While in Boston, we didn’t just indulge in delicious lobster with garlic butter (which was as amazing as it sounds); we also dived deep into the pressing issues facing our industry.  The timing was perfect, as news dropped about X suing GARM, Unilever, CVS, and others — fueling plenty of conversations during Tuesday breaks.

Our publisher forums are always valuable, but this one hit differently. The focus was clear: everyone was determined to crack the code to retain more revenue. This time around, attendees were in rare agreement, openly discussing their biggest challenges as publishers. The great main-stage presentations and breakout sessions all revolved around one core question:

What is the future of revenue? Three key themes emerged: data, transparency, and diversifying ad revenue across diverse publishers. Let’s explore each of these critical areas in more detail.

Unlocking the Treasure Trove: How Data is the Golden Key to Future Revenue for Publishers

I’d be rich if I got paid for how often data came up in conversations. But it’s no surprise—it’s at the forefront of every publisher’s mind. The conference started with a bang when Claire Atkin, CEO of Check My Ads, took the stage. She kept it real, to say the least, ruffling some vendor feathers, but hey, we’re here to expose the truth. 

Atkin emphasized that the ad tech industry must embrace a new era of accountability and transparency. To empower advertisers and ensure purveyors of disinformation don’t hijack their brand messaging, she advocates for hourly log-level data and “know your customer” requirements.

Jeff Goldstein, Head of Programmatic at Future, shared how they rely heavily on their first-party data platform, Aperture, to collect and unify data signals from their 200+ owned and operated properties. This data is key for audience segmentation and building media products. Goldstein and his team collect data signals that give advertisers better insights and help create more precise targeting products. These signals include brand, model, and category information from the content, which helps Future understand how audiences behave, consume, and shop.

During the Deal Curation session, Scott Messer explained how these curations create a less leaky data-sharing environment. This is crucial, considering how data often leaks somewhere in that black box called the ecosystem.

Rick Welch, who works on advertising partnerships at Western Union, shared how they use their audience data to sell media and create cohesive, multi-touch packages for advertisers. And yes, when we say Western Union, we mean Western Union, the publisher, as they have thousands of owned and operated screens strategically lighting up retail spaces and locations worldwide. Their digital out-of-home network is making waves, proving they’re not just money movers but also a force in the digital advertising game.

Transparency and Collaboration: The Dynamic Duo Powering the Future of Publisher Revenue

Data and transparency were neck and neck in Boston, given how often attendees discussed both. This brings us back to that black box in ad tech — everyone is doing something, but no one knows what anyone else is actually up to. Publishers may know the pipes that generate their revenue, but what happens inside the ad tech ecosystem often remains a black box—how bids are made, who’s bidding, and where the money goes. Brands don’t have full visibility into agency strategies and tactics, while agencies may lack insight into the brand’s internal goals and data.

This has to change, and fast. The only way forward is through collaboration and establishing more transparency. In other words, talk to each other. It’s really that simple even a caveman can do it, jk.

I recall at least four sessions that directly addressed transparency. Jana Meron discussed it in her keynote, and John Shelby, Director of National Programmatic Sales at Zoom Media, Gym-TV, also brought it up in his Ops to Sales workshop. Attendees further explored this topic in the media quality session featuring Addy Atienza, VP of Programmatic Revenue and Streaming Operations at Trusted Media Brands, and Roxanne Allen, Head of Ad Ops at Dotdashmeredith. Finally, Atkin and Goldstein shared valuable insights on transparency during their keynotes. Goldstein also talked about how important it is to partner with advertisers to share sales data, which is vital for validating the effectiveness of high-intent segments. This collaboration explicitly boosts campaign ROI and refines audience targeting.

Meron shared some compelling stats on brand safety and made a strong case for the ongoing relevance of quality news. She stressed that brand safety and news SHOULD NOT be mutually exclusive, and advertisers should feel confident placing ads next to election content. Consumers with high political interests are highly engaged and could be lucrative.

She also emphasized that everyone needs to communicate to enhance brand safety across the board; publishers can no longer be left out of the conversation. Atienza and Allen echoed this sentiment, highlighting the lack of transparency, the challenges in getting verification vendors to address misclassifications, and discrepancies in reporting. They also pointed out how publishers are excluded from brand safety conversations, with agencies often defaulting to broad, non-contextual blocking measures.

The main theme of Shelby’s Ops to Sales workshop was clear: “Communicate, communicate, communicate, educate, educate, educate.” The key takeaway was the need for greater transparency, both internally between ad ops and sales teams and also with clients.

As I mentioned earlier, Atkin also reinforced the need for advertisers to be more transparent and controlled and suggested new strategies.

Spreading the Love: Why Championing Diverse Publishers is the Secret to Industry Growth

Messer’s Deal Curation session stood out for its focus on multicultural publishers. He invited Armando Aguilar, VP of Programmatic Operations at Mirror Digital, and Alex Haluska, Senior Director of Revenue Operations at MyCode, to discuss these publishers’ challenges. Despite representing 40% of the population, multicultural publishers receive only 6% of media budgets—a glaring disparity. 

Promises of increased ad spending on minority-owned and small niche publishers have not materialized. Instead, agencies bottlenecking the budgets, with most diverted to large platforms like Facebook and Google, bypassing diverse publishers altogether. 

Both speakers urged agencies to innovate and be accountable for their spending practices. They also encouraged publishers to engage directly with brands to circumvent agency bottlenecks. Once again, speakers emphasized the need for transparency and accountability in distributing ad dollars. 

The Premium Publisher Shift session began with a powerful visual:  a slide highlighting the disparity between the US Black population (15%) and the ad spend on Black-owned media (2%) to emphasize the issue. Terry Guyton-Bradley, Senior Director of Ad Tech at Fortune, led the discussion alongside Michael Bendell, an ad tech consultant from Ebony, and DeVon Johnson, founder of BlueLife Media and co-founder of BOMESI.

