Commercial staff at leading publishers have told Press Gazette they’re still set on transitioning to first-party data despite Google’s landmark decision in July not to proceed with its long-promised deprecation of third-party cookies.
Although the tech giant’s about-face caused grumbles in the news industry, executives at Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology Conference agreed the threatened death of cookies on Google‘s dominant Chrome browser provided the impetus necessary to get their houses in order on user data.
That change, they added, appears to already be reflected in increased ad sales.
‘I definitely used the word bastards’ when Google made cookie announcement, says one executive
Asked by Press Gazette editor-in-chief Dominic Ponsford how he had reacted to Google’s July cookie announcement Morgan Stevenson, the digital transformation director at Newsquest, said: “I definitely used the word bastards.
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“Simply because we put a lot of work in, preparing. I think it was a good industry kick up the arse to better prepare for leveraging our first-party data.”
But he said he felt Google had at least been “trying to create a solution to the challenge, unlike Safari and Mozilla, who just said ‘see you later, publishers’…
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“I think there was a part [of me that] would have liked to just carry on with it, pull the plug, let’s see what happens. But there is so much still within the consent challenge to truly be confident that, if they pull the plug, we know what’s going to happen.”
Cookies are packets of data that give websites information about their users. If a website knows about its users it can sell ad space for higher prices, so Google’s planned deprecation of third-party cookies left publishers scrambling to develop strategies to get users to hand over their data directly.
Ultimately, Stevenson said, “it was a bit of reprieve, actually, just to get a bit more time with so many challenges to be ready for it if they really do pull the plug”.
Kyle Vinansky, the senior vice president of global sales at Forbes, had a similar view, saying: “I think everyone on our team really groaned when we heard that news. It was just one more thing in that saga.
“But I think what Google did, and others that were focused on this cookieless future, is they really got us thinking more about our first-party solutions, about the way that we could better understand our audiences…
“The biggest thing for us is it put focus on an issue where, ten years ago, despite our size and our scale, we didn’t know that much about our audiences. Now we know an awful lot.
“We’ve been investing more, even outside of first party data, and looking at ways with research panels and other levels of engagement that really allow us to dive into those groups that are most core to the advertising partners that are spending with us.”
Gareth Cross, the senior director for digital solutions at The Telegraph, said he had been less shocked: “To say it wasn’t the biggest surprise of the year is probably an understatement.
“I think the good thing from the Telegraph perspective was it hasn’t really affected the way we go about day to day, or our strategy, in any way. We were always doubling down on our first party data.”
Newsquest sees success with subscription model for advertisers
Despite their frustrations, the publishers said things appeared to be going in the right direction on ad sales.
Stevenson said Newsquest had “done very well pushing our direct sales with lots of local businesses. That’s predominantly what the Newsquest model focuses on”.
Although most of its concern was with its digital direct-sold advertising, he said “we’ve done significantly better this year at holding on to print revenues.
“One of the diversifications that we did six to seven years ago was to start introducing digital marketing services, as a reseller of those, to the same businesses that we sell our direct audiences to. That’s helped us become much stickier, for customers to stay with us.”
Services offered within that package included “SEO advice, PR copywriting, website building as well – so a whole one-stop shop and helping them to really navigate how they better improve the marketing of their own brand”.
He said Newsquest had “invested very heavily” in metrics like view time that help prove the value of their services to small business owners, and that they have improved client retention by rolling out a subscription model for ad sales.
“We looked at the best-performing campaigns for different industry styles and turned them into such good value you can’t afford to turn them off,” he said.
“You need to give three months’ notice if you want to turn it off, effectively… I’d say probably now 16 or 17% of our ad revenue is coming from a subscription model for advertisers.”
Nuno Brilha, the CMO of attention management platform Insurads, said they were looking into a similar ad subscription service as part of a recently-launched strategic partnership with Mather Economics and its content and analytics platform, Sophi.
Telegraph: Direct-sold advertising revenues up and ‘they will grow again this year’
Cross, from The Telegraph, said that over the last year “we have seen our areas of focus, our direct-sold, grow. We’ve seen our partnerships grow, and digital revenues, from an advertising perspective, are up. And they will grow again this year”.
He said the “beauty” of a subscription-first business was that “the things that come with that are all the things that help you face some other challenges” around advertising.
“So there’s a hell of a lot of first-party data – whether it’s declared, inferred – and the way we use it, we no longer need to rely on third-party data sources for our direct-sold.”
More broadly, he said, “we do things now that we would never have done before. A good example of that is if an ad format isn’t working, we remove it.
“Often what would have happened in the past – you [wouldn’t] lose that yield, you’d just add something else, and before you know it you’ve got something incredibly cluttered, diluted…
“One of my colleagues says the ad experiences are designed to engage, not enrage.”
Forbes ‘creates scarcity’ on sponsorship opportunities to add ‘exclusivity’ for partners
Forbes executive Vinansky also said he was pleased with the year – but sounded a note of caution.
“From an audience standpoint, I think we’re doing better than ever: almost 100 million users on a monthly basis, consistent growth from that regard,” he said.
“From a revenue standpoint we’re pacing ahead of last year, but Q4 for us is an incredibly important time of the year. We’re expecting a lot of information in the next month or so that’s really going to decide where those numbers fall on an annual basis.
“And we’re still up against a very challenging political landscape, as we all know. There’s a lot of economic uncertainty still, and it’s a question for us of whether or not our largest advertising partners are in a position where they want to be a part of those conversations, or they want to wait and they want to stay out of the market.”
Forbes has a partial paywall, but Vinansky said “the majority of our traffic” does not come through it.
“We continue to grow our registered users, but we view that as multifaceted – it’s people that attend our events, it’s people that subscribe to our newsletters, it’s people that subscribe for digital or print access.”
He said that direct-sold advertising is “our largest business segment”, with ads sold via the open exchange second.
Forbes SVP of global sales responds to revelation the site had been running ads on a low-visibility subdomain
Press Gazette editor Ponsford also asked Vinansky about a story that broke in March which revealed that some ads Forbes had been paid to run had appeared not on the main site but on a subdomain that could not be accessed through regular site or search engine navigation. (Forbes has denied that it had been running a so-called “Made for Advertising” or “Made for Arbitrage” site.)
“I think it’s really caused us to think about transparency in a different way,” Vinansky said.
“From a data compliance standpoint, and some of the verification partners that they were using, we taught our partners how to actually identify any advertising that ran with us on that subdomain. It just wasn’t something that they were looking for.
“The primary issue that we were dealing with there… was a matter of the page templates that we were using, and them being gallery-style templates.” (The ads on the subdomain appeared while a user clicked through slideshow-format content.)
He continued: “Once we had that conversation with our partners about why these pages existed, the way that we were using them, the way that they supported some of our most deeply-reported editorial, it had a very different outcome than the article alone that really put us in a spotlight and had us on our heels in a pretty negative way.”
A specific change following the incident, he said, was that Forbes now provides “a templated lookbook of every single page design that we use on Forbes and every single place that an ad could theoretically run.
“It was nothing that we had done before. We’ve provided screenshots before after a campaign went live, but now we’re getting to granular detail as to where your ads might run before a campaign happens.
“From a reporting standpoint, we are dialed into all of the ad verification partners and have direct relationships with them ourselves. So we encourage our partners to use that data. We encourage them to use our first-party data. We encourage them to use third-party data segments that are outside of those.
“It’s the mixed approach to making sure that everyone feels the highest levels of confidence in that reporting and where the sources are coming from and being able to tell a more complete story with it.”
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