Our competition is not another news outlet in Philadelphia, it’s the 24 hour clock, it’s Netflix, it’s YouTube, it’s scrolling through Instagram. So how are you going to break through in someone’s day, so that they feel compelled to read your content, and further compelled to pay for that content. We think about this in terms of our content strategy in the newsroom, we strive to be useful, revealing and responsive, that’s the lens that we look through what we produce.

– Lisa Hughes, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Guest: Lisa Hughes, Publisher, The Philadelphia Inquirer

How can magazines and newspapers innovate to attract and keep subscribers in an increasingly competitive landscape? What must news and magazine publishers do to continue to keep their readers engaged over the long-term?

In this episode of News Take, Lisa Hughes, the first female Publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer, joins News/Media Alliance VP, Research & Insights, Rebecca Frank, for an insightful conversation about the evolution of magazine and newspaper media during a time of rapid change. Hughes shares how she’s led with innovation at top magazine and news publications to introduce successful new products and brands that have kept readers and subscribers coming back for more. She talks about her very first experiences working in the magazine publishing business, and how she rose through the ranks to become a top executive at The New Yorker and Condé Nast Traveler before making the transition to Philadelphia’s flagship newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, where four weeks in she found herself brand new and having to adapt and respond amid a nationwide shutdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. She shares how innovative strategies and products, including live blogs, newsletters and gamification have been successful in driving audience engagement, as well as the potential of new platforms such as TikTok for meeting audiences where they are. She also talks about the risks and opportunities that come with new technologies such as generative AI and where she sees the technology having the most potential to optimize the reader experience.

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Speaker bio:

Lisa Hughes is Publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer. As Publisher, Hughes brings to the role an impressive track record, having successfully transitioned an iconic print brand into a multi-platform, profitable business. Hughes is the first woman Publisher and Chief Executive Officer in The Inquirer’s 190-year history. Hughes is known as a skilled business executive who values and respects journalism. Under her nine-year leadership, The New Yorker, owned by Condé Nast, grew from a largely print-only magazine into a multimedia enterprise. Over the past decade, The New Yorker revamped its website and paid digital content strategy and built award-winning mobile apps. Hughes launched the acclaimed New Yorker Radio Hour and Podcast, and restructured The New Yorker Festival into a profitable business. She left the company at the end of 2017. Prior to The New Yorker, Hughes served as VP Publisher of Condé Nast Traveler for 10 years, steering that magazine through the most successful period in its history.

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Send your suggestions for future News Take guests to Alliance VP, Research & Insights Rebecca Frank at rebecca@newsmediaalliance.org.

News Take Production Team:

Host and Executive Producer: Rebecca Frank, VP, Research & Insights, News/Media Alliance

Production Support, Editing & Distribution:

Georgi-Ann Clarke, Social Media & Content Manager, News/Media Alliance
Rachel Fox, Manager, Membership & Events, News/Media Alliance
Lindsey Loving, Director, Communications, News/Media Alliance

Audio & Video Engineer: Current Media Group

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The post News Take Episode 203: Pioneering Innovation at Legacy Magazine and News Media Brands appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

Brand safety has always been a concern for advertisers working to ensure their investment drives consumer behavior and does so in a way that doesn’t harm the brand. With the rise of digital and programmatic ad buying, brand safety risks have increased, as has advertiser awareness of ad placement. While it presents an opportunity for news media, which are known for having the most reliable brand safety, political polarization and media distrust in the U.S. has led some advertisers to hesitate when it comes to advertising in news media.

A typical example of a brand safety concern is that airlines don’t want their ads appearing next to stories about plane crashes, lest consumers connect the two. In the case of programmatic ad buying, there isn’t a human involved to spot and prevent these scenarios.

In early 2017, CPG giant Procter & Gamble cut its digital ad spending by $140 million due to concerns that its online video ads, especially on YouTube, were appearing next to brand unsafe content. Telecom giant AT&T also pulled its YouTube ads, citing the same concern. These decisions have rippled throughout the advertising and ad tech industries.

This concerning trend has opened an opportunity for news publishers, which offer advertising opportunities that encourage engagement. According to the News Media Alliance News Advertising Panorama, ads on premium editorial sites receive 50 percent more engagement than ads viewed during general internet browsing. In addition, news media have long relied on human editorial judgment to ensure brand safety issues don’t arise. News publishers are often perceived as high-quality publishers for this reason. “If we can get a quality environment, quality inventory from quality publishers, that are seen by real people in appropriate contextual environments, those ads sell better,” said Joe Barone, Managing Partner, Brand Safety Americas at the media buying company GroupM, in a 2018 interview. “Brand safety is linked directly to inventory quality and client results.”

Despite this, and despite a desire for brand safe options, some advertisers are hesitant to commit their ad budget to news media due to a different and more surprising concern – the risk of appearing next to high-quality, hard news reporting. According to an August 2019 Wall Street Journal story, some advertisers have resorted to a strategy known as language blacklisting in an attempt to avoid having their ads placed near a wide range of negative or controversial terms; some advertisers mentioned in the story seemed ready to walk away from advertising in news outlets altogether, to avoid any controversies. However, as the story explains, this “ad-blacklisting threatens to hit publications’ revenue and is creating incentives to produce more lifestyle-oriented coverage that is less controversial than hard news.”