Each panelist offered a unique perspective on how to address this issue. One proposed solution to simplify ad buying was for platforms to aggregate minority-owned media buys. They also discussed the need to dismantle systemic barriers in the advertising industry that prevent minority-owned publishers from thriving independently. 

Advertisers should differentiate their spending on Black audiences from their spending on minority-owned publications, recognizing that these groups have distinct experiences and needs. As an industry, we must find ways to support unique publishers— whether they’re diverse, niche, small — if we want to see real growth. 

Embracing Data, Transparency, and Diversity: The Path Forward for Publisher Revenue

At PubForum Boston, it became clear that the future of publisher revenue hinges on three critical pillars: data, transparency, and support for diverse publishers. The discussions were not just about recognizing these elements—they were about taking actionable steps to make them central to our core strategies.

Data isn’t just a tool; it’s the foundation of future publisher revenue. Transparency and collaboration are no longer optional — they’re essential for defining success. And when it comes to diverse publishers, we need to actively uplift and invest in them, as they are vital to the ecosystem’s growth.

Looking ahead, these themes will clearly shape our strategies, push us to think differently and drive us to work more closely together. The future of revenue is bright, but only if we embrace these lessons, act with urgency, and follow through on our commitments made at forums like this one.

If you missed Lynne and myself chatting about these themes, check it out on AdMonsters LinkedIn

The post PubForum Boston: Three Emerging Themes Redefining Revenue’s Future appeared first on AdMonsters.

We are living in a time when some consider elevating diversity a lost cause, but organizations like BRIDGE help to keep DEI&B alive. Their focus is literally on helping companies bridge the inequity gaps we often see amongst underrepresented communities. 

“How can inclusion become a practice in your organization? Not just in the workplace, which is focused on talent acquisition and retention, but also across your marketing management and commercial practices?” asks Sheryl Daija, Founder & CEO at BRIDGE. While only some brands may be ready for advocacy, it is crucial to view inclusion from a business practices perspective. This holistic approach ensures companies can genuinely embed DEI&B into their core operations, driving ethical and financial benefits.

As the first independent DEI&B Trade Organization for the global marketing industry, BRIDGE believes that inclusion is not just a moral imperative but also a business necessity. BRIDGE integrates inclusion into traditional workplaces, marketing management, and commercial practices.

“We look at it from the perspective of knowing there’s a moral and a business imperative,” Daija says. This dual approach ensures that inclusion is not a mere checkbox exercise but a fundamental component of a company’s growth strategy.

Measuring Change With IMAX

At the end of last year, BRIDGE launched IMAX, an Inclusion, Maturity, Assessment, and capability-building tool, that offers companies a unique opportunity to measure inclusion maturity across their entire organization.

If a company’s internal inclusion efforts are weak, its advocacy efforts can appear disingenuous and are likely to fail. “IMAX presents companies with a first-of-its-kind opportunity to measure inclusion maturity across an organization,” Daija explains. 

“We believe all companies should advocate for the communities they serve and be intentional and authentic about it. We want to be careful that companies aren’t out there doing advocacy work if their own house isn’t in order because that’s when it starts to fall apart potentially,” 

Daija emphasizes. “With IMAX, companies can use its structured approach to identify their strengths and weaknesses in inclusion. For instance, companies like Campbell’s have piloted IMAX to compare brands within their portfolios. This comparison revealed varying levels of inclusion maturity among brands, highlighting areas where inclusion competencies could be better applied. “They knew that they had a core competency in their organization that wasn’t being applied against all of their brands,” Daija explains. This insight allows companies to address gaps and strategically enhance their overall inclusion efforts. 

Developing IMAX: Goals and Framework

At its heart, IMAX is about elevating the roles of Chief Diversity Officers (CDOs) and their impact on business. “CEOs need to recognize that their CDOs are the hidden gems that can create a huge business impact,” says Daija. Over the years, Daijia has engaged with numerous CDOs, understanding their challenges and potential contributions to business growth. This exposure was instrumental in shaping the creation of IMAX.

In collaboration with academics from Emory University, the University of Georgia, and Indiana University, IMAX was developed to help companies understand how inclusion can become a business practice and ultimately a brand metric. “Through our  Voices of Inclusion research, we discovered one of the big gaps in our industry was understanding what business practices contribute to equities and inequities in the marketplace,” Daija notes. This foundational research informed the development of IMAX, ensuring it addresses real-world challenges companies face.

IMAX’s importance was further solidified by the Voices of Inclusion research program by BRIDGE. By interviewing CEOs, CMOs, and CDOs, BRIDGE gathered insights into the practices contributing to equity or inequity in the marketplace. “We decided to do a research program called Voices of Inclusion, where we interviewed CEOs, CMOs, and CDOs to understand what approaches and practices were contributing to either equity or inequity in the marketplace,” Daija explains. These insights were crucial for designing a tool to assess and enhance organizational inclusion capabilities.

Success Stories and Practical Applications

The transformative power of inclusion as a business practice is highlighted in several success stories. Fenty Beauty, for instance, recognized a gap in the marketplace and has now become a billion-dollar company. Similarly, Tristan Walker’s Bevel addressed a specific health and beauty need for Black men, turning it into a $40 billion company that P&G later acquired. “Tristan created a company around a single-blade razor, thus closing that inequity,” Daija says, emphasizing how addressing specific community needs can lead to significant business success.

Moreover, IMAX’s flexibility to operate at company and brand levels allows for tailored inclusion strategies. Companies can assess and improve inclusion practices across the entire organization or within specific brands, depending on their unique needs and goals. This adaptability ensures that IMAX can drive meaningful change in diverse organizational contexts.

