business logic that needed to be applied in a consistent fashion and often it required reaching out to a subject matter expert for validation.”
“I was ecstatic when I learned about this new data integration initiative because it would solve all these aforementioned issues and enable analysts and non-analysts to quickly and efficiently use our data to answer vital business questions,” said Haney regarding his choice to transfer from one Post team onto another.
According to a recent Deloitte study, “most executives do not believe their companies are insight-driven. Fewer than four in 10 (37 percent) place their companies in the top two categories of the Insight-Driven Organization (IDO) Maturity Scale, and of those, only 10 percent fall into the highest category. The remaining 63 percent are aware of analytics but lack infrastructure, are still working in silos, or are expanding ad hoc analytics capabilities beyond silos.”
WaPo 360 will improve the turn-around time for The Post to turn data and signals into insight-driven business decisions.
WaPo 360 and the engineering experience
When he applied to work at The Post, Jack Miller said his “interviewers stressed the importance of the WaPo 360 project across many different verticals within the organization. Being able to join a growing team supporting that project was a huge reason why I decided to pursue the position and so far it has been a great experience.”
Fellow team Data Engineer Zach Lynn agrees, saying, “the WaPo 360 project struck me as an excellent opportunity to learn and also support The Washington Post’s core mission.” Lynn’s interest included working in several business areas and collaborating with other software teams.
The first step of WaPo 360 has been focused on stitching data signals from various data sources together. Data that previously was unstructured and accessible only to data analysts is becoming democratized for Washington Post engineers and technical business users. This first pillar of work is essentially warming up the oven and organizing all of the ingredients to make it easier for business stakeholders, in different departments, to bake their own pies. Data from site and app traffic, newsletter engagements, ads, subscriptions, and other sources are becoming more structured in WaPo 360 through Customer 360 — our first pillar of the initiative.
A Washington Post data analyst recently presented how his work has been impacted by WaPo 360. In his presentation, he outlined how he experienced a nearly 96% improvement in a SQL query run time by switching data sources from the siloed unprocessed data that he was looking for to the same data signals that were structured and pre-processed in WaPo 360. As noted earlier, different data sets have been accessible before 2021, but with WaPo 360, The Post is turning data into intelligence and making it easier for staff to do their jobs. WaPo 360 is essentially replacing their hand tools with power tools.
WaPo 360 and the business-user experience
The data that is becoming structured and pre-processed in Customer 360 isn’t just going to live on an island to be visited by data analysts and data engineers. The second pillar of WaPo 360 is to make that data accessible to those with a business need to access it, in anonymized ways, through improved self-service tools.
Joshua Zieve, Senior Data Analyst, joined the WaPo 360 team, to “help catalyze The Washington Post’s data sources to better understand and serve our current and prospective readership.” Zieve has been active in coordinating with business and technical users on many fronts. “Working across the Analytics & Engineering teams, I’m grateful for the opportunity to develop systems that facilitate, deepen and expedite analytics for use-cases throughout the organization,” Zieve said.
Good data is the foundation for WaPo 360 and that leads to personalization benefits. Following the team’s work in delivering structured data in Customer 360, WaPo 360 sends relevant data to power the business use-cases that Zieve references into a new Customer Data Platform (CDP). The CDP then works as an engine to allow business-users to perform exploratory data analysis, build audience segments, create marketing and reader engagement campaigns, analyze their success, then deliver an improved personalized experience to readers through integrations with Washington Post-built tools and popular offsite services that The Post utilizes to reach potential readers.
“[I’m] most excited about the self-service potential for The Post’s newsroom and business teams … with data in one place, which is aggregated and ready to be queried, users can get their data without waiting for The Post’s Analytics team to prepare the data. For the Analytics team, this will also reduce time spent for serving ad hoc requests from the newsroom/business side.”
— Sam Han, Director of Zeus Technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Machine Learning at The Washington Post
WaPo 360 and the reader experience
The Post will be doubling down on personalization in 2022 — directly and adjacent to the work being conducted by the WaPo 360 team.
Early work is underway to improve the onboarding experience for new subscribers. And the team plans to unlock significant opportunities to retool, rethink and reshape how articles are suggested to readers — such as through improved content insights and an updated Content Taxonomy System with new article subjects/topics metadata powering future innovation.
