If there is one thing we learned from the digital marketplace in 2016, it’s that consumers want a better digital experience with less intrusive advertising. This year media brands and marketers need to actively reconnect with the consumer. With this in mind, Kantar Millward Brown analyzed current marketplace trends to provide six media and digital recommendations for 2017:
Build a strong relationship with Generation Z, now approximately 2 billion or 27% of the global population.
Focus on co-creation, authenticity and transparency to connect with Gen Z.
Deliver a consistent brand voice and experience across all touchpoints.
Creates multi-platform touchpoints for a consistent brand experience. Offer different purchasing options for different buying habits (both offline and online).
Ensure that digital strategies have a large emphasis on mobile, once again, with consistent branding. Kantar reports that close to nine in ten internet users own a smartphone.
Drive innovation and experimentation in both content and formats.
Try and test new technologies like 360 video, augmented reality, virtual reality and artificial intelligence for new models of creativity.
Build emotional advertising campaigns and targets, stop creepy and intrusive advertising.
Create emotionally-driven campaigns to strengthen the bond between the brand and the customer.
Incorporate brand affinity data into media buying plans.
Develop a better ad experience for consumers.
Ensure a three-prong approach: Advertisers need to create relevant and compelling ad content, publishers need to provide a less clutter environment with a positive user experience and agencies need to improve targeting and tagging implementation.
Assure the message fits the medium and reduce ad duplication across platforms.
Understand the function each media plays within the context of how they work together.
Media brands and marketers need to interact with consumers in a more holistic manner utilizing both context and content. Identifying and understanding consumer motivation and engagement in the digital landscape will offer insight into building a strong brand relationships.
While it is appealing to start off a New Year with rosy predictions, it is also important to take a clear-eyed look at the road (and roadblocks) ahead. We asked a few of our members what they see as the biggest challenges the digital media industry faces today.
Here’s what leaders at ten diverse media companies see as the biggest challenge in the year to come:
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Scott Bailey, President, TEN Automotive Division @TENenthusiast
Monetizing scaled social audiences and the content made for these channels is a challenge. We see the benefit of being a first mover and building a large social audience. That said, the benefit today lies heavily in the marketing value it provides in driving traffic to our sites and leveraging it to convert fans into paying customers through subscription offerings like Motor Trend OnDemand. We are able to monetize through advertising, but the nature of the monetization on social is more challenging to do at scale, as it requires a more custom approach compared to more traditional, turnkey placements/buys.
Our industry must build a parallel world adjacent to the current one dominated by Google and Facebook. This new world must be scaled, intelligent and open. Currently, 85 cents of every new dollar are going to the two biggest players because they have been solving for scaled and intelligent – and have done a great job doing so. But, an open garden is increasingly becoming a requirement for sophisticated advertisers who want partners who are flexible on data and transparent on pricing and performance.
It’s hard to pick a “biggest” challenge, as there as so many. But, to me, refining user experience remains a crucial one. There are still way too many sites alienating readers for a quick buck by hammering them with pop-ups, unnecessary slideshows, pagination, interstitials and more. Yes, we need to make money. But gouging readers to the point where we drive them away is an abysmal long-term audience strategy. Treat your audience like you don’t care about them, and they will surely return the favor.”
Steven Smith, President of Digital Media, AccuWeather @accuweather
In 2017, we continue to hurtle toward a ubiquitous global user audience, accessing data from every imaginable kind of device with a greater focus on personalization, localization, service and mobility. Content providers are going to have to step up to meet the needs of an audience that wants fast, relevant, and localized—and provided consistently regardless of device, from smartphones to connected refrigerators. That makes strong partnerships with vendors a necessity, from Cloud storage providers for scaling data to meet demand demands to robust content management solutions to help port news from format to format and device to device. And of course, the audience will continue to demand content that is more timely and relevant than ever.
Joy Jones, Vice President, Global Products, Associated Press @AssociatedPress
The biggest challenge we face is building diverse streams of revenue that support innovative storytelling. In 2017, digital media companies must bridge the current divide between creating compelling stories that attract interest and attention, and the opportunities for monetization that are increasingly concentrated on just a few of the largest platforms. The industry is not going to be successful if there’s too much focus on trendy stories that spin up on a one-off basis or so-called native ad content that lacks authenticity. We need immersive and captivating high-quality content that engages diverse audiences and creates a wide fan base across emerging media platforms. That diversification of revenue will be critical to building and maintaining a sustainable engine for digital media innovation.