DEI&B and The Power of Authenticity

“If companies want to build their cultural competency, they must look at the people they are with and the communities they spend time in,” Daija advises. This approach is particularly crucial for marketers to engage authentically with diverse communities. By immersing themselves in different cultures and experiences, companies can develop a deeper, more genuine understanding of the audiences they serve.

“Diversity without inclusion is performative,” the CEO asserts, highlighting a critical challenge in DEI&B efforts. She criticizes the over-reliance on heritage months as the core of DEI&B activities, often leading to performative actions rather than genuine inclusion. “We’ve fallen into the trap of heritage months as being the center of DEI&B efforts.” For inclusion to be authentic, companies must build cultural competency and understand different lived experiences.

From a media perspective, Daija stresses the need to move beyond simplistic demographic categorizations. “We need to start thinking about the world as people, not just demographics.” This shift requires recognizing individuals’ complexity and multifaceted nature, which can lead to more effective and respectful marketing strategies. According to Daija, authentic inclusion demands the same rigor and strategic thinking as any other business practice.

The Role of Media in Shaping Attitudes About DEI&B

Media plays a significant role in shaping perceptions of diversity and inclusion. At BRIDGE, there is a strong belief in reconstructing how media is bought and sold, which better reflects inclusive practices. “We need to deconstruct what’s not working and reconstruct the right model,” Daija asserts. This effort has led to the launch of an inclusive Media Marketing Development Committee, including major brands and agency holding companies.

This committee aims to address the systemic media buying and selling issues perpetuating exclusionary practices. By bringing together diverse stakeholders, BRIDGE is working to develop best practices and standards that promote genuine inclusion. “We’ve convened an inclusive Media Marketing Development Committee of over 50 companies, brands, all the agency holding companies, and platforms so that we can now deconstruct what’s not working and reconstruct what we think should be the right model,” Daija explains.

Daija envisions a space where inclusion is not an afterthought but a fundamental component of strategy. “Inclusion should have the same rigor and strategy as any other business practice,” says Daijia. This commitment to rigorous, authentic inclusion sets a new standard for the industry, demonstrating that ethical practices can drive significant business success.

The post Bridging the GAP: Driving Results with BRIDGE appeared first on AdMonsters.

Brands know how crucial it is to differentiate themselves and ensure brand safety, and with a new partnership on the table between AI Digital and Sightly, both are easily attainable. This new collaboration brings together each company’s buy-side tools and strengths to provide endless outcomes.

One big benefit from this partnership is that it addresses brand safety, allowing AI Digital to discern which news and content fit a marketer’s campaign best, keeping responsible journalism in mind, and resonating better with audiences. This elevates better consumer experiences and drives consumer actions.

By combining AI Digital’s programmatic expertise with Sightly’s Brand Mentality® platform-driven moments intelligence, advertisers gain access to valuable insights about consumer behavior, enabling real-time responses to emerging trends and cultural conversations.

Learn more about this collaboration from our discussion with Stephen Magli, CEO and founder of AI Digital.

Yakira Young: How does partnering with Sightly help AI Digital enhance its performance when it comes to increased data management and audience targeting?

Stephen Magli: Our interest in partnering and investing in Sightly is in the spirit of improving their Brand Mentality® platform. 

With the intelligence Sightly already provides, AI Digital can now identify more opportunities for brands to differentiate themselves in the marketplace and gain market share authentically vs. their competitors. 

To that point, we’re addressing a big brand safety element with this partnership. Many brands and clients are still operating under the assumption that all news is not brand safe. However, it’s much more nuanced than that, and Brand Mentality allows us to identify where we can resonate with audiences and the types of news that promote responsible journalism.

YY: How does the collaboration between AI Digital and Sightly benefit brands and agencies looking to optimize their programmatic campaigns?

SM: This collaboration of AI Digital and Sightly is an opportune time for brands, agencies, and marketers. Programmatic is at an inflection point where extracting value through programmatic technology has become invaluable for those who want to derive the most out of their advertising spend. 

We always seek to leverage additional insights to improve optimizations and ensure they drive client value toward their KPIs. As we head into the 2024 election and our current post-COVID reality, we can leverage Brand Mentality’s insight to coincide with cultural changes and how groups of people react to certain events and societal changes. In doing so, we can help brands optimize campaigns at today’s speed of change.

YY: Could you explain how AI Digital’s programmatic expertise and Sightly’s Brand Mentality® platform-driven moments intelligence work together to enhance advertising outcomes?

SM: Moments intelligence provides a window to dive deeper into a moment’s lifecycle and changes to consumer behavior that will inform campaign optimizations. It can provide insights into a brand’s extensive mentality profile and constant stream of news and social data to supply actionable signals for AI Digital’s programmatic experts to anticipate and respond in real-time to risks and opportunities in emerging trends and cultural conversations. Ultimately, this will lead to more relevant messaging to audiences in near real-time and improved brand and business outcomes.

YY: What advantages does Sightly’s recently patented technology bring to AI Digital as an Enterprise licensee of Brand Mentality?

SM: Acquiring an Enterprise license for Brand Mentality® was another integral factor in this investment and partnership, as its technology is unique. 

The technology within the Brand Mentality® platform codifies a brand’s DNA to respond instantly and authentically to breaking news and viral trends and ensure our clients can take advantage of emerging media moments. 

Let’s examine the current media landscape, especially with the actors’ strike and political cycle. How can brands, agencies, and marketers quickly acclimate to fast-paced changes in today’s culture that may cause audiences to shift their attention to new media or channels? 

That’s where the Brand Mentality® platform and its codified technology come into play. With that kind of marketing intelligence at our fingertips, brands, and agencies can combine speed and values without sacrificing ROI.

