Many publishers’ digital revenues have been on an upward swing in recent years — but it’s not enough to fill the gaps left by print. According to eMarketer, global digital ad spending in 2015 is expected to reach $170.17 billion. Global mobile ad spending globally should hit $69 billion this year.
That sounds like good news. But there are plenty of caveats for publishers: In 2014, Google, Facebook, AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo accounted for 61 percent of total digital ad revenue in the U.S., according to Pew’s annual State of the Media report.
And this year, publishers are confronted by new obstacles: The rise of ad blocking on mobile and the specter of fraud brought on by bot traffic. With the rise of automated ad sales, some media companies are trying to build their own custom ad tech.
Factor in platforms like Apple, Facebook, and Snapchat hosting news — and offering to sell ads, minus their own cut — and it can feel as if publishers are trying to thread an increasingly smaller needle.
I asked several publishers what’s working for them in digital advertising in this uncertain environment. What types of formats are performing well? How is that a change from recent history? Do they have any plans to counteract ad blockers?
Now that many companies are creating branded/sponsored/native offerings, the hunt for America’s Next Top Advertising Model has moved to formats like video, podcasts, and newsletters. For many, mobile remains an elusive goal — and, as Mary Meeker’s annual slide deck shows, a tantalizing opportunity.
I spoke with executives from Slate, The New York Times, Vox Media, The Atlantic, Mashable, The Seattle Times, Newsweek, and Wired. Their thoughts on digital advertising are below, slightly edited for length and clarity.
If you take a look at Slate podcasts, or Panoply podcasts, we’re seeing a lot more brands move into that space. The biggest players are the “DR,” direct response advertisers, because we don’t have tremendous metrics and data yet. That’s one of the reasons I think the brands have been a little slower to move in there, although, as I mentioned, we’re seeing more and more brands move into that space.
There’s several different things we do there. The host read is very valuable. That’s the midroll unit, and it will go 30 to 60 seconds, sometimes longer. The hosts are given talking points and make it feel like it’s part of the program.
Four years ago we launched “Slate Custom,” which is basically an in-house creative studio that helps our advertisers communicate with Slate readers.
It’s another area where we’re having some success. We use the natural editorial positions on the site to drive the user to that content. It is clearly demarcated that it is sponsored content; it’s actually a different color. But we still bring the reader to that content the same way we bring them to high-quality content in Slate.
Our goal is to make sure we’re not confusing the reader, obviously, and that advertising does not influence the content of Slate, and finally to produce the best quality content for our advertiser.
At Panoply, we’re working with several partners to create custom podcasts, or native podcasts, where we deliver helpful or entertaining information to a particular listener.
We’re doing a series right now with Umpqua Bank. We’ve done a series with HBO. And we’re also doing something even more unique with GE. If you look at the iTunes chart, you’ll see a podcast called “The Message,” which is a fictional podcast, basically a sci-fi cliffhanger. We co-produce that with General Electric.
It’s just gotten more competitive. We’re still winning a great deal of business that’s tied to custom. But an advertiser can only work with one, two, or three partners. They might be able to go a little deeper occasionally, but it just makes it more competitive to win those battles.
We’re talking about a lot of things as far as ad blocking is concerned. It’s a concern for us and a concern for the industry, but we have made no decisions on what we plan to do there.
If it’s not one thing, it’s anothe, especially for an industry where we’re not charging our customers to enjoy world-class content. We gotta pay for it some way. I beg and plead with people to not use ad blockers so we won’t have to charge you for content.
The New York Times
Michael Zimbalist, senior vice president of advertising products and research and development:
Our native advertising and branded content businesses continue to show robust growth. In just the past two weeks alone we’ve launched programs for Cocoavia, Delta, Philips and Nest.
Additionally, our new mobile creative package called Mobile Moments is striking a chord with pretty much every advertising sector, from fashion to automotive to tech. Mobile Moments uses a unique native in-stream unit we call the Flex Frame that fills three-quarters of the screen on any mobile device.
Advertisers want to reach our audience, who are among the most curious, intelligent and influential people in the world. Who knows better how to reach our audience than us? Our best ad products build on the same techniques and insights that help inform our news presentation. In the case of Mobile Moments, for example, we used the insight that our audience’s news needs change throughout the day, and using that insight, we designed an advertising program with dynamic creative that can be [scheduled by time of day] in harmony with the news presentation.
Five years ago, it was pretty much all standard units adjacent to content, with limited storytelling capabilities. Today, we offer advertisers the ability to tell stories with the same depth and breadth of our news report.