Members of the WaPo 360 team recently presented the team’s work at a company-wide virtual forum. Washington Post Organizational Development Consultant Cameron Booher said, “Planning for any What’s Next event involves talking with many project teams about their ongoing and upcoming initiatives. And the usual format of What’s Next is to highlight three projects from different areas of the business. But it very quickly became evident through conversations just how significant of an undertaking WaPo 360 is. It’s extremely collaborative, and has been built upon expertise from almost every department at The Post. It will be rolled out in various phases, which speaks to the iterative process of develop-test-improve.”
“Some of the insights we’ll gain will help us improve reader and user experiences in spades,” Booher said.
This article originally appeared on Washington Post Engineering and is re-published with permission.
Targeted contextual and behavioral advertising currently dominate much of the digital advertising marketplace. Behavioral advertising uses personal browser data collected by intermediaries to serve ads to users by assigning them into micro categories. In contrast, contextual advertising serves ads to match the marketer’s requirements.
GumGum, a contextual intelligence company, commissioned Harris Poll to survey consumers to better understand their online advertising preferences. Nearly eight in ten (79%) consumers report being more comfortable seeing contextual ads than behavioral. While more than three-quarters of all people are more comfortable with contextual ads, there are some generational differences: 84% of consumers ages 35 to 44 preferred contextual ads, while 76% and 75% of those between the ages of 18 to 34 and 45 to 54, respectively, preferred a contextual experience.
Personalized ads are not beneficial
In contrast, most respondents (66%) report they are uncomfortable with companies tracking their browsing history to show them personalized ads. Further, women are more uncomfortable with behavioral ads than men (70% vs. 61%). Older adults aged 55+ are also more likely than younger adults to say they are uncomfortable with brands tracking their browsing history.
While marketers often overstate the value of personalized ads, consumers are also uncomfortable when brands use their browsing history and habits to serve personalized ads. Personalization often relies on surveillance advertising, which is data-invasive and has consumers concerned.
Similar trends have also been observed in European research. Last year, Global Witness commissioned YouGov to conduct research among 2,000 regular social media users in France and Germany about personalization in online advertising. The findings show that consumers are uneasy about targeted ads — driven by everything from income and religious views to life events such as pregnancy, bereavement, or illness — and do not want to receive any personalized advertising. Further, approximately 38% of the respondents said they are “creeped out,” and 31% said they feel violated.
Behavioral targeting can lead to discrimination
Beyond privacy concerns, selecting specific demographics and audiences to receive certain advertising can be discriminatory. Civil rights groups accused Facebook of violating federal anti-discrimination laws in 2016 because of their targeted advertising practices. At least five lawsuits were filed against the company at that time. A settlement was reached in 2019, and it noted, “Facebook advertisers can no longer target users by age, gender and ZIP code for housing, employment and credit offers.”
Google announced a cookie replacement called FLoC, Federated Learning of Cohorts, in mid-2021. The company planned to shift online advertising tracking from user to group tracking. However, many voiced concerns that users could potentially be identified within cohorts. Google’s newest idea in their Privacy Sandbox is an API called Topics, which links user browsing history to topics for interest-based advertising. Unfortunately, there’s a significant disconnect between Google’s Sandbox initiative and consumers’ sentiment from the user privacy perspective.
Contextual relevance
Contextual advertising addresses consumers’ privacy concerns, allowing publishers to serve more relevant ads to their customers without tracking their browser history. Interestingly, few marketers transitioned their dollars from behavioral advertising to contextual advertising after Google announced the end of cookies in 2022 and then again when it announced its delay until 2023.
The research clearly shows that consumers are uncomfortable with behavioral and personalized ads. As the digital advertising industry moves forward to make changes and create solutions, transparency is essential, and it is necessary to inform consumers on how their data is collected and used. Digital ads that do not make consumers uncomfortable build brand trust and increase the likelihood of a positive response.
Digital advertising needs to be rebuilt and reinvigorated. Consumers want better privacy protection, engaging content, and an overall foundation built on trust and transparency to ensure loyalty. To achieve this, data management platforms (DMPs) and supply-side platforms (SSPs) are joining forces.
As we enter the privacy-centric era of digital advertising, third-party cookies will be replaced by first-party data, which is even more powerful and effective because the signals originate directly from a publisher’s page, works on every browser, and doesn’t require third-party syncs.
In the privacy-centric era, first-party data will be the new currency for digital advertising.
Overcoming the third-party data challenge
The deprecation of third-party cookies and the need for better audience consent for cross-domain and cross-app targeting demands that publishers and advertisers put privacy at the center of everything. Publishers, like consumers, want control of their data.