YY: How does the partnership between AI Digital and Sightly contribute to delivering real-time brand insights for dynamic media campaigns and strategy?

SM: Let’s use the political season as an example. During political campaigns, people can react quickly to specific events. For instance, following a speech delivered by a candidate, consumers may shift their perspective on a certain topic. Brands need to take note of such situations, as they are powerful for driving consumer sentiment and behavior. Sightly’s platform allows AI Digital to better view these changing consumer insights and adjust campaign strategies accordingly.

YY: Can you provide more information about AI Digital’s role as a programmatic consultancy and its approach to audience strategy and campaign optimization?

We’ve built AI Digital to be the leading client-centric global programmatic consultancy underpinned by the marriage of AI-driven advanced analytics and human intelligence. We believe clients deserve guidance in the programmatic space and much of the data and technology that has been designed up until this point, doesn’t serve their best interests or allow them to maximize output of their spend. In that spirit, it’s why we launched our proprietary platform, ELEVATE, earlier this year.

We designed a client-centric solution because the programmatic market needs to improve its ability to address marketer challenges and deliver real business outcomes, not media proxies. That’s why with ELEVATE, every in-campaign optimization and recommendation is in the client’s best interest. 

There is an immediate need for an optimization and measurement solution that empowers advertisers and marketers to get the most out of their digital advertising dollars in a constantly evolving programmatic marketplace. ELEVATE provides that with accountability and insights into the metrics that are most important to our client’s business.

Following that ethos of helping marketers realize the full potential of programmatic, we set out to shift the programmatic definition of success away from traditional metrics of impressions, reach, and clicks to more meaningful outcomes such as brand equity and lower funnel actions. 

Programmatic was promised to be a marketing utopia for CFOs and corporate C-suite, with greater accountability to sales/business metrics, precision audience targeting, and real-time optimization. We’re creating new ways and a higher programmatic standard for everyone to realize programmatic’s full potential and value. 

The post AI Digital and Sightly’s Strategic Partnership Unleashes the Key to Brand Safety appeared first on AdMonsters.

Breza has been dancing since she was eight years old, and the art form has taught her about accepting criticism, attention to detail, problem-solving, and collaboration – all lessons she carried over to her ad operations career and current role as VP, Ad Quality Measurement and Audience Data Operations, at SXM Media. 

“Dance has given me the confidence to know there is always a way out of the thorniest problem the industry can throw at you. When you hit a roadblock, you just need to start again and try a different approach. Eventually, you’ll work it out, and then you can continue iterating to improve it,” said Breza.

Breza will build on those dance insights for tackling problems at the Miami Publisher Forum. During her keynote, “How Podcasting Is Transforming Brand Safety For Everyone,” she will share learnings for building brand safety and brand suitability solutions for the emerging world of podcast advertising.

Breza’s Career Evolves With the Growth of Brand Safety

Over the last few years, the context, environment, and tools for brand safety have led to morphing into brand suitability. Breza witnessed this growth starting when she began her career over 20 years ago. At that time, brand safety existed, but there was no name for it or technology to support it. 

“Looking back on the progress we’ve made as an industry is impressive, and that empty space has been a great place to build a career iterating on new ideas and technology and pushing forward a bit more every year,” said Breza. 

When Breza worked at BusinessWeek Magazine during the 2000s, the concept of brand safety was primarily about ensuring that display ads would not appear alongside negative news coverage, within stories, or next to the story links on the site’s homepage. In what now seems like an antiquated approach, the process required human recognition of negative content and real-time anti-targeting of URLs. 

“Across the industry, we are making enormous strides each and every day. Like with dance, you need to have the mindset of a forever student. There is always more to learn from your colleagues, your partners, and the industry at large,” said Breza.

 Podcasting Emerges As the Next Phase for Brand Safety

Brands have traditionally bought podcast advertising on a sponsorship basis.

During planning, the buyer selects a specific adjacency to the podcast and host while considering brand safety and suitability upfront. But as podcasts are rapidly scaling (SiriusXM alone has over 34.5 million subscribers) and buyers are looking for reach in this medium, the handpicking methodology isn’t keeping up with the extensive amount of podcast content available. 

Breza suggests that advertisers must use different strategies to reach their full target audience while ensuring their ads only appear in suitable environments. And that starts with having a brand-level strategy for brand safety and suitability. 

The strategy should include a plan for aligning against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) brand safety and suitability framework. Launched in 2019, GARM is a cross-industry initiative by the World Federation of Advertisers that addresses the challenge of harmful content on digital media platforms and its monetization via advertising. 

“But simultaneously, it shouldn’t be a rigid policy,” cautions Breza. “Buyers should consider applying the GARM standards to each new medium or environment each time.”

With podcasting, some advertisers set up programmatic podcast deals with theirstandardized GARM selections and then struggle to scale. Take profanity, for example. 

“Podcasting is an intimate audio experience, and part of its power is creating a one-to-one human connection, almost as if you are talking with your friend,” said Breza. “Because of this environment, we often see an increase in profanity compared to what is expected for written or scripted media.” 

While Breza wouldn’t encourage advertisers to throw caution to the wind and remove all filters, she suggests that in many cases, it may make sense to loosen the level of protection and carefully think about how the brand wants to show up in this conversational medium. This approach could increase campaign reach and could be a better choice for brands looking to align with podcasts where listeners have come to expect a more authentic experience with their hosts.

 The Future of Brand Safety and Beyond

Breza thinks brand safety and suitability should be a consideration for every dollar spent on advertising. Across all mediums, advertisers need to balance transparency, control, and reach. 

“As ad technologists, our job is to make it easier to spend at scale,” said Breza. “I’m eager for the industry to get better at defining and managing adjacency in all streaming environments, tightening definitions of standards and infractions, and getting better at the context and tone words appear in – not just words themselves.”

