From ‘hedged gardens’ to new metrics: How publishers can grow ad revenue
Falling referral traffic from Google, brand safety fears and the challenge of finding common readership metrics are among the major challenges facing news publishers when it comes to growing advertising revenue.
At a recent roundtable discussion chaired by Press Gazette, major publishers and adtech representatives discussed these challenges and also some potential solutions for an online news industry which is increasingly looking towards subscriptions, rather than advertising, for future funding.
Here are some of the solutions proposed some of the delegates at the “Scaling Trust, Driving Growth…” roundtable hosted by UK Advertising in Cannes in association with Press Gazette and Propeller Group.
Moving beyond standard metrics
Chief commercial, digital and strategy officer for Mail Metro Media Hannah Buitekant said one answer to the advertising revenue challenges facing publishers was “moving away from standard metrics like impressions into a world of attention and engagement across all platforms.
“To effectively monetise that you have to bring the advertising relationship into the content creation. So it is about drawing in the attention of the consumer and bringing the brand elements to life without causing tension.”
Managing director for Europe and Bloomberg Media David Bradford said: “Where we have had success is taking an audience-led approach rather than looking at platforms specifically.
“We have nine platforms at Bloomberg and we know that our audience consumes across multiple platforms. That’s a huge opportunity for us, particularly as we’ve invested a lot in video. Our audience across video has increased 50% year on year. There’s an opportunity to work with partners in a meaningful way which is not specific to one platform.”
Creating a ‘hedged garden’ for quality content
Vice president for revenue technology at News Corp David Rowley said: “We have not made it, as publishers, easy for advertisers and agencies to buy us, to measure us to report against us, et cetera.
“We need to turn the open web into some sort of walled garden, or a hedged garden, in the sense of finding easy ways to buy a set of premium publishers in a very smooth, scaled, transactable way, for planning purposes, buying purposes and probably most importantly for reporting.
“We also need to have some sort of closed-loop attribution. If we collectively come together we will get the scale that the buyside is looking for.
UK country manager for ad-buying platform Adform Phil Acton said: “There are some brands that will always be more brand safe than others. Clients that we work with like Ikea which are so focused on allow lists that we would not ever be on a news site. We have to focus on other quality journalism sites that we know they will be on.
“But if we are championing independent publishers and the quality journalism that comes with that, we have to champion all of the transparency and data that comes with that versus ‘you say you want to be brand safe but here you are advertising on Youtube or one of these social channels where you get very limited metrics’.
“We need to say: ‘Trust us, this is a good place for your brand to be and the user of that page will get a good advertising experience’.”
Also joining the discussion (which was mainly conducted off the record) were:
- Tracey Baldwin, SVP, luxury & lifestyle, Wall Street Journal
- Alex Humphries-French, MADTech practice director, Propeller Group
- Ben Chester, managing director, clients, UK and global, Hearst UK
- Jacqueline Willemsen, SVP global enterprise revenue, Dotdash Meredith
- Irena Raltcheva, commercial director, Fortune
- Marko Johns, UK managing director, Seedtag
- Trevor Kaufman, CEO, Piano
- Jonathan Haines, managing director, UK and Northern Ireland, Equativ
- Ben Samuel, VP partnerships, AudienceProject.
Video highlights
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