By replacing third-party cookies with first-party data solutions, the combination of a DMP and an SSP will deliver that control, keep privacy at the center of business, and help to unlock the full potential of their inventory — including deeper audience insights. This deeper view will not only benefit publishers, but it will make it easier for advertisers and their DSPs to target and reach their audiences more accurately across mobile, web, and connected TV.
DMPs and SSPs are more powerful together
When leading DMPs and SSPs combine their valuable media and data capabilities, it makes for a powerful combination that will raise the fortunes of publishers and advertisers alike.
In March, TripleLift announced that it acquired our company, 1plusX. This supply-side platform bought a first-party data management platform to activate first-party data to help its publisher partners better monetize their inventory once third-party cookies are phased out. This is the first acquisition in the company’s history, which speaks to the importance placed on privacy and identity, and the confidence SSPs have in partnering with DMPs built for the privacy era. Combining a scaled SSP and a savvy DMP is a pathway forward for thousands of publishers and ad buyers. This acquisition has created that pathway.
TripleLift is not the only SSP that is planning for our industry’s privacy-centric future. Earlier this year, Magnite announced that it acquired Carbon, a platform that enables publishers to measure, manage and monetize audiences. Other partnerships aim to bridge the gap between consumer identity and the privacy-first web. As a result, publishers and advertisers will get more accurate data for campaign targeting without the need for third-party cookies or mobile ad IDs. Buyers and sellers would then in theory be able to transact based on consumer insights without data leakage or scale reduction.
Mergers and acquisitions will lead the way in MarTech
Companies everywhere are looking to accelerate their ability to fill the gap that the depreciation of third-party cookies will create. Bringing together the power of media and data, as happens when DMPs and SSPs join forces, is just one way that M&A will lead the way. As time marches on and we approach the end of third-party cookies as we know it, we will see mergers and acquisitions among independent MarTech and AdTech companies accelerate. And it will be the mergers and acquisitions that prioritize privacy and first-party data that will win the day. Because in a world without third-party cookies, if your data strategy isn’t a first-party one, then what data strategy do you really have?
Publishers continue to remain highly focused on revenue diversification and the value of first party data according to new research from the Association of Online Publishers (AOP), a UK industry body that represents digital publishing companies. The AOP undertook its Digital Publishing: Meeting the Future survey to provide “a snapshot of how digital publishing companies across the UK are continuing to respond to the challenge to change.” The research offers a look at publishers’ business priorities and the future-readiness of the media industry.
The AOP carried out its survey between January 5 and February 9 of 2022. Of the 111 responses, 83% were from publishers and 17% from organizations providing solutions to the publishing sector.
Diversifying revenue streams
Across all types of publishers (B2B, B2C, or a combination), respondents said that their highest priority is developing new revenue streams through product innovation. Ensuring data privacy compliance and transparency ranked second.
The AOP’s publisher respondents ranked opportunities for revenue growth over the next three years. More than half (55%) feel that subscriptions are the big revenue opportunity right now, with lead generation-based revenues ranking second (33%). The report concludes that these findings mean that publishers are highly focused on building direct relationships with audiences and leveraging their first party data.
Audio and ecommerce tied for third (31%) in terms of revenue priorities, which points to continued revenue-model innovation. The research finds that both B2B and B2C publishers agreed that subscriptions have the most potential for growth. However, publishers that target both B2B and consumer audiences saw ecommerce as the most promising revenue generator.
Data dominates
While publisher concerns about ensuring privacy and providing transparency rank high, they clearly know the value of their first party data and seek to maximize its use. According to the report, publishers are focused on building the right ecosystem of commercial, data, and tech partnerships.
In the shadow of cookie deprecation, some publishers are considering collaborating on data initiatives. AOP found that, while 12% of publisher respondents are unsure of their next moves and 12% do not expect to collaborate, many publishers are either already collaborating (20%), are discussing collaborating (16%), or are open to the possibility of collaboration (40%).
The majority (75%) of publishers said that they are working to ensure that audience data informs everything they do and that they are investing in tools to help achieve this. Despite the emphasis on data, however, only 17% of publishers said that all their teams are aligned internally around their audience data. Half of the solutions provider respondents suggest that, while publishers understand being joined up internally around audience data is important, many don’t yet have a strategy in place to achieve their goals.
Workforce and workplace concerns
Interestingly, recruiting and retaining talent, and ensuring a diverse and inclusive workplace, are rated higher (tying for third place with “developing new first party data strategies”) than the tech-based challenges you might expect the digital publishing sector to be focused on.
