Reinventing digital advertising (now that cookiepocalypse is not happening)

Left to right: Fiona Salmon (Mantis), Charlie Celino (News UK) and Madeleine White (The Audiencers)

Credit: Mousetrap Media / Frank Noon

"The cookiepocalypse has actually been quite positive for publishers," said Charlie Celino, head of strategic partnerships at News UK, speaking at Newsrewired last week. He was highlighting the silver lining that has come out of Google's third-party cookies saga which has ended in the phase-out not happening (as of yet): "It's allowing us to put our readers first and take back control of our content."

News companies like News UK have responded by building in-house advertising platforms - in this case, Nucleus - to broker their own first-party deals with advertisers. Newsgroup Reach plc has done the same, building the Mantis platform, which can be licensed to other publishers, like LadBible and Netmums.

Challenging advertising limitations

Mantis managing director Fiona Salmon revealed that it pays to have tools built by, and for, newsrooms as the current keyword-blocking systems are surprisingly blunt. For instance, Reach's sports content saw 56 per cent of articles blocked due to words like "shoot" and "shot" - despite being completely safe in context.

Such examples of brand safety are something that Mantis can mitigate, and is in fact, not a real concern.

Research by Stagwell this year debunked the widespread belief that humans correlate brand ads with the news stories next to them - adverts next to 'brand safe' and 'brand not safe' content score equally well (66 and 67 per cent respectively).

"[Audiences] don't feel any correlation between the editorial piece and the advert. We know it's church and state. That's super important because what's been happening over the last years is brands have been boycotting news with blanket blocking," Salmon says.

Reckitt, a major advertiser, has since taken a "big step forward" with Mantis in only blocking politically biased political news and human loss of life stories.

The path forward for smaller publishers

Take this as solace that news publishers of all sizes are in a position to bargain for their own ad deals. But advertisers will be looking for strong brands, engaged communities and high-quality content.

It matters to build up known segments of audiences through data collection. Both News UK and Reach plc have veered into the 'pay or consent' model, which asks website visitors to pay a monthly fee for access, to consent to tracking, or to be walled off from the content entirely. This can be seen on websites like The Sun or The Mirror, at the risk of alienating audiences, to either monetise the user or feed platforms like Mantis or Nucleus so they can serve up targeted ads.

An alternative to consider is a data clean room (DCR) which is a secure software tool that allows advertisers and brands to run targeted advertising campaigns while respecting user privacy.

On DCR, Celino says: "Don't expect the double or triple-digit increases that some will [predict], it's just a slow learning graph off knowing who the audience are, utilise those into segments and then activate them when they land on the page."

Consider polls: The Sun has used polls for the last five years to increase user engagement and logged-in users, and it is a tactic now used across other News UK brands like talkSPORT and The Times.

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