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It is not a stretch to say that programmatic advertising and the broader suite of advertising technology (or ad tech) has harmed publishers in multiple ways. Whether due to the system’s monopolization by the largest tech platforms, the ability for bad actors to manipulate the system for profit,  or unscrupulous vendors playing on advertisers’ fears, it seems wherever you look, you can find evidence of the adverse impact of ad tech companies’ actions on publishers. A new report out in January gives us hope, however, that things may be looking up.

In 2020, the UK’s Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA), working with PwC, published a landmark study tracking ad tech spend, the findings of which were very disturbing to publishers. Among the findings was an “unknown delta” of 15 percent of advertising spend that could not be attributed to either the buyers or sellers in the ad tech value exchange. The fact that publishers were only receiving 51 percent of advertiser spend was also cause for alarm. As we wrote at the time, “This study should act as a clarion call to publishers, advertisers and the ad tech community that the system as it stands does not work as it should.”

At least to some extent, that call has been heard and we hope to see the improvements continue.

In addition, last month the two organizations reported “positive and welcome improvements” in the second round of the study, conducted in 2022.

They found, among other increased benefits:

• “Improvements in data access successfully halved the time required to conduct the study to nine months (vs. 18 months for the 2020 study).
• Greater standardisation of data quality improved the ad impression match rate to 58% (vs. 12% in 2020) and the unattributable ad spend (AKA the unknown delta) was reduced to 3% (vs. 15% in 2020).
• The proportion of advertiser spend reaching publishers has risen by 8%.”

However, there are still many places where the deck remains stacked against publishers. As AdExchanger reported, “PwC itself has room to grow as an auditor” to better understand and audit more transactions. And publishers still take less than two-thirds of advertising dollars spent, with companies that are not involved in content creation taking a large share of the advertising placed against it.

While the report’s findings are welcome and positive, all parties have a responsibility to continue to advocate – voting with their voices and their dollars – for a stronger system for ad-supported news and content.

The post A Spot of Good Ad Tech News for Publishers appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

Guest: Gordon Borrell, Borrell Associates

“If we don’t understand that the people who really support the newspaper are the advertisers, and they need to be able to use the newspaper company to help them sell things, to help them grow their business, if we fumble that, we don’t have a newspaper.”

– Gordon Borrell, Borrell Associates

In an environment with ever-increasing advertising options, what do local advertisers want today? As everything becomes more digital, what changes are happening across media, and what are the opportunities for local news publishers to stand out? What do marketers uniquely value about local news media and how can publishers capitalize on that? 

News/Media Alliance President & CEO David Chavern dives into these questions and more in this episode of News Take with Gordon Borrell, founder of advertising tracking firm, Borrell Associates. In this candid conversation, Borrell shares his insights on the evolving world of local advertising and what advertisers are looking for specifically from local news publishers, as well as how publishers can be more valuable by serving as advisors to advertisers on how to tell their story.

Listen or download the audio file to listen offline:

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Speaker bios

Gordon Borrell founded Borrell Associates in 2001 and has become the local media industry’s leading analyst. He is ranked in the top 2 percent among Gerson Lehrman Group’s 150,000 consultants worldwide and is quoted in Ad Age, MediaPost, Editor & Publisher, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes and other publications. Prior to starting Borrell Associates, Gordon was vice president for new media for Landmark Communications, where he started his career 22 years earlier as a newspaper reporter. He is past chairman of the Local Media Association and of the Local Media Foundation. Gordon has five children and lives with his wife, a writer and book author, in Hampton Roads, Va.

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

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The post News Take Episode 109: The State of Advertising and Local News appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

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Building the technology that underpins the online advertising ecosystem is a lucrative business. The two largest online advertising companies, Alphabet and Meta (parent companies of Google and Facebook, respectively) are also some of the most valuable companies that have ever existed. But many other companies have found success in the ad tech market, earning money by inserting themselves into advertising transactions that once took place between only advertisers and publishers. However, three recent developments suggest that ad tech – which already has many known flaws – may be negatively impacting publishers even more than previously understood.

The black box of ad technology, particularly “brand safety” tech, has long been suspected to cause harm by needlessly scaring advertisers away from supporting news with their ad buys. We now have even more insight into the harm caused to advertisers and publishers by these unscrupulous middlemen, supporting our previous call for advertisers to walk away from this system.