John Kosner, EVP, Digital & Print Media, ESPN @JKosner@ESPN
Establishing timely and trusted cross-media measurement is an enormous challenge — but a critically important one. People consume media on an ever-growing number of platforms and devices and we must establish accurate ways to measure the total audience we reach and their engagement with content. That means having clear, trusted standards and metrics — which measure across TV, apps, web, OTT and more — and do so both in- and out-of-home. The connection people have with digitally-delivered content and advertising continues to grow enormously. But so does fake content and ad fraud. Trusted and transparently-measured environments will become ever-more valuable.
Beth Lawrence, EVP of Digital Ad Sales, Scripps Networks Interactive @ScrippsNet
A big challenge in digital in 2017 will be the ability for clients and consumers to separate the wheat from the chaff. We all know digital is here to stay and continues to be a more important revenue driver every year. But the quality of digital content has been under the radar, and in the final analysis, marketers care what brands they associate with. Period. Content matters; quality content rules. It will be a year of cleaning up, properly measuring and delivering great results in digital.
The biggest challenge will continue to be capturing consumer attention as existing platforms grow and new platforms emerge.
Vikki Neil, SVP/GM of Scripps Lifestyle Studios @ScrippsNet
In digital, you must stay open to all ideas that come your way, but disciplined enough to say no to many. You must move quickly and not wait for perfection, but perfect what you do daily. There’s not time to develop a long-range plan like a traditional media business offers. From my seat, the biggest challenge is a combination of making the right bets, and moving as fast as humanly possible to understand the space before your competitors, so that you can build the best offering for consumers and advertisers. It’s impossible to be everywhere across all opportunities, so choose wisely, go quickly and iterate daily.
Alex Skatell, Founder and President, Independent Journal Review @AlexSkatell@TheIJR
The biggest challenge for media is building community. The strategies that have propelled many digital media companies into large audiences are largely commoditized, so you need to figure out how to connect your content and communities together in a deeper and unique way.
Brendan Spain, VP, Advertising – Americas, Financial Times @spanishbrendan@FT
The biggest challenge for digital media in 2017 will be for quality publishers to cut through the noise – of ad fraud, fake news, and non-human traffic – to command fair market pricing for their trusted brands and influential audiences. Evaluating and leveraging these trusted environments will continue to be both important and difficult as the market weighs chasing scale and audience against quality and transparency.
Domenic Venuto, General Manager, Consumer Division, The Weather Company, an IBM Business @dvenuto@weathercompany
As we look at the 2017 media landscape, there is potential for a massive upheaval on multiple fronts with the forecasted political uncertainty. The industry is resilient and adaptable, and we must remain focused on building great products for fans. And perhaps anxiety is unwarranted.
In 1972, a couple of intrepid Washington Post journalists stumbled onto a story about a break-in at Democratic National Committee Headquarters. These two young men had no idea they had unearthed one of the greatest political scandals of the 20th century, one that would eventually take down a president. All they knew was that they pulled a string and didn’t let go until the truth came tumbling out.
The Watergate scandal (named for the complex where the break-in occurred) was so legendary that it became the archetype for all scandals that came after it. These days, major scandals (be they political or not) are likely to have the ending “gate” amended to their popular name in homage — all because of journalists who doggedly pursued the truth. We need people like that now more than ever.
When I was coming of age, those two journalists, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, inspired me and a generation of young men and women to pursue a career in journalism. We believed that journalists could make a difference, that you could hold people in power accountable and that was worthwhile and righteous work.
Somewhere along the way, journalism lost its way. Maybe it was the corporatization of media one of my college professors warned us about. As media ownership consolidated into fewer and fewer hands, a reckoning was bound to come. Maybe it came in the form of the internet, a concept that newspapers chose to ignore or simply misunderstood until their industry was steamrolled. Newspapers closed down or radically transformed to survive. Journalists lost their jobs… or transformed. The mission changed.
Perhaps more than all of that, the industry itself shifted in a dramatic way, one which caused it to lose the trust of a significant segment of its core audience. Pursuing the truth, holding those in power accountable was no longer a priority. In a quest for clicks, it seemed that people didn’t want to hear uncomfortable truths. They wanted to be entertained with the latest celebrity gossip or hear about the new blockbuster movie that was coming out.