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We’re seeing this with the many consumer data privacy regulations that are being passed globally, as well as with big tech updates like Apple’s ATT and Google’s Privacy Sandbox. User consent is now a top priority in how the industry moves forward. But people don’t only want to make decisions about who they share their data with and how they use it, they also want more say in what content they’re served, including advertising.

Conversations about balancing user experience and revenue are even changing tone, as publishers are doing a lot more to keep people on their site and coming back for return visits.

Consumer perception is of great value in the advertising ecosystem and it means everything. That’s why ad quality and brand safety should be just as important as how privacy and user experience are viewed — ultimately they all intersect.

In a recent study by Integral Ad Science: Advertising in the Age of Misinformation: How Consumer Perception of Misleading Content Impacts Brand Favorability, 42% of industry experts are concerned about the repetitional impact of their ads being placed alongside misleading content and the potential impact of future buying amongst these same consumers. And, 73% of media experts are in unison that buyers and sellers must do everything in their power to avoid misinformation.

It’s great to hear what experts think, but isn’t it time we learn more about how consumers feel about this issue?

Misinformation: The Consumer Perspective

People use digital devices to consume media more than we can realistically calculate. In fact, 74% of consumers check their digital media outlets multiple times a day on their smart devices, and 80% of them see misinformation as a massive bump in the road to connecting with digital media. Frighteningly, a whopping 71% of consumers say they regularly stumble across misleading digital content when surfing the web.

Additionally, 62% of consumers think advertisers, agencies, and publishers are equally responsible for ads appearing near misinformation. It’s clear that consumers have had enough, and if this issue is not quickly reconciled it will harm brand perception and revenue for advertisers, as well as monetization for publishers. Sixty-five percent of consumers disclosed that they would likely stop buying from a brand that advertises alongside wonky content.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. There is hope, as the report found that 67% of consumers agreed that brands could redeem themselves as long as they actively denounce misinformation. When brands step up in this way, consumers can still view them positively. In turn, brands earn brownie points toward saving their reputations.

We all know, that no one will not spend their money on a brand they don’t trust. For this reason, advertisers and publishers should do all they can to eliminate misinformation on the web. Doing so will only help to influence purchasing decisions positively.

Content is still king; that is never changing, and we see it firsthand in this report. Fifty-one percent of consumers expressed that online content adjacency influences their trust in a brand, and 69% acknowledged that the level of trust influences whether or not they will use a brand’s goods and services.

Surprisingly, 91% of consumers feel confident in their ability to detect misinformation, and they will point out every instance. Yes, cancel culture still exists, even for brands.

So, isn’t it time the industry makes the much-needed adjustments to address misinformation?

How Can Buyers and Sellers Combat Misinformation?

We must protect brand safety at all costs.

When obstructed, it can significantly tarnish an advertiser’s reputation. To solve the issue, brands and their media agencies turn to keyword blocklists. But that doesn’t always solve the problem, as legit publishers who provide essential content might get blocked and end up losing out on ad revenue.

That’s why the industry is working on a range of tools to combat this issue.

For instance, IAS partnered with the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) to give advertisers enhanced misinformation protection. With IAS’s expanded global coverage, they can detect more sources of misinformation, ensuring a larger spectrum of security for digital campaigns.

This coverage is available across the open web for pre-, and post-bid media buys and can be accessed via IAS’s Brand Safety Offensive Language & Controversial Content category.

Also, video advertising platform, Unruly, pledged to shield its advertisers with tools from NewsGuard, a company that rates news sources for credibility and transparency. NewsGuard works with advertisers, agencies, and ad tech companies to help brands dodge ad placements on sites with misinformation and direct their ads to trustworthy news and information publishers.

Thankfully for publishers, this NewsGuard’s tool includes a benchmark created by a team of seasoned journalists, where brands can use the journalistic criteria to evaluate each publisher’s credibility and transparency practices.

Just like traditional keyword blocklists, tools like these — that mitigate the risks of a brand’s campaign appearing next to hate speech or fake news — always make a huge difference, but they need to have lots of flexibility built in to ensure that content is flagged appropriately and that deserving publishers don’t lose out on revenue.

Regardless of which solution brands select, it’s important to note that the consumer has spoken and will continue to be vocal about issues like privacy and misinformation. At the end of the day, misinformation negatively impacts consumers, buyers, and sellers, so the industry should continue doing all it can to put death to it.

The post Misinformation Kills Brand Favorability, Consumers Are Not Here for it appeared first on AdMonsters.

Here are six takeaways from AdMonsters PubForum Vancouver:

1. “RevOps as Fixers”

Hallway conversations focused on careers and work culture within revenue operations. A consistent throughline was that ops is increasingly called upon to troubleshoot or hack together solutions for a fairly broad range of projects. Many view this as a career boon since it allows for greater involvement in top company priorities. Sadly, however, the root of underlying frustration was that many publishers still don’t have unified internal data and reporting, which means that sleuthing can be slow going. On the upside, I got the gist that more media companies now recognize the growing importance of ops and are putting resources into recruiting and compensation.

2. Video Is on the Rise, but Still Operationally Challenging

Most digital publishers are at least experimenting with video. A few, like A+E, have shifted to put video front and center, while others (my own company, Granite, included) are running a combination of instream or outstream videos alongside articles. Advertiser demand is robust, but implementation still tends to be problematic. Complaints ranged from expensive rates for video players and content delivery services to discrepancies and serving errors on video advertisements. In spite of endless daily VAST errors, there was tangible excitement about video’s growth potential. More and more consumers are ditching traditional TV for internet-based solutions ranging from OTT/CTV to short-form clips found throughout the web. As bandwidth increases, so will viewership and revenue.