Most respondents (75%) report that “supporting and retaining current employees” is their top priority when it comes to recruitment and workforce development. This was followed by adapting the publisher’s offering to appeal to new talent entering the industry.
Putting in place recruitment processes that eliminate bias and support the development of a more diverse workforce is ranked third here. However, when asked how they would describe their organization’s diversity, equity & inclusion (DE&I) strategy, respondents suggest confidence in their progress on this challenge. Just over half (51%) believe they have made good progress with areas for continued improvement, and 24% believe they have an effective DE&I strategy. Only 5% of respondents don’t believe they have a clear strategy on DE&I.
As Covid-19 restrictions are being eased in the UK and elsewhere, publishers are evaluating their working environments and plans to return to offices. This survey found that 37% of respondents say their ideal working pattern would be to work from the office two days a week and 24% would be happy to come in for the occasional key meeting, but primarily work from home.
Nearly a third (30%) of respondents expect their employers to be fully flexible and happy for them to choose to work as they wish. However, 66% believe they will be asked to work at least a few days in the office each week.
Clearly, the past couple of years have seen trends like ecommerce intensify and placed increased pressure on publishers to innovate. That innovation has, unsurprisingly, focused on product and revenue. However, it has also required publishers to reexamine workplace culture, recruiting, and retention strategies. The AOP’s survey finds that digital publishing companies that understand the bigger picture challenges and have identified many opportunities. However, it appears that they may still be working through the best tactics and strategies to provide the requisite competitive advantage moving forward.
The time is ripe for publishers and advertisers to embrace privacy as an opportunity to fuel new possibilities.
As consumers, we value our privacy and want to control what, where, and with whom we share our personal information. With rising concerns and a lack of trust in brands, consumers are now taking various measures to take back control. Research shows that 63% of North Americans would rather purchase from organizations that protect their privacy.
Regulators have a sharper focus on privacy in advertising too. The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) issued a release stating: “A healthy market is one built on data protection by design, enabling privacy-respectful innovations focused on the individual’s interests, rights and freedoms. Meaningful choices benefit individuals and underpin effective competition between businesses. Proposals looking to replace the use of cookies and similar technologies need to ensure they raise the standards of data protection and privacy, and not dilute them.”
Advertising now requires a clearer, transparent, and fairer ecosystem that will benefit advertisers, publishers, and consumers.
Privacy is no longer a nice-to-have
News UK is one of many media owners keeping an eye on privacy changes ahead. Bedir Aydemir, Head of Audience & Data, said: “I’m keen to start to see some real clarity with regards to what’s required for ICO and how the GDPR is interpreted. I think what we’ve been doing up to now is sticking plasters. We’re trying to make what’s happened in the past possible in the future, and that’s not going to be allowed: the ICO made clear.”
In an FT article, it was reported that Meta was suffering the impact of Apple’s privacy policies that “make it harder to track users and target advertising.” The data that was once available to deliver personalized advertising on the web is disappearing. The mobile ecosystem is also disrupted, only 21% of users worldwide have opted into ATT, which requires opt-in consent from users to track them across apps.
The changes we’re seeing in advertising is about more than third-party cookies, it’s about data privacy. Aydemir added that we would see “some real-world changes with regards to how data is parsed into the open market, how it’s valued, how it’s activated” and that publishers will be at the forefront because they have consent data, identity and scale.
If advertisers want to rebuild trust with consumers via responsible marketing and safeguard themselves from the impact of privacy regulation, the key is to work collaboratively with publishers. Many advertisers are already working in this way. They’re moving away from their reliance on a complex system of third parties towards more direct way of buying.
Publishers, and their wealth of first-party data, are valuable because they can build nuanced audiences for advertisers to target, aligned with target audience definitions. This gives advertisers the ability to reach new audiences and achieve marketing goals without compromising user privacy or unnecessary exposure to risk.
First-party data cohorts offer a solution
Advertising is still about reaching relevant audiences at scale on the right channels. With increased privacy concerns, addressability tactics will shift away from reliance on third-party trackers to an increased focus on publishers’ first-party data and publisher cohorts, which groups people with similar characteristics and behaviours without identifying them.
Visitor-based rankings publisher, Ranker saw a 25% increase in RFP win rate within six months of taking their first-party data strategy to market and demonstrating the value of their unique first-party cohorts. Ranker can tell advertisers what their users are doing and their other interests and likes, this includes data designed to inform planning, optimization, and future targeting.
According to Ranker’s senior director of sales operations and planning JR Hoffman, “As the industry figures out the privacy piece, it helps our clients feel confident that we have a strategy in place for dealing with the ongoing changes around third-party cookies and privacy regulation.