The first notable finding centers on the fees siphoned away from publishers. Research conducted by Adalytics found that the fees taken by the “supply chain” range from 22-45 percent, with an average of 35 percent of ad dollars taken from publishers. In some extreme cases, demand-side and supply-side platforms (DSPs and SSPs) take 98 percent of an advertiser’s spend, leaving a mere two percent for publishers. The study also highlights how in the complex, auction-based system, some SSPs deliberately take a loss on some bids, “juicing their overall win rate.” Publishers are trapped in a system controlled by companies with few motives beyond winning, so that they can continue to take their cut on sales.

Even ad tech companies that claim to be looking out for advertisers and publishers do not seem to be acting honestly. “Brand safety” companies prey on advertisers’ concerns about where their ads will run, providing little benefit to brands while cutting off publishers from revenue that could be reinvested into newsgathering and distribution by encouraging keyword blocking. A joint statement from the News Media Alliance and Digital Content Next in 2020 explained:

Fact-based, reliable journalism supports the online ecosystem by providing readers with invaluable information and advertisers with high-quality content and access to these readers. Keyword blocking threatens this symbiotic relationship at the worst possible time.

This threat made it more difficult for news organizations to report on Covid-19 and the January 6 riots, and will make it more difficult in the face of hostilities in Ukraine.

Beyond harming news publishers, many brand safety tools don’t even do what they promise. On March 8, The Wall Street Journal reported that Gannett inadvertently reported inaccurate information about the location of ad placements to its advertisers. In a fully programmatic and machine-led marketplace, no individual advertiser can see every live ad, and reporting is vital for their tracking. However, Gannett’s error – which was widely agreed to not be malicious or fraudulent – highlights another flaw in the system. “Brand safety” companies sell tools and earn money from advertisers and publishers on the promise of avoiding just this type of mistake through careful monitoring and reporting. However, the brand safety trackers failed to flag this issue for months. As Matt Rogerson, head of public policy at Guardian Media Group tweeted:

Question from a dummy: if Gannett was doing this in error, what’s to stop far end of web sites from feeding the same data into the ecosystem? Similarly, if the ecosystem not catching these errors re Gannett, how can we believe they are catching them for bad actors?

— Matt Rogerson (@MattRogerson) March 10, 2022

Implicit in his question was why these companies should earn millions of dollars.

The brand safety companies – while not doing what they claim to – have found new ways to drain value from publishers. A March 10 report in Morning Brew details an additional form of abuse – ad tech companies scraping publisher data and selling contextual advertising segments based on it without permission. Contextual advertising – where the content of the story matters more than the reader’s data profile – is seen as one potential way for publishers to earn back some control in the marketplace with the disappearance of audience-based cookies. This scraping is, according to the trade groups quoted by Morning Brew, “not only a violation of publisher terms and conditions, but also the potential infringement of basic intellectual property rights.” Publishers seemingly can’t win, even with their own assets.

The harm that ad tech companies cause to publishers is now clearer than ever. They take away publishers’ ability to earn enough on advertisements to support the expensive, important work of gathering and sharing real news, waste their dollars with fraud and sell useless “safety” tools that don’t make things safer. And in an age when disinformation is rampant online and information warfare is fueling actual war in Ukraine, choosing to support real news outlets directly and advertising alongside high-quality news can literally save lives.

The post Ad Tech: It’s Worse Than We Thought appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

This post appears on Medium – click here to read the full article. Below is a short excerpt.

A new study released this week suggests that the current ad-tech ecosystem is not only detrimental to publishers, but it harms all involved in it due to a lack of accountability. The UK’s ISBA and their research partners at PwC spent over a year assessing data from all points of the programmatic advertising equation and reached some conclusions that should give pause to all involved.

Read more

The post A Clarion Call 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.

For October/November 2018, we have two New(s) Ideas winners!

Job listings are a big business, with online job sites such as Indeed, ZipRecruiter and Glassdoor serving as a common way for employees to search for their next opportunity. Programmatic is still catching on in the recruitment field; however, with Recruitology’s programmatic job distribution platform, MaxRecruit, news publishers can get ahead of the competition and secure a piece of the recruitment advertising pie.

News media organizations can offer employers and job seekers something the large online job sites cannot – a localized presentation of the opportunities available in their communities. This helps job seekers to cut through to the jobs that are near their location. This is good for employers, who want their postings to be seen by the most eligible candidates, i.e. those who already live where the jobs are. By advertising with news publishers, employers can let publishers manage the postings with MaxRecruit, taking away the need to juggle postings in several places.

News organizations have taken notice of MaxRecruit’s benefits for improving efficiency and driving revenue, with companies such as McClatchy, Digital First Media and Tribune Publishing leveraging the technology.

Recruitology’s demo gives a tutorial on using MaxRecruit and tips for optimizing job listings.