3. Mobile Web is a ‘Tale of Two Cities’: iOS vs. Android

iOS monetization (or lack-there-of) was top of mind. Cookie-restricting features built into Safari have significantly hampered the ability for advertisers to target ads, and therefore reduced the value of impressions by as much as 40% compared to similar impressions on Android devices. Media companies are trying lots of clever hacks to lessen the hurt. For instance, teams with direct sales are increasingly using iOS impressions for make-goods or to fill non-targeted line items. Others are experimenting with larger-format ads or simply a higher ratio of ads to content.

In sharp contrast, Android has been fueling 2019’s mobile revenue growth. People are on their phones ALL THE TIME. Volume is up big for Android web as well as in-apps. At the same time, increased advertiser demand and improved auction dynamics are lifting Android CPMs.

4. Storm Clouds Are Ahead with Privacy and Cookies

Companies are preparing for California Consumer Privacy Act compliance in similar ways that they did for Europe’s GDPR. One fear is that eventually there may be many slightly different laws governing specific countries and states—a true nightmare scenario for anyone working in ad operations. Also, based on financial numbers, teams recognize a substantial difference between ‘opt-in’ and ‘opt-out’ consent.

The tenuous fate of cookies also sparked anxiety in Vancouver. Will more browsers follow Safari’s example? Will Google’s own reliance on advertising shield the industry from sweeping changes? Can publishers collect first-party data and make it available (fast enough) to advertisers at scale? Why are there so many ‘unified’ ID projects?

5. Advertisers Are Shunning Controversial Topics

Several publishers observed that certain topics (especially within news and politics) are becoming increasingly difficult to monetize because advertisers are trying to avoid divisive or polarizing articles. Negative keywording isn’t a new feature for the industry, but historically it was used by only a small segment of advertisers to avoid relatively specific topics (most often pornography, drugs, and gun violence). We’re now seeing more widespread use of a much broader set of terms (for instance the phrase ‘climate change’ or the name ‘Donald Trump’). The implications for newsrooms could get a bit scary if weaker financials start to have an implicit silencing effect on which stories get assigned and resourced.

6. Shifting to ‘Fewer, Better’ Partnerships

Programmatic ad sales is now mainsteam and emphasis has shifted from signing as many new deals as possible to culling down and concentrating on ‘fewer, better’ partnerships. Several industry trends align with this more concentrated approach:

• Companies are keeping their most important SSP bidders on-page, but moving smaller SSPs to server-to-server solutions (usually EB or TAM).
• DSPs and savvy advertisers are starting to pursue supply path optimization (SPO) to funnel more of their spending through the most effective channels.
• Advertisers are increasingly seeking verified performance guarantees. In-display, the most common KPI is viewability which has motivated pubs to remove below-the-fold ads in favor of lazy-loaded slots. Fewer impressions then need to be sold, ideally to higher-paying demand sources.

Not much about the future of our industry is certain, with new legislation and ever-advancing technology keeping everyone on their toes. It was clear from the days we spent together in Vancouver, we work in a dynamic, maturing industry that continues to deliver big opportunities and big challenges.

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But over the years we’ve seen these either fail or stagnate for a variety of reasons, but probably a certain central one: Publishers were simply unwilling to put in the collaboration it would take to succeed. And there understandable excuses for this reluctance, including displeasure at working alongside theoretical competitors or fear of losing priceless first-party data.

Nucleus Marketing Solutions’ compact of major journalism outlets has succeeded where others haven’t. Perhaps right now is just the time, or perhaps the approach is on the money. Before he appears on the Ops closing panel, The Reckoning of Digital Media, Tuesday, June 5 with representatives from Quartz, Engine Media, and more, we asked Nucleus CEO Seth Rogin how the alliance rolls strong and what is biggest on its plate.

At AdMonsters, we’ve long thought publisher alliances like Nucleus would be the answer for taking on the walled gardens, but several in the past have flamed out. What’s different about Nucleus? Or is this just the moment?

The stakes have never been higher to get this right. The idea of an alliance isn’t new, but the way Nucleus operates is. Nucleus is built for today and tomorrow’s ad market, using not just scale but scalable technology. By uniting the regional news audiences into a national platform, and uniting the first-party data from them, Nucleus delivers the scale of some of the largest digital entities, but sets itself apart with the brand-smart environment marketers are demanding. I’d challenge you to show me another with the combination of true brand safety and first-party data for nearly 160 million unique users.

What’s the big focus at Nucleus at the moment? What do you hope to have achieved by the end of the year?

Let’s keep our eyes on this prize: Real journalism has rarely been more needed and more central to the American conversation than it is today. If democracy is built on a common understanding of truth fueling consequential choices, we need the reporters of truth to have a business model that attracts the funds they need to get their work done. I’m not just talking about the hard news. Our sites and ad positions are built around how Americans connect with each other, in a family-friendly, brand-safe environment of sports, entertainment, dining, cooking, and lifestyle coverage that actually drives decisions each day. We don’t ask advertisers to support us because we’re news, we ask advertisers to consider us because we deliver better results in a better environment with the scale and precision they demand.

The focus at Nucleus is on delivering brand-safe, high-ROI results for the world’s largest brands. We’ve been doing that, with rapid growth last year that’s accelerating as we speak. Nucleus has just launched its proprietary SSP and a partnership with Telaria as its video SSP. It feels as though we’ve spent the last two years building the Ferrari, and now it’s time to take it out to own the track.

The post Seth Rogin Talks About High Stakes in Preserving Journalism appeared first on AdMonsters.

In today’s digital environment we’re constantly talking about how the survival of digital media depends on conversations between buyers and sellers. There’s such a focus on direct communication, instead of relying on intermediaries to speak accurately and transparently on our business’ behalf. Fortunately, GABBCON CEO and Co-Founder Gabe Greenberg offered to help facilitate that communication by lending some of his own perspectives. Gabe has spent about two decades in media—he’s held leadership roles at The Trade Desk, Vibrant Media, Delivery Agent, Autobytel and other companies; he’s an advisor to a number of industry groups and he’s particularly well-versed in the language of TV/video.