Working directly with publishers and targeting via publisher cohorts alleviates challenges caused by privacy because they use consented first-party data. In this way, publishers and advertisers work towards a more responsible web, using privacy-compliant and sustainable approaches to engaging high-value audiences.
Don’t be afraid of the challenges ahead
It’s an exciting time for advertisers and publishers. But it’s also challenging, as have other major shifts in advertising. There are over 100 post-cookie solutions, according to continuing analysis by MMA Global and Prohaska Consulting, but all differ in regards to how data is used.
Publishers and advertisers need the infrastructure to connect safely with multiple publishers at a global scale, in a brand-safe environment where no data is leaked, and personalized advertising at scale is possible for first-party data owners.
Rethinking privacy as an opportunity to fuel possibilities will help publishers and advertisers emerge from the cloud of confusion that has shrouded them in 2021. Critically, it will also put people back into the decisions we make in advertising.
About the author
Elizabeth Brennan is the Head of Advertiser Strategy for Permutive, which powers the future of targeted advertising on the Open Web. With over a decade of experience in digital advertising, Elizabeth is a champion of women in business and a strong believer in the power of coaching. A graduate of The University of Reading, Elizabeth is a former winner of the prestigious NABS Fast Forward award and has gone on to achieve Code First certification as part of the organization’s initiative to increase the number of women in tech.
The digital advertising world is no stranger to innovation and agility. As we know, the ecosystem has evolved significantly over the past year, highlighting opportunities for the future as well as challenges that need to be addressed. As the big tech players inch closer to their deadlines to address privacy concerns, here are some trends that advertisers and publishers should keep an eye out for in 2022.
2022: The year of CTV. And 2023, 2024, 2025, etc.
We all remember the “year of mobile” in the ad tech world – since it lasted more than a decade. Well, we can expect Connected TV (CTV) to continue to dominate the headlines for the foreseeable future. And why not? After getting a considerable boost in adoption thanks to consumers’ pandemic behavior, it is predicted to grow quite a bit more over the next five years.
More companies are seeing the value of one of the fastest-growing channels in digital advertising. Therefore, we are likely to see even more innovation in the space. More CTV inventory will become available to marketers as identity resolution and connectivity solutions come to the forefront to address the fragmentation in the channel.
And praise be, there are no third-party cookies to battle over in CTV. The explosive growth of CTV will only continue to eat away at linear TV’s share. This year, brands will refine their strategies and unlock incremental linear reach with CTV spend.
Small and independent publishers will finally be heard
Even though third-party cookies will disappear, that doesn’t mean third-party data will. The reality is that third-party data will stick around because the alternatives that will crop up in its absence aren’t feasible options for smaller publishers.
There is a misunderstanding about third-party data in the industry where people believe that it can’t be privacy-compliant. It absolutely can: it just requires checking the source of the data. As my colleague said: “advertisers should hold [third-party data] providers accountable by asking whether they use and how they use privacy by design.”
Simply put, first-party data or contextual targeting can’t be the solution for publishers who don’t have enough data to scale. Contextual data works only inside one’s own domain, which for small publishers is, well, too small. Plus, marketers are less willing to engage with sites that don’t have as many monthly visitors as the larger ones. Context remains a useful tool — as it has always been. Lotame findings show that 52% of publishers and marketers are testing or planning to test contextual solutions. But can it stand alone once again?
The industry as a whole needs to come up with solutions that will work for everyone, especially for publishers as they build their post-cookie strategies. Publishers will need a plan B for the billions in lost programmatic ad revenue. McKinsey estimates $10 billion is at risk for U.S. publishers alone In 2022, the screams of these smaller publishers will be better heard and addressed.
Dear identity partners: Stop the infighting!
With 80 identity solutions in the market today (and counting), industry professionals may very rightly feel overwhelmed and confused. A multitude of tech vendors and more are throwing their hat in the identity ring — from media companies to DSPs, agency holding companies to TV manufacturers. And their interest is justified: Identity is big business for digital advertising. Research and Markets reports that the global market for digital identity solutions is projected to grow to $49.5 Billion by 2026, up from $23.3 Billion in 2021.
ID solutions for the open web are going to be invaluable for publisher monetization. So, we’re going to see collaboration will dramatically increase. ID partners in 2021 operated in the identity arena like a circular firing squad. Everyone claims their privacy is better than others, and everyone who has a solution wants to say theirs is the only one that works. In reality, all have to work together. Our global survey, “Beyond the Cookie: The Future of Advertising for Marketers and Publishers,” reports that both marketers and publishers overwhelmingly agree that digital advertising relies on a connected ecosystem that supports the open web and diverse, ad-supported content.