Time frames and ways of delivering news shifted too. News broke on social media, sometimes before conventional news outlets even knew it had happened. Suddenly because of that growing speed, being first took priority over being right, and as the number of journalists decreased, distrust grew. According to data from Gallup, in 2005 around 50% of respondents trusted the media a great deal/fair amount. That number had plunged to 32% by 2016, dropping below 40% for the first time since polling began in 1997.
It’s interesting that as the trust in media dropped, at the same time that the number of working journalists also decreased dramatically. That’s probably not a coincidence. According to data from Neiman Labs, the number of journalists in the United States tumbled from a high of 54,700 in 2003 down to 32,900 in 2015.
Last week though, after years of bleeding jobs, we heard some honest-to-goodness positive news — a newspaper was actually hiring journalists in 2017 — and it couldn’t come soon enough, judging from those poll numbers. Politico reported that the Washington Post planned to add more than 5 dozen journalists to the staff this year, an 8% increase.
As we move into 2017, it’s time to earn that trust back, and the best way to do that, is to go back to the hard work of being of a journalist, of following the stories that matter, of holding people in power accountable. Having more boots on the ground in Washington will certainly be welcome. As a society, we need that. Most of all, we need men and women, whoever they may be, to step up and inspire a generation that journalism is honorable work, just as Woodward and Bernstein did for mine.
Advertisers spent a total of $17.5 billion dollars in digital media in 3Q 2016, a 20% increase compared to same time-period last year and a 4.3% increase over prior quarter. This is the highest third quarter for digital advertising spending on record according to the latest IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report.
Almost half of all digital ad buys (47%) were on mobile platforms with spending on desktop experiencing a 12% as compared to the same time last year.
But the real question is which media players are capturing these digital ad dollars? According to Brian Wieser, a Wall Street analyst specializing in AdTech for Pivotal Research, Facebook and Google received more than 75% of this revenue. Based upon his analysis, Digital Content Next CEO Jason Kint points out that while Facebook and Google registered strong quarterly profits, when these two players are excluded from digital ad revenue growth, digital media spending averaged a mere 1% increase in Q3 2016. So while digital advertising revenue growth is exciting, the overwhelming dominance of only two players certainly dampens any enthusiasm around the finding for the majority of industry players.
While the creation of quality content remains at the fore of premium publishers’ priorities, these days, they also need to double down improving the user experience, streamlining how audiences access and engage with content wherever they opt to consume it. This puts companies under pressure experiment with new formats and technologies in search of new ways to meet consumer demand for snackable and relatable content delivered how, when and where they want it.
According to, Lewis D’Vorkin the company’s Chief Product Officer, Forbes is pursuing a comprehensive strategy to accomplish both. Peggy Anne Salz—mobile analyst and Content Marketing Strategist at MobileGroove—catches up with D’Vorkin to discuss how the company is reinventing the mobile app user experience with the help of new technology that removes friction, increases engagement and opens up additional opportunities for monetization.
Peggy Ann Salz: You have overseen a wave of change that includes the introduction of a new content-creation engine, the launch of an innovative digital publishing platform, and—most recently—a complete rethink of the mobile app experience. Why choose Progressive Web Apps over ordinary native mobile apps?
Lewis D’Vorkin, Chief Product Officer, Forbes
Lewis D’Vorkin: I don’t believe traditional apps will be successful in the news space. Moreover, I think most of them are likely to end up as revenue failures—for several reasons. One, you don’t get the scale required to be able to monetize mobile apps, unless, of course, they’re paid apps. Two, there’s a lot of friction tied to the traditional mobile app experience. People have to go to the app store. They have to find your app and they have to download it.
The Progressive Web App is a lot like a traditional native app experience, but without the hassle and the friction. The reader basically bookmarks it on their home screen, and they have it just like that (!) No going to the Apple App Store. No going to Google Play. No downloading it. No searching it. No installing it. And, once the user gives us their permission, we can send alerts, push notifications and re-engage in all the ways you can on native apps do. It’s just faster and simpler to do all this on Progressive Web Apps.
I don’t believe in native apps. In fact, I didn’t believe in news apps from the start. Now, there are countries like the U.K. where news apps have been successful. But, for the most part, when you look at the apps you have on your phone you’ll see you have utility apps—banking, maps, productivity apps. The appeal of the news apps was a dream.
