Future plc has launched a new brand called Elevate based around selling its own advertising technology to other publishers.
Future Elevate combines Hybrid (its in-house advertising technology) and Aperture (Future’s audience management platform which is powered by Permutive).
The new brand promises to help publishers sell their online advertising inventory (through programmatic and direct sales) and offers ad-serving technology (such as its own high-impact ad units).
The technology works via a combination of first-party data collected by publishers themselves, third-party cookies and contextual targeting of ads (based on what content readers are seeing).
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Future’s ad product and revenue operations director Nick Flood said: “Smaller publishers might not have the operational resources to run an ad stack – we take that all off their hands and allow them to monetise their sites.”
Elevate charges publishers a fee and also works on a revenue share model.
Much premium online advertising is currently enabled by third-party cookies on Google‘s Chrome browser which allow advertisers to target readers based on their previous browsing interests.
Asked whether Elevate is ready for the expected replacement of publisher cookies with Google’s own sandbox technology, Flood said: “We’e been preparing for a future without cookies for the last few years.”
He said Elevate already incorporates publisher first-party data and they have been testing a range of ID partners, who should allow publishers to anonymously identify readers and place them in audience segments for premium ad targeting without the need for cookies.
He said: “There are many months to go but we feel with the expertise we bring we are starting to better understand what works and what doesn’t.”
Sciencealert.com already partners with Future on advertising technology. According to co-founder Fiona MacDonald: “Our partnership with Future has delivered revenue growth year-on-year, enabling our editorial team to focus on publishing timely, trusted science news to enlighten and entertain millions of readers each month.”
Future Elevate is a similar proposition to The Ozone Project, which provides a shared advertising platform for many UK online news publishers.
Future runs a stable of 200 mainly specialist publishing brands and in May reported revenue down 3% to £391m in the first half of its financial year. Operating profit was down 19% to £196m.
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