With the decline of third-party cookies and increasing amounts of legislation aiming to protect users’ privacy, media companies are taking charge of their data transformation journeys.

Consumers already are wary and skeptical about being tracked. Trust has eroded; privacy is their utmost priority. Thus, advertisers have to formulate alternate methods to reach their target audience while still being compliant with regulations.

As media entities and advertisers alike adapt to the ever-shifting consumer landscape, INMA Advertising Initiative Lead Mark Challinor offered a sage piece of advice during the recent Digital Advertising Master Class:

“Just make sure that every digital advertising campaign you create for your advertisers or adapt on their behalf feels authentic, engaging, and is as relatable as possible to the target audience.”

Media leaders joined Challinor to share how their companies are leveraging first-party data and embracing automation to remain competitive in their offerings to advertisers.

ITV

Data is a big buzzword today, but Lara Izlan, head of data strategy for U.K. public broadcast network ITV, said it’s not a word media companies can afford to ignore.

“I think becoming data-driven is no longer a choice, it’s no longer a strategy. It’s basically essential for all transforming businesses. But there’s nowhere this is more true than in media,” she said. “And by media, I mean all aspects of media.”

ITV’s data transformation plan was launched about two years ago and is a five-year plan. As ITV was structuring the programme, it identified three core principles for how it would ensure it was not only satisfying the data requirements for the business today but to ensure it would have longevity.

One of those three core principles is about being responsible by design. This responsibility includes privacy, cybersecurity, data governance, and more. ITV ensures it is building security and privacy by design from the bottom up of its data infrastructure, Izlan said:

“We need to ensure that we respect and protect that data first and foremost, but by ensuring that we have responded by design in the foundations of our data strategy, it also means that we can then build on that to enable secure data collaboration with partners.”

Collaborating around first-party data

DIAR

Bente Klemetsdal, executive vice president of sales and marketing for Norway’s Aller Media, said nine out of 10 Norwegians use digital news media every week. What’s more, 45% of them read news “directly from the source and not social media — Norwegians trust publishers.”

To better capitalise all that first-party data and honour reader trust, Aller Media and Amedia established DIAR, a joint marketplace, in 2019.

By joining forces, Aller and Amedia could combine their user databases across more than 130 publications, allowing them to better compete with multinational companies. Out of a population of 5.2 million people in Norway, DIAR has a collective reach of 2.6 million. This puts them in a far better position against the likes of Facebook or Google, with daily reach of 3.4 million and 3.6 million, respectively.

“Size matters,” Klemetsdal said, “because it makes us relevant.”

It’s all about the story — and who owns it.

That’s what Helene Slettemoen, DIAR’s strategy and insight director, preaches. That includes showing the numbers to your advantage and blocking the extra noise.

With direct sales, the publisher is in control of the information and campaign. With programmatic, the client has the advantage of building its advertising plan and making changes. The DIAR marketplace, however, pulls back the curtains and enables the sides to see the same information, thereby conducting business with transparency and efficiency.

The marketplace is an intuitive system; the advertiser can book a placement, access first-party data, and set campaign goals. The publisher can monitor the progress of the campaign creation and anticipate changes and needs.

The marketplace also allows publishers to adjust prices based on supply and demand, create new ad products, offer insight reports, tailor key performance indicators (metrics), track campaigns and make changes in real time.

To make communication easier, there even is a chat function so questions can be answered by a real person.

“For too long, we as publishers have become a mere distributor of impressions,” Slettemoen said. “We’ve been passengers in the back seat, so to speak, and we’ve been relying on the driver and not knowing where it takes us. But now we’re actually in the driver’s seat.”

Ekstra Bladet

As privacy laws tighten and approaches to third-party data evolve, media companies need to adapt. With the use of third-party data becoming ever more fraught, Thomas Lue Lytzen, director of sales and tech at Ekstra Bladet, said his company has been building its capacity to use its first-party data in this fast-changing ad sales landscape.

Ekstra Bladet has been collecting various types of user data for some time and plans to rely more on that first-party data moving forward. The company has a mix of data on various types of users. For example, some personal and behavioral data for digital and print subscribers and logged-in users, and behavioral and campaign data for anonymous users. Some of it is structured, and some of it isn’t.

“We all have these massive data streams going on but aren’t using it actively yet,” Lytzen said. “All that together, that is what we are going to use to enhance our businesses.”

Ekstra Bladet is now devoting more time and resources to get a full picture of what they have so they can build the technological and organisational capacity to use it.

Lytzen stressed that publishers should all start to deliver first-party data to the market, as well as focus on the contextual and classify their own content. Having contextual also allows publishers to do brand safety in-house without third parties, Lytzen said: “I really feel as publishers, that is so close to our hearts. We should decide on that, together with brands. Third parties should not be able to do that.”

AI and automation

MediaNews Group

MediaNews Group thinks of sales automation as a way to free up “people resources” to do bigger and more effective tasks. They are giving advertisers a self-serve option that provides instant gratification in posting ads themselves immediately. With automation technology like AI and ChatGPT, it’s more convenient than ever for advertisers to submit ads without having to wait on face-to-face or in-person interaction.

“They want something that meets their needs,” Latha Rao-Cheney, senior vice president of local sales for MediaNews Group, said. “This gives our reps more time to focus on growing their account base, looking at upsell potential, looking at creating really unique solutions for our clients.”

Once MediaNews Group decided to play in the sales automation space, they had to make sure they had the proper internal resources to properly execute.

First, they took a look at all the categories of their business and identified which were good candidates for sales automation. This was everything from retail, classifieds, recruitment, and real estate. Then they had to establish some guardrails around how much time they wanted their sales reps spending on inbound sales versus outbound sales opportunities.

“When it comes to automation, please make no mistake, it’s never going to be 100% automated,” Rao-Cheney said. “At some point, you are going to require the human touch, whether it’s releasing the ad through the pagination, whether it’s any tech support or troubleshooting.”

Generative AI

AI offers tremendous opportunities in areas of personalisation and expanding into new markets with different languages. Because ChatGPT understands things like marketing theory, INMA’s Readers First Initiative Lead Greg Piechota said it can answer marketing questions and problems and even provide feedback to the work you’re doing.

But there are also some legal and ethical challenges that are still unclear, and public perception could remain a stumbling block to overcome. Recent surveys indicate that people are comfortable with AI making recommendations for purchases but are concerned about using AI to create journalistic content.

“People are likely not ready for it. So even if you think the tools are ready, the public is not,” he said. “And this might be actually an important factor when deciding how far you should go with it.”

As AI infiltrates our world in more ways, Piechota suggested more experimentation is necessary, and this is a good time to learn how to use the tools to run ad campaigns and create content. He urged members to become adept at writing prompts for ChatGPT and becoming familiar with how it works.

“AI won’t steal your job, but someone using AI might,” he said. “So perhaps use the opportunity when vendors are democratising access to those tools to learn by doing.”

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