Your web app is in beta and slated to launch by the end of Q1/early Q2. What is the user journey and experience as they explore the content you offer?
On top of the Progressive Web App comes a new experience based on cards. We began launching Forbes’ new mobile card-like experience in June, starting off with Forbes’ Self-Made Women list. Forbes has been testing two elements of our new mobile card-based experience— lists and articles—allowing readers to engage with bursts of information. And I say engagement because the consumption or usage of card-based lists is extraordinary. In the case of the Forbes 400 [list] average session duration was 45% longer on the new mobile list compared to the current mobile list and engagement, specifically pageviews per session, almost tripled.
The card-like experience is obviously engaging. What will the impact be on how you create the content to match?
There is much more engagement and much more opportunity to create a different kind of navigational construct. For the user, it’s more mobile-centric, allowing them to swipe and tap, and that also creates opportunities for new advertising revenue formats. We are starting to educate our newsroom around how to create new kinds of mobile content that is shorter and much more visual.
It’s why we’re also embarking on creating a new content management system. Today you go into a system like WordPress where the default position is write a headline and write a story. Well, what if the default position had several defaults, allowing you to choose a story format, a photo format, a graphic format, or pick some other format? We’re building a content management system to allow this freedom and choice so that the default of writing a story is no longer the instant thing to do. Of course, it also means reorienting the staff reporters and contributors and getting them to understand and accept that the 800-word story is not the be all and end all of everything. But, after 40 years in this business, that’s what I find the most exciting.
What about advertising? How you going to align this with your chosen format, Progressive Web Apps, and with your audience?
This format is as exciting as it is engaging because we will be able to develop and deploy new kinds of ad formats and ad strategies around time-based advertising versus just pushing impressions. The user experience will also be very beneficial to our BrandVoice platform, which is our native ad platform. Overall, it gives us new and unique ways to integrate native advertising. Imagine our card-like experience, and then imagine if we flipped some of the cards every 5 or 10 seconds, for example. It would also be a very smooth way to time-based advertising. The point is the card format layered on top of the Progressive Web App technology allows us to experiment with new formats, including advertising that is time-based, learn what works. We really don’t know what works yet. But we do know there are many different ways in which different kinds of ad formats will play in here.
How might that help in the delivery of contextually relevant advertising?
It’s simple and it fits with our model that makes us the only brand that enables native advertisers and brands to publish content in the same CMS as our contributors and journalists. In the new content management system that we’re building it will be much easier for us to make connections between what the user is reading and serve up related content, as well as a BrandVoice piece of content in a card perhaps, that complements the user experience, without interrupting it.
Today we get our content from many sources, and social networks top the list of referral sites for some audiences, such as Millennials. What are you going to do to ensure your Progressive Web Apps and card-like content don’t lose steam?
Within the content management system, it’s not just about presenting our contributors and journalists with different options on how to create content, such as a graphic or a photo. It’s about understanding that a particular format may be far more suitable not just to publish on Forbes, but to publish on Instagram or somewhere else. In other words, it’s about creating content once for publication across Forbes.com and whatever social network is appropriate. We’re finding ways to be part of those ecosystems. I believe that what wins at the end of the day are new models, new content creation models, new ad models and new distribution models.
Peggy Anne Salz is the Content Marketing Strategist and Chief Analyst of Mobile Groove, a top 50 influential technology site providing custom research to the global mobile industry and consulting to tech startups. Full disclosure: She is a frequent contributor to Forbes on the topic of mobile marketing, engagement and apps. Her work also regularly appears in a range of publications from Venture Beat to Harvard Business Review. Peggy is a top 30 Mobile Marketing influencer and a nine-time author based in Europe. Follow her @peggyanne.
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Time frames and ways of delivering news shifted too. News broke on social media, sometimes before conventional news outlets even knew it had happened. Suddenly because of that growing speed, being first took priority over being right, and as the number of journalists decreased, distrust grew. 
On top of the Progressive Web App comes a new experience based on cards. We began launching Forbes’ new mobile card-like experience in June, starting off with Forbes’ Self-Made Women list. Forbes has been testing two elements of our new mobile card-based experience— lists and articles—allowing readers to engage with bursts of information. And I say engagement because the consumption or usage of card-based lists is extraordinary. In the case of the Forbes 400 [list] average session duration was 45% longer on the new mobile list compared to the current mobile list and engagement, specifically pageviews per session, almost tripled.