Put down your arms, identity vendors, publishers, and marketers. Instead, let’s focus on our common goal of giving the consumer transparency and control while making everything more efficient. The end result will be better for everyone involved.
Consumers are forever changed by the global pandemic but have proven resilient in adopting new habits the world over. Marketers and publishers, too, have proven flexible in the face of enormous change in their personal and professional lives. The major industry changes afoot present us with two options: we can either work together to ensure the ecosystem thrives or we can just look out for ourselves in silo. I believe that working collectively this coming year will bear the most fruit for all involved. And I hope you agree.
Digital media companies face fierce competition for the eyes, ears, and wallets of customers. But those who succeed have the potential to win big. With the rise of new content platforms and the emerging promises of web3, media companies have to evolve faster than ever to deliver the right experiences to the right people at the right time.
The pace of critical transformation has been accelerated by the global pandemic. Audiences have always been fickle media consumers. However, Covid-19 drove a massive, rapid change in consumption habits. People have become more demanding and expect better digital experiences to meet those demands.
In conversations with media executives, we’re hearing three major trends that savvy organizations should consider before launching new initiatives.
Data-centricity
The first trend is around data-centricity. Companies are awash in data, and the differences between sinking and swimming hinge on developing a strategy that leverages their customer (reader/viewer/subscriber) data. By gathering all of the information they have—from multiple first-party sources, as well as financial and operational data—into a single repository (which may be a data lake, data warehouse, or other cloud-based platform) companies can effectively manage and use their data.
With a data platform in place, organizations can begin to unlock insights from every angle. Internally, the data can be used to aggregate customer-level insights to create models that achieve acquisition, growth, and retention goals.
Externally, the insights can be used to develop better user experiences that incorporate learnings from across the customer journey. This enables media companies to provide unique experiences that align with the brand. Data also allows products and services to operate more effectively, particularly personalization, recommendations, and the like.
Improving customer experience
The next trend is a focus on providing optimal customer experiences. According to McKinsey:
“The CX programs of the future will be holistic, predictive, precise, and clearly tied to business outcomes. Evidence suggests that the advantages will be substantial for companies that start building the capabilities, talent, and organizational structure needed for this transition. Those that stick with the traditional systems will be forced to play catch-up in the years to come.”
One of the most effective ways media companies can improve the customer experience is through personalization. Countless studies have shown that personalization not only drives better engagement for media brands, it is welcomed—even demanded—by consumers. As audiences continue to expect more relevant experiences, media companies require more proficiency in data science to deliver on those expectations.
Diversifying revenue streams
The final trend is the disruption and diversification of revenue streams. In the past two decades, media companies have built strong digital products and services yet relied on traditional monetization paradigms such as advertising and indirect distribution channels. However, ad-based business models are no longer a sufficient primary revenue strategy for many media companies. This has triggered a shift to monetize their content in other ways, particularly through direct audience-based revenue.
Take The New York Times, which has focused on subscriptions as the key driver of growth. They leverage news, as well as additional content and channels (including cooking, audio, and games) to drive engagement and ultimately readership and subscriptions as well.
Disney has been a master at diversifying revenue streams. If you merely look at their Star Wars franchise, Disney has taken advantage of opportunities to cultivate new fans, deepen customer experiences, and generate new revenue streams. They’ve licensed the brand to Lego to produce Star Wars-based kits; built out new in-person experiences like Galaxy’s Edge at Disney World in Orlando; and added new fans and their subscription revenues by producing the Mandalorian series exclusively for their streaming service Disney+. Disney proves that quality content leveraged omnichannel drives business outcomes. Last quarter, their parks business reported a $2.45B operating profit and streaming added 11.8 million new subscribers.
The future: bumpy but bright
The evolution of digital media may be bumpy, in part because there’s an array of forces at play, such as developments in the web3 sphere, like the metaverse, NFTs, and blockchain, among others. Despite that, we expect the ventures that survive will continue to recognize the primacy of their audiences, by keeping an eye on and leveraging data-derived insights.
As digital businesses diversify their revenue streams, and adopt and adapt to new distribution and delivery mechanisms, the players must think differently and broaden their perspective and knowledge of their customers. Those that invest the time and effort to foster innovation will be the ones that thrive, no matter what changes come their way.