Source: The Wall Street Journal, “‘Shooting,’ ‘Bomb,’ ‘Trump’: Advertisers Blacklist News Stories Online,” August 15, 2019.

Blacklisting is a dangerous and unnecessary strategy, as it degrades the quality and variety of news content and ignores the fact that news media already employ human editorial review to ensure ads are not placed in a brand unsafe environment.

In May, Vice Media took a stand against ad-blacklisting, detailing certain words its clients can no longer blacklist, particularly related to sexual orientation and national origin. Vice’s SVP of client partnerships for North America, Cavel Khan, wants to ensure that “bias should not be the collateral damage of our much-needed brand-safety efforts.”

Eschewing news may also have a negative impact on ads’ effectiveness. The Hard News Project, founded by UK newspaper marketing organization Newsworks, asserts that when advertisers avoid news environments, whether deliberately or as a result of their whitelisting, “content which can provide great reach, engaged audiences and contextual relevance is being shunned.”

Newsworks commissioned original research as part of the Hard News Project to understand “the benefits of advertising in the high-performing news brand environment,” partnering with Neuro-Insight to uncover consumer attitudes about the context in which they see ads. They found that the majority of consumers understand the role of news media and have positive perceptions of and trust in ads they see in both soft and hard news settings:

– 86 percent agree they “know that the role of news brands is to keep me up to date with all kinds of stories and that sometimes they can be upsetting or shocking.”

– 89 percent “like browsing my news brand and coming across new things.”

– Although some people prefer ads in a soft news context, others feel that ads in a hard news story are more trusted.

In addition, the study found that brain activity levels were higher when readers consumed hard news, suggesting readers are more engaged with the content. The data also suggest that hard news leads to a better response to ads.

Based on existing research and data around consumer engagement with advertisements in news – and some of these cutting-edge findings – we believe the value of reaching news readers continues to be high, and that avoiding news media advertising entirely will have a negative impact on brands.

Advertisers should think carefully about who they want to reach, when and how, and continue to consider news media as a high value channel to accomplish their goals. While the future ability of ad tech providers to offer brand safe environments is still unknown, print and digital news media are and will continue to be powerful, reliable and brand safe options for advertisers looking for effective media platforms in which to reach their customers.

Advertisers can feel confident when working with news media that they will receive a strong return on investment that will ensure a lasting and productive relationship.

The post News Media Offer Brand Safe Alternative for Advertisers to Ad Tech appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

With the onset of digital media and the subsequent migration to digital marketing, concerns regarding personal data privacy have spurred new protective regulations for consumers. As a result, we may be on the cusp of a change to the digital advertising playbook, and that change could end up being a return to an already-established method: contextual advertising. In this article, first published in Street Fight, Alliance VP of Research & Insights Rebecca Frank posits that it is possible we are on the verge of a return to contextual advertising as the dominant form of online ads.

Read full article.

The post A Return to Contextual Advertising? appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

On a recent Adweek Webinar, Chief Marketing Officer at NetBase Solutions, Paige Leidig, shared that 81 percent of executives don’t feel like their company is leveraging enough from social media. “There’s so much information out there, literally hundreds of thousands of social media sites, that it’s really hard to keep track of all of their metrics,” he said.

Companies need to understand why consumers are purchasing their products, as well as the key metrics that they should be measuring. “Aligning metrics with your business strategy is key to your business success,” Leidig adds.

Leidig, along with NetBase’s Sr. Director for Product Marketing, Mike Baglietto, shared what they have deemed the nine most crucial social media metrics companies should be considering when investigating their performance:

1.     Mentions: Mentions qualify how people talk about a brand, but businesses should also look at the channels where they were mentioned– your own, sponsored, public or earned.

2.     Engagement: By measuring customers’ engagement in these three different channels, companies can figure out not only who is mentioning them, but also what people are saying about them and their competitors.

3.     Sentiment: Understanding consumers’ likes and dislikes gives you the attitude towards engagement.” Once brands understand this, product and service improvement becomes a simple task.

4.     Passion: While passion and sentiment are two very similar categorizations, passion refers to the intensity of the sentiment. And passion drives action, “If people are passionate about your product they’ll be willing to stand in line for hours to get it.” Baglietto said.

5.     Influencers/Detractors: Brands’ biggest fans are often the best influencers. When identifying potential influencers, “Followers are not enough. Celebrities aren’t either. Even though they are important, people who connect deeply with the target audience can be more beneficial.” Surprisingly, detractors can also be important influencers. By spotting where conversations expressing dissatisfaction are, companies can start communicating and change consumers’ attitude and behaviors.

6.     Top Content: The top content that resonates with the audience is what drives engagement, sentiment and passion. “Visual content has been proven to be 40 times more likely to get shared in other media sites, specially earned channels.”

7.     Top Channels: With such a broad spectrum of social media platforms, some of them can get overlooked. The panelists gave the example of the Pocky brand, being considered unpopular in the U.S. until they learned that Tumblr was the largest source of where the conversations were happening.

8.     Top Locations: Knowing where and what your audience is interacting with will increase targeting possibilities and expand your consumers.

9.     Share of Voice: Include mentions of your main competitors in your social media monitoring to know where your brand fits into the overall conversation.

The post Nine Social Media Metrics for Success appeared first on News/Media Alliance.