THE HIGHLIGHTS
Looking to the future of the digital ad market
SPONSORED BY the ozone project
With trust in online media suffering setbacks in recent years, traditional media owners are now setting up platforms to compete with the digital giants
Consumers and marketers alike are demanding increased transparency from digital media, so news brands - like other media owners - are pooling resources to create a new kind of digital advertising platform.
Despite traditional media owners having a wealth of high-quality, trusted content, newer digital companies have built a dominant slice of the online ad market. However the advent of ‘fake news’ has raised questions over what types of content can truly be trusted as well as being a reputable environment for brands to advertise in.
There’s a perception gap that only social media brands have platform ability
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Jo Bacon, Reach
Reach CMO Jo Bacon on news brands as ad platforms
On top of that, recent headlines about viewability, brand safety and ad fraud across a large proportion of digital advertising inventory have raised challenging questions for the industry.
Damon Reeve, CEO of The Ozone Project - a premium publisher collaboration set up to address these challenges in digital advertising - told the Festival of Marketing that the “integrity” of content is more in the spotlight today, as is the appropriate use of data for advertising purposes.
As professional, trusted content creators face up to the market dominance of Google and Facebook, The Ozone Project is building the digital advertising environment of the future, with a focus on “real people and greater attention”. By using news brands’ ad inventory on a ‘platform’ scale, they can compete more effectively, in a transparent and easily accessible way.
Publishers are on a mission to close the gap between advertisers and their businesses, creating a more direct, trusted and valuable relationship within the digital advertising space. But first they have to change perceptions.
Jo Bacon, CMO of Reach - the owner of the Mirror, Express and Star to name a few titles - warned that industry terminology does not help publishers. “There’s a perception gap that it is only the social media brands who have platform ability. Actually news brands, particularly collectively, have a platform ability. We just don’t refer to ourselves using the same language,” she argued.
She added: “One of the things we can do to help ourselves is to think of ourselves as digital platforms with greater power and better control than most social media brands. We operate relevant, credible spaces.”
The panel agreed that thinking creatively about the environments in which ads exist in is critical to their success. As such, they emphasised the need for marketers to work closer with media owners and to design digital experiences which are truly “immersive”, as opposed to aiming to be “disruptive”.
“Audiences don’t want multiple pop-ups,” warned Bacon. “They want your brands to sit seamlessly within the context of an editorially curated experience.”
The Telegraph's Chris Forrester on the metrics that matter
In the digital era, the right questions are not being asked, with the focus instead tending to be on how cheaply audiences can be delivered, claimed Chris Forrester, The Telegraph’s chief revenue officer.
“[Marketers] often forget to ask questions like ‘Where will it be seen? What frame of mind will the audience be in and on what type of device?’,” he said. “Just because an ad looks the same as it would on a news site - the same shape, the same size - doesn’t mean it’s consumed in the same way.”
Fortunately, Reeve pointed out that a shift is happening in terms of digital measurement, towards the “media effectiveness measures” marketers use to evaluate other channels, as opposed to the ad tech metrics that have dominated digital advertising in the past.
“We’ve started to look at things like scroll speed,” agreed Forrester. “So we are asking ‘Have readers hovered over an advert?’ and ‘How long was the article itself?’ It’s early days for all of us and we’ll probably all start working together on it. We’re getting better at doing that, as an industry.”
Bacon also stressed the benefit of those “direct conversations” between marketers and professional content publishers in order to devise targeted brand strategies. “Build longer-term relationships, rather than coming in and doing one-off campaigns.”
According to Reeve, The Ozone Project will continue to grow in scale and it is currently in talks with other creators of content, such as broadcasters and magazine publishers, in order to provide marketers an opportunity to reach highly attentive audiences in quality environments that will deliver real business results. ■
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