This discussion with Gabe will be an ongoing one, but to start us off, I asked Gabe about what stories stuck out to him at the 2018 GABBCON NY event, which took place about three weeks ago. He also shared some thoughts about what buy-siders are thinking about when they hear the words “brand safety” or “consolidation”—and, like a lot of forward-thinking people in digital right now, he had quite a bit to say about blockchain.

What are the top three takeaways from GABBCON—and in particular, were any of these major themes something you didn’t really expect to be so prominent right now?

GABE GREENBERG: Number one, there is an abundance of senior diverse talent in the market. Any conference that claims there is a shortage is not working very hard on their programming. Diversity is integral in each and every  event.

Number two, blockchain is here to stay. Anyone who suggests that blockchain cannot support ad tech and address the many ad taxes and ills major brands and agencies talk about (trust, fraud, transparency, speed, reconciliation) is probably from a company that stands to be disintermediated, and is purposely trying to cast doubt to avoid their own ill fate. That is not to say that all the answers exist for blockchain—but have no doubt, this will change the business we all know today, and it will change it soon.

Number three, the continued consolidation in the TV market will pave way for continued innovation, shorter ad breaks and new waves of audience targeting and addressability.

Points two and three were ones we’ve predicted for some time. In fact, shortly after GABBCON NY, announcements were made by Fox and NBC about shortening the ad breaks, and there has been ample press about blockchain. Jonathan Steuer from Omnicom put it best when he said, “We are experiencing a new paradigm in network design, and blockchain represents positive change for the industry. Your team should be thinking about how you can leverage this new open source protocol” (referring to the protocol that MadHive is bringing to market).

What are media buyers’ biggest concerns about consolidation among publishers and broadcasters? How is this changing their buying habits and strategies?

The biggest concern is always the creation of a new walled garden or an overly dominant force. Buyers (and consumers for that matter) are more savvy then ever, and this is forcing publishers to rethink the media unit and what it represents. I expect we will see new ad units and experiences that value consumer attention and time more than ever before.

We’re seeing publishers restructure their sales and ops teams so they can be more flexible for however buyers want to transact (i.e., programmatically, directly, or with some hybrid of the two). How’s that working out for buyers? What else should publishers be doing to be as flexible with transactions as they can be?

The restructuring is a cost of doing business. To be fair, with a new blockchain-based fat protocol to replace OpenRTB, we will see far more change in the months ahead. The benefit of this new protocol, however, is that it will bring buyers and sellers closer together again. Publishers should embrace this new protocol and get ahead of it as quickly as they can. Unlike RTB, which many thought could represent a race to the bottom, this new protocol represents higher margins and the elimination of ad taxes from verification companies, data companies and many others who will no longer be able to get away with a large ad tax for a service that should be commoditized.

When you hear buy-siders talk about brand safety, what specific issues are they really talking about? And is there anything buy-siders wish publishers understood better about what they’re up against on the brand safety front?

They mostly talk about the risk of their brand being adjacent to content that is outright negative (terrorism, accidents, etc.). Buyers need publishers to understand the inherent risk of an airplane brand being next to an article about a plane crash, or safety issues or company impropriety. It’s clear that there are instances where these things can sometimes be unavoidable because of the nature of algorithms and targeting, but it is imperative that large publishers police their own sites and balance the use of AI and machine learning with human review.

We’re seeing publishers restructure their sales/ops teams to respond to the ways buyers treat the old programmatic/direct split. What kind of responses are media buyers looking for?

I do not think buyers have expectations here other than that their business be serviced. Sometimes I think we overthink this question in the industry.

The post Inside the Buy Side: Catching Up With Gabe Greenberg of GABBCON appeared first on AdMonsters.

Though Zynga made deals to try to prevent this from happening, eventually Facebook shuffled its weight and the game-maker suffered through several rounds of layoffs starting in 2013.

I felt like I was having a Zynga flashback when publishers like BuzzFeed joyously hailed how much revenue they were driving thanks to Facebook traffic. I knew it was a matter of time before Facebook put on the squeeze—and it’s been a long, slow one that’s only recently began to show its toll in publisher layoffs.

In the wake of damning reports of platform abuse by unsavory parties following the 2016 election, Facebook seems to have gone for the full choke: a major algorithm change that seriously downplays editorial-type content in the newsfeed. At least one pub has cited this algorithm switch as the reason for its closure, and publishers of all stripes are biting their nails when they think about their referral traffic.

There is a silver lining, though—Zynga seems to have rallied. In 2018, the company boasts more than 1,600 employees and net revenue of $741 million. Premium publishers can wean themselves off their Facebook traffic habit, but it’s going to be painful. Ops speaking alum and Dailymotion VP of Product and Partner Development Claudia Page has an insightful take on how publishers and other media companies can dwindle their dependence on the Duopoly in general, and how best to work with such platforms in the future.

Let’s start with something straightforward, and yet extremely confounding. At Recode’s Code Media, Campbell Brown of Facebook’s news partnerships team said if publishers don’t think Facebook is right for them, they shouldn’t be on it. But is that really an option? Can pubs quit Facebook?

CLAUDIA PAGE: If you look at the history of media, there have been a lot of evolutions, but the progress has also been incredibly cyclical. Back in the early days of the internet, portals like AOL and Yahoo were the dominant traffic machines to publisher websites—about as dominant as Facebook and Google are today. And yet, the publishers that endured and thrived understood the importance of owning their audiences, as AOL and Yahoo eventually lost their dominance.

BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, and The New York Times are looked to as the prime case studies in how publishers can build audiences beyond the homepage via side-door strategies—marked by an aggressive use of social and SEO—and these strategies were made famous in our world via the Times’ 2014 Innovation Report.

There’s a big difference between having traffic and having an audience that trusts you and engages with your content outside of a feed.

While Pinterest is a platform, they also grew by cultivating communities around niche subject areas and using media aggregation to their advantage. Instead of simply targeting large lifestyle categories, Pinterest understood the power of owning smaller subsets within these categories, like “tattoos,” and becoming the de facto source for trusted content on niche topics.

The common thread with these examples is that these companies focused on audience development, rather than hitting traffic targets alone. There’s a big difference between having traffic and having an audience that trusts you and engages with your content outside of a feed.

With Facebook developing a point of view on the definition of quality news, the teams responsible for carrying out these marching orders are now focused on surfacing “broadly trusted” publishers. This will help Facebook change the conversation with publishers away from quantity and move the conversation towards quality. It may seem confounding that Campbell Brown, as head of news partnerships at Facebook, would suggest pubs shouldn’t be on their platform. But I think this is a clear message that Facebook wants publishers to focus on engagement, not traffic.

A blind reliance on a single platform to drive traffic is not, and never has been, an effective means for building audiences.

Because I’m a fogey who has been covering this industry for a long time, Facebook’s battle with clickbait and fake news reminds me a lot of Google vs. the content farms back in 2010-11—in both, actors were playing platform algorithms and controls to drive traffic to sites (that were potentially monetized by those same platforms). Do you see the parallels, and how do you think the two examples primarily differ?

Going back to my earlier point, the evolution of media is cyclical. What we’ve seen, then and now, is a platform re-calibrating and correcting as media consumption increases, along with instances of people (or bots) gaming the system to their own benefit and to the detriment to the industry at-large. With Google and now Facebook, we’ve seen a loss of control, an admission of that loss of control, and now, steps to rectify it.

What’s different is that today the conversation about the ethics of these platforms has reached a higher order. When we were criticizing Google in 2011, we were largely discussing how click-farms were bad for our industry—bad for marketers, bad for publishers, etc. Today, these concerns go much deeper. They’re really about the kind of world we want to live in, and how we need to protect people—not just marketers and publishers—from malicious forces that threaten to abuse the platforms we’ve come to rely on to stay connected and informed within our communities.

About a year and a half ago, Dailymotion began to rethink its own place in the online ecosystem. The strategy shifted away from functioning as a massive pool of user-generated content mixed with professional content, to a highly curated, algorithmically-driven video platform in which we would help people discover the videos that matter. For us, this means focusing on premium content partners, nurturing discovery of new and trusted content creators and ceasing the monetization of UGC to protect our brand partners.

This is the first article in a brief series. You can find the second portion of Claudia and Gavin’s conversation here.

The post The Next Stage of Social Strategy: A Q&A With Claudia Page of Dailymotion (Part 1) appeared first on AdMonsters.

Rob Beeler, Gavin Dunaway and I all knew brand safety was going to be a big one this time, as it’s on just about everyone’s lips on both the buy side and the sell side, and it involves so many elements of the publisher business. For one of our attendee sessions, Adam Moser, Hulu’s Head of Ad Tech and Platform Operations, put together a meaty presentation on why the brand safety discussion seems to have exploded recently, and what’s at stake for publishers. But brand safety came up almost as soon as our first keynote, Trusted Media Brands’ President and CEO Bonnie Kintzer, took to the dais on Monday morning. Her talk was about how creating and maintaining a better user experience—a process guided by listening to your users, giving them what they tell you they want, and focusing on the products and experiences that perform best—can really drive monetization. So it’s not surprising that brand safety is part of that process.

Part of how you get there, Bonnie explained, was that you don’t necessarily put an ad on everything. You don’t necessarily sponsor every product that could be sponsored. But you can stay open to pulling advertisers into these experiences, and you can incorporate advertising or sponsorships where buyers recognize the value of being in those environments specifically.

Which relates to another subject we heard throughout the Forum: A brand-safe environment is one where the client understands the value of being in that environment, and often publishers need to explain how that environment operates. One example that came up in the Wednesday breakouts: If you find one of your clients has blacklisted the word “shooter,” and they’re trying to buy in an environment related to basketball, they’re going to have some problems, and so are you.

GDPR also gave people a lot to talk about this week. One of the reasons the GDPR discussion isn’t over yet is that the interpretation of the regulation’s language keeps changing. But it feels like we’re getting somewhere. We’re no longer hearing publishers ask, “Do we need to worry about compliance?,” because there’s consensus that trying to dodge the regulators would be a very bad idea. OpenX Chief Administrative Officer and General Counsel Doug McPherson explained the stakes in OpenX’s session. For example, GDPR has really strict rules around how much time a company has to notify authorities of a data breach—72 hours. And when you think of any high-profile data breach in the U.S. in recent years—Equifax, Target, et al—it’s not likely any of those companies have acted so quickly.

Anyway, the big GDPR question for U.S. pubs is now more like, “Is my EU audience small enough that I can just shut off our EU ad business altogether?” The clock is ticking, and many pubs are lagging in compliance (only 2,500 U.S. companies have certification from the Department of Commerce’s self-certification process), making pulling the plug seem like an acceptable idea. In Doug’s session and in other conversations around the Forum, we’re hearing predictions that the E.U. regulators are going to enforce GDPR in part by making an example of some U.S. company or other. Pubs are wondering whether that company will be Facebook or Google, or something more seemingly random. Will that show of enforcement be a shot across the bow, or a reaction to something particularly egregious?

There are other conversations we heard, which we’ll be getting into in future AdMonsters coverage. The past few days have given us fodder for articles and events to come—so, as always, watch this spot for what’s to come.

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