Right now, our plans for ad blocking are to be vigilant — closely monitor the situation to understand what impact, if any, it is having on our business — and to strategically focus our ad product development on innovations that are additive to the user experience. Mobile Moments is a prime example of that. It’s non-interruptive and respects the user experience. That’s super important to all we do.
Newsweek
Thomas Hammer, senior vice president of sales, IBT Media:
What we’re really focused on and what’s really performing and resonating, is branded content and video.
I think we’re at an inflection point, in terms of digital advertising and mobile advertising, where the brands really want to get closer to the core audience and core consumer. We’re using our editorial staff and our content curation to build experiences that pull in the brands themselves.
Whether that be an automotive brand, or a [consumer packaged good], or confections or whatever, they’re really focused on getting back to that core audience through branded experiences and native content across our different channels, whether that be desktop, mobile or print.
There is somewhat of an inflection point in digital advertising. It’s changing. I’ve just spent seven and a half years in a pioneering mobile video platform and mobile video advertising, which didn’t really own any of its content.
I think what you’re seeing in a lot of the ad tech companies out there is that, if you don’t own your content, it’s going to be very, very hard to win brands over in this new age of branded advertising, because you don’t control it. That’s where you’re going to see a big push from media companies to really start winning back the brands, and owning their content and curating it, and putting brands in that experience.
The one thing that has been difficult for marketers, and it’s a fault of everyone in the industry, is mobile. I’ve worked in mobile since 2007. I was at the pioneering mobile video company since 2008. During that period of time, there were very few companies that were talking about mobile advertising, the audience, the engagement that was there, whether that was video or rich media, full-screen experiences.
Only in the last three years has it been this dominant feature. You had maybe a handful of companies that were doing it prior to 2012, and now everyone says they can do it. But desktop has standards — there’s the IAB and the MRC. In mobile, there’s really no standardization. Everyone says they can do video, but they’re not defining what video is.
I think where things are trending is the mobile platform. But I think desktop is still that much more powerful. And when you’re talking about targeting and reaching that unique viewer from desktop to mobile and then, perhaps, in the future, over the top and connected TV? The media companies will have that first-party data. That’s where the power lends itself.
We’re about to release the new International Business Times newsletter. We’ve redesigned it, it’s going to be called “Pulse.” We’re very bullish on that and getting into a great discussion with the editorial team and my side of the house in terms of revenue.
Video’s the same way. We’re really building out our coverage. So in the next year we’re going to have boots on the ground in Davos for the World Economic Forum. At CES, SXSW, Mobile World Congress, the red carpets of the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards.
Internally and externally, we’re being very proactive in discussions about ad blocking.
It’s a difficult circumstance, but it’s something, again, when it’s great content — and content, unfortunately, in that idiomatic phrase, is king — we have to be very upfront in terms of ad blocking and understanding what is the true audience that is coming through.
The Atlantic
Hayley Romer, vice president and publisher:
We are seeing incredible engagement across the site right now. In particular, the performance, which we measure through engagement, of our native ads and custom content has increased tremendously. For example, we have seen a 164 percent increase in metrics like page views, time on site and social actions taken year-over-year. Additionally, high-impact units with non-standard pixel sizes are in huge demand, and are showing a 94 percent increase in engagement on our site over last year.
We attribute it to a number of different things. First and foremost, our commitment to quality is unwavering. People engage with quality content, and by now, our readers are accustomed to getting great value through content created by Atlantic Re:Think. To underscore that point, we continue to invest in talent across the board, and specifically on our content and design teams for Atlantic Re:Think.
We also completely re-imagined TheAtlantic.com this year, and have evolved the way in which our readers discover custom content on our site. Organic traffic to our custom content has increased by more than 480 percent.
“We’ve embedded our editorial UX team into the design process in order to create elegant templates for large-scale ads that live and breathe with the site’s responsive content experience,” Sauerberg said. “By doing this, we’ve driven ad performance beyond anything we’ve seen before.”
In looking at the difference between what ad products are available today compared to the recent past, Sauerberg pointed to the “polarization shift from IAB to entirely-custom ad experiences.”
“Advertisers are much more comfortable with completely new executions, ranging from custom native content programs to proprietary ad templates,” he said.
Companies now expect better metrics around ads, and as a result products that perform well consistently. “Wired’s natural strength is delivering brand awareness in new ways for advertisers — while tailoring each experience to keep readers interested,” Sauerberg said.
Finally, Sauerberg said the magazine is exploring options to counter ad blocking: “We have a series of tests running to convert ad blockers to white-list our site.”
Photo of an old Datsun ad by John Lloyd used under a Creative Commons license.