We recently caught up with Roberto Angulo, CEO at Recruitology, to tell us more about MaxRecruit and how news media can start using it to attract employers to advertise in their publications.

What is Recruitology MaxRecruit?

Roberto Angulo, CEO, Recruitology

MaxRecruit provides programmatic job distribution and optimization to employers posting jobs through news media organizations that use Recruitology as their recruitment platform. The platform is fully white-labeled, meaning the service is provided to employers under the media company’s brand.

How did the idea for MaxRecruit come about?

We saw a trend where employers started allocating more of their recruitment advertising dollars toward CPC (cost per click) and away from the traditional 30-day duration job postings. At the same time, we’ve seen the creation of many top job sites for jobseekers. Instead of one or two top brands, there are dozens now. So, we created MaxRecruit as a way to provide employers with a one-stop solution where they can post their job and not have to worry about which sites to use and how much budget to allocate or how much to pay for each job on each site. The engine behind MaxRecruit fully automates this.

What challenges does MaxRecruit help news media organizations to overcome?

One of the main challenges faced by media companies is the relevance of their recruitment solutions. Employers have choices, and many have gravitated to the large online job posting services, leaving the media companies with print advertising and only a small share of the digital pie. With MaxRecruit, media companies can reclaim ownership of their local employment market and offer a solution that is superior to working with a single online brand.

What are some different ways news media organizations can incorporate MaxRecruit into their business?

Some news media companies incorporate MaxRecruit as the programmatic solution sold alongside their main recruitment offering or alongside a range of niche job networks powered by Recruitology. Increasingly, we’re seeing our news media partners build a full end-to-end recruitment solution based on the Recruitology white-labeled job board. MaxRecruit serves as the foundation for job distribution, complemented by both specialty job networks, such as diversity, veterans and healthcare, as well as other value-add offerings like CareerBuilder, Facebook passive job seeker campaigns, and Candidate Search.

What has the response to MaxRecruit been like from your news media customers?

We’ve seen a very enthusiastic response to MaxRecruit from news media organizations. MaxRecruit’s core value proposition, “Post once and your job is distributed to top job boards, such as Indeed, Nexxt, Jobs2Careers and Glassdoor,” resonates well with both news media sales teams and employers.

What else does Recruitology do?

We provide a fully white-labeled job board, with a range of recruitment offerings news media partners sell to their employers, solution-selling training and marketing support to maximize sales effectiveness.

What is Recruitology working on for the future?

Some news media companies are cutting back on their recruitment advertising staff as they focus on digital subscriber-oriented initiatives, including paywalls. We will soon introduce a fully white-labeled self-service capability that lets the media company direct employers to a website where they can select the product that best meets their needs and pay via credit card. We believe this will be a strong solution for markets where there is material recruitment opportunity, but the media company may have too small a staff – or even no staff – to meet those needs.

How can publishers interested in MaxRecruit get started? Is there any special computer equipment or software required in order for newspapers to use it?

Getting started is easy. No special software is required. The news media company’s IT group needs to set up a connection to send employers’ job postings to us. We handle the rest.

What do you see as the future of news media?

In this era where “facts” are sometimes in dispute, a robust local media presence plays an essential role in our democracy. News media organizations who are refocusing their value proposition on being the trusted source of local news will maintain their relevance. This strategy goes hand in hand with the need for a strong digital revenue growth plan. Recruitology is committed to aiding the success of local news media.

The post New(s) Ideas: Recruitology’s MaxRecruit Gives Publishers an Edge with Employers appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

We have all heard the term programmatic, but what does it really mean, and how can we hop on the programmatic money train? During the May 19 webinar, we will demystify the programmatic space, and learn about how publishers around the country are getting bigger shares of their local advertiser’s digital budget by leveraging programmatic technology.

For more information or any questions, email Gay Mac Leod, NAA Project Director, Business Development.

“Programmatic Opportunity, and How to Capitalize on it!” is on Thursday, May 19 at 1:00 PM EST.

*Log-in required. Please contact member services if you need your login information sent to you.

Presenter

About Mike Smith: Mike has been working with local publishers at Centro for nearly four years. He has a street level knowledge of howprogrammatic technology can help a local advertiser’s business, and how it can add to incremental revenue for a local publisher. Mike spent 2015 leading the Centro team who supported the buyers within CentroDSP, and now is taking his knowledge of the programmatic space, and how it works, back to the sales enablement side. Mike has been asked to speak at more than one conference on the topic of programmatic and has a knack for making the information easy to understand, and actionable.

The post Webinar: Programmatic Opportunity, and How to Capitalize on it! appeared first on News/Media Alliance.