In a time of mistrust and suspicion, economic stress and changing markets, advertisers and news publishers have been forced to take a hard look at their respective situations.

Advertisers want to know if a publisher is diversified and has a vision for the future, even if its current plan or ideas are rejected. Some publishers might think they’re ready, when in actuality they are not, INMA Advertising Initiative Lead Mark Challinor said during the recent Digital Advertising Master Class.

“We need to take control of how and where we place our limited resources,” Challinor said. “The still-coming cookie situation, sharing insights with our advertisers by our sales teams, and the need to find new revenue streams to supplement those lost in what is seen as traditional.”

During the master class, media leaders shared how their organisations are preparing for the future of advertising now by reevaluating their revenue models, creating new opportunities for clients, building direct client relationships, and ensuring staff have the right skills to drive success.

Revamping revenue models

Alexander Group

Matt Bartels, principal and practice lead for media and consumer technology, and Jamie Riley, principal and practice lead for media and EMEA, offered insights based on Alexander Group’s work with and research into a client base that represents a broad spectrum of media companies around the world across multiple verticals.

Overall, Alexander Group’s data shows that the largest and most diversified companies are the most efficient, Riley said. That’s just as you’d expect, he added, since it’s about scale.

“What’s interesting to me,” he said, “is that these large, diversified digital companies are not just the most scaled and efficient, they also grow the fastest,” as is clear from year-on-year revenue growth rates on the chart.

Bartels shared two major takeaways from this data:

1. “The low-growth, low-profitability companies felt like they needed to grow at a new market entry point or diversify at the beginning of the process, whereas the high-growth, high-profitability organisations felt like they could diversify equally throughout the entire sales process on an ongoing basis.”
2. “A lot of times we’ll jump in and talk about tactics — the ‘what we should be doing’ — and what we’re suggesting is stepping back and quantitatively giving yourself an idea of where you should be placing your bets.” Knowing the “where,” he said, helps make “how you’re placing your bets” more effective.

“The temptation,” Riley added, “is to ask ‘what should I bet on?’ But first you have to pick the where — the game you’re going to play.”

Mather Economics

Pete Doucette, senior managing director for Mather Economics in the United States, said the industry will see a more integrated B2C/B2B model emerge in the next decade. The past couple of years have seen traffic drop below pre-pandemic levels, which means publishers need to determine what their business and revenue model is: “We’ve got to figure out how to navigate through these waters as we’re facing these industry headwinds.”

Finding the best revenue model, he said, means looking at the interplay between advertising revenue and subscription revenue.

1. Competing: This is a siloed approach in which advertising and subscription have their own departments. “[B2B has] their own objectives and they might be chasing different KPIs and metrics and the subscription business is over here trying to optimise that.”
2. Complimentary: This is where limited, integrated, and high-quality ads are used to complement a subscription model. “It’s really complimentary and streamlined and it’s a really good user experience.”
3. Advertising free: Doucette called this an “extreme” solution that has limited use. “I know that there is some research that shows users will pay a little bit more when it’s advertising-free, but I have yet to show or be been convinced that the best business model for a publisher is an ad-free model.” Instead, he recommended a model with “an elegant ad experience” that drives both B2B and B2C revenue.

Serving clients with new opportunities

Cox Media Group

Monetising a media brand looks much different today than in the past. Micah Beatty, digital director at Cox Media Group in the United States, told INMA members how the company revived and revitalised its Access Atlanta brand.

“What we’re doing is using content partnerships to help build our brands to help generate new audiences and new revenue streams,” he said. “So we’re meeting our audiences where they’re at and publishing the right type of content using the right formats.”

The new approach has worked extremely well and the brand is now preparing to roll out new offerings, such as city guides. The 100 or so guides will each cover a different neighbourhood, and AJC will have one content partner as the premier sponsor of each one.

It is also introducing the Access Atlanta Influencer Network, partnering with social influencers and specifically local influencers in Atlanta to help them promote the Access Atlanta brand — not only in Atlanta but to extend reach into the southeast, which will help the publisher provide better value for its clients.

“We found our success by proactively being where our audiences are,” Beatty said. “We’re trying to be there, and we’re going to continue to build upon that foundation.”

Newsday

In 2017, Newsday launched Brand 360, a content studio that allowed the company to translate all the knowledge it had in publishing into digital. Nannette Fevola, senior director of client solutions/Brand360 content and video at the U.S.-based company, shared two keys to the initiative’s success.

1. Sales training: Selling branded content can be a new concept for legacy sellers. “We hold training sessions on a consistent basis and we walk our teams through what branded content is and how it can be effective for advertisers,” Fevola said. “We use case studies, we showcase recent products that we've done, and we also constantly update them on anything new or any new statistics that come out. So they're pretty well versed. They also know they can bring us along on any call and we're going to supplement their education.”
2. Project management: Every project they do gets assigned a dedicated project manager. This person coordinates between the client and the sales rep and makes sure all the objectives are being met, including schedule and budget. “We're constantly in communication with the client from kickoff through completion,” Fevola said. “And since all our campaigns offer digital displays and drivers as well as social media, each project manager monitors each campaign in real time. And this way they can really optimize our performance. And of course, at the conclusion of each one of our projects, all of our clients get a full comprehensive analysis of their performance.”

Connecting directly with clients

Toronto Star

Supporting good local journalism should be part of good corporate citizenship. Michael Beckerman, chief client officer at Canada's Toronto Star, said having meaningful, direct conversations with clients about this concept has persuaded them to commit more advertising support to The Star and to local journalism: “We’re in a place now where we’re competing against Big Tech companies and winning more than our fair share of advertising dollars back.”

Talking with clients directly has helped them recognise they have a responsibility to invest in local Canadian media to support the newsrooms that support democracy.

As a publisher, Torstar has a platform and a staff of like-minded people to help get this message out, Beckerman said. The Star plans to run an op-ed, along with its competitors, about the ethical media supply chain. Torstar’s owner and publisher, Jordan Bitove, also speaks publicly about the concept and its role in supporting good journalism.

All of this is making a transformational difference, Beckman said. He can think of 10 examples of companies that had spent US$50,000 last year that are now poised to spend more than US$1 million: “They are putting their money where their mouth is.”

Building the right team

Media24

Agile, innovative and trustworthy: These are qualities South Africa’s Media24 looks for in its team. Gone are the days where salespeople were only worried about print advertising, negotiating, and being able to schmooze the clients. There’s so much more expected of staff that Tasmia Ismail, Media24’s general manager of commercial, doesn’t think of them as salespeople anymore. She calls them sophisticated consultants.

“We'll talk about sort of reorienting our sales forces in order to cater for what the market is actually demanding at this point,” Ismail said. “You have now salespeople in the market having to counter a strategy around what influencers are doing particularly well for brands and, whether we see that positively or whether we see that negatively, it is impacting how brands are spending their marketing budgets.”

Sales staffers also need to be familiar with not just ad tech but also reach and engagement in order to be successful, Ismail added.

“I think we see the challenge we have with clients at the moment, they will compare reach on social versus reach on publisher platforms and we need to be able to counter that,” Ismail said. “And I think again it comes back to the type of narrative and confidence in which we can groom our salespeople to have these conversations.”

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