• Facing a Cookieless Future, Marketers Trust Performance-Driven Paid Media

There’s no denying that the prospect of a cookieless future is concerning to many. For years, Magazine Manager Blog has written about various cookie concerns (and the data-driven strategies to address them).

New data from Mediaocean’s 2022 Market Report and 2023 Outlook confirms much of that, with 37% of the more than 600 respondents saying a lack of preparedness for a cookieless future (“and other data deprecation relating to consumer privacy”) was the largest area of concern for their media and marketing initiative.

• Google Says Automation Will Support Advertisers in a World Without Cookies

Google has offered an in-depth look at how automation will pick up where cookies leave off when targeting ads without browser cookies. The company is collaborating with the advertising industry to transition to new private ad technologies that eliminate support for third-party cookies in Chrome during the second half of 2024.

Joey Trotz, director of product management for Privacy Sandbox at Google, in a blog post, describes how the post-cookie project will change its advertising platform once cookies are no longer used. Turns out the project relied highly on automation.

• Data in Advertising: How Publishers Retain User Trust

As more users expect transparency, control, and choice over how their data is used, how can publishers build consumer trust, protect user privacy, and create a more responsible web? Becky Dutta, VP of Customer Success at Permutive, and Mathew Rance, Head of Commercial Data at Immediate Media, met as part of the Responsible Web Roadshow to discuss how publishers are addressing the issue…

• Ad Market Falls for 6th Consecutive Month in November, Signaling Potential Recession

The U.S. ad market fell 6.7% in November, marking the sixth consecutive month of declines and giving impetus to the notion that the ad industry is in recession, according to MediaPost’s analysis of data from Standard Media Index’s (SMI) U.S. ad market tracker.

• Ad Spending Forecast: Cloudy With a Chance of Recession

To be clear, things are bleak — online advertising’s uncurbed euphoria slammed into a harsh reality this year. The layoffs and closures across the media industry are proof of that phenomenon.

Granted, it was inevitable because the rampant growth spurt online advertising has been on was always going to run out of steam. This slowdown is providing a much-needed reality check of sorts for swathes of the market. Inevitable because the rampant growth spurt online advertising has been on was always going to run out of steam.

• Google Apologizes for Ad Manager Outage, Raising Questions on Dependency

Google apologized last week for the “inconvenience” it caused online publishers when its ad managing platform stopped serving ads and prevented sites from generating revenue and advertising agency representatives from serving ads for brands. This once again raises questions about agencies’ and brands’ dependency on Google advertising services.

• Recirculation: How It Can Have a Major Impact on Both Traffic Growth and Revenue for Publishers

Recirculation is a real-time analytics metric that compares the number of people on a given page to the number of people who have continued their journey from that article to another one on the same site. In other words, it’s the percentage of readers that make it past the first article of their visit. While some readers will naturally engage with multiple articles per visit, most need extra help getting deeper into a site. In fact, across the Chartbeat network, 89% of readers will leave a site after engaging with just one article. While that might be a discouraging figure at first glance, it’s also a testament to the importance of Recirculation in your engagement strategy.

• Gartner: Uncertainty Clouds CMO Prospects for 2023

Marketers have had a rough go of it in 2022, and Gartner’s CMO predictions for next year don’t herald happier times. One of the biggest factors pressuring the role remains the economy. While some of the inflationary pinch has eased in recent months, fears a recession will hit next year endure. Marketing departments are often among the first targeted for cutbacks in a downturn.

• Publishers: Search Traffic Continues to Outpace Social, and Other Global Audience Insights From Q3

The third quarter of 2022 saw mobile traffic and engaged time remain largely unchanged while loyalty increased and search traffic slipped in some regions. While most regions saw a decrease or no change in their percentage of pageviews from Search, it’s worth noting that the channel as a whole is on the rise. Raw traffic from Google in particular has risen in 2022, while Facebook traffic has remained flat.

• Surprising Beneficiaries of Ad Slowdown: Small Publishers, Traditional Media

If there is a positive story in the ad-spending downgrades being issued this week by the major agency forecasting units, it’s that ad budgets are becoming far less concentrated among the big digital platforms and the biggest beneficiaries are smaller digital publishers and — surprise — traditional media.

• Ad Revenue Forecast Shrinks for 2023 Amid Economic Uncertainty, Magna Says

Manga predicts that 2023 will be a slow year for U.S.-based advertisers, with sales growing just 4% to $330 billion. This is largely due to the lack of cyclical and political ad spending. When this type of spending is excluded, the firm predicts ad spending will grow 6%, with market recovery in the second half of the year. Following a small uptick in ad revenues in 2022 for traditional media owners, Magna’s predicts that ad sales for publishing and television will shrink by 3% and 4% respectively in 2023.

• Meta Threatens to Remove News From Platform if Journalism Bill Passes

Meta Platforms on Monday threatened to remove news from its social networking service if Congress passes the controversial Journalism Competition and Preservation Act.

“If Congress passes an ill-considered journalism bill as part of national security legislation, we will be forced to consider removing news from our platform altogether rather than submit to government-mandated negotiations that unfairly disregard any value we provide to news outlets through increased traffic and subscriptions,” spokesperson Andy Stone said Monday on Twitter.

• Yahoo and Taboola Enter 30-Year-Old Commercial Agreement, Developing a Leading Offering for Advertisers and Publishers

Together Yahoo and Taboola are forming a contextual data powerhouse to reach consumers, important as cookies go extinct. As advertisers want to reach consumers at massive scale, but shouldn’t have to be trapped in walled gardens, this deal gives them massive scale from two trusted pioneers.

• Ad Consent Now a Top Issue for Publishers

Consent will be a critical issue for publishers next year, according to Richard Reeves, managing director of the Association of Online Publishers (AOP).  Specifically, Reeves means informed programmatic ad consent, as opposed to, say, email opt-in. Publishers are seeking tech solutions that “do not rely on personally identifiable information,” Reeves said in an interview with the UK’s PressGazette.  

• Publishers Are Adapting Advertising Strategies for a Privacy-First World

So much of the attention around the death of third-party cookies and its impact on the digital advertising industry is focused on the implications for brands and consumers, which is far from the complete picture. The digital publishing industry in the U.S. is massive and set to be shaken up as it heads into the cookieless future. However, for those publishers that leverage the right technologies, the death of cookies should be seen as an opportunity to generate new revenue streams and rebuild trust with their readers.

• Publishers Are Turning to Headless CMS Solutions: Here’s Why

A headless system lets publishers store their content in one place, but distribute to any frontend. With more and more digital channels and devices available to consumers, publishers have had to adapt their publishing processes to reach audiences where they spend their time. This has led to a rise in demand for headless content management systems (CMS) that store content centrally, but distribute it across multiple display options.

• ‘Growth has persisted’: Continued Increase in Digital Content Consumption Indicates Potential for Greater Ad Revenues

The digital habits people worldwide picked during the pandemic have persisted. A new report shares how the continued rise in the use of digital content creates ongoing opportunities for publishers. “Global digital content consumption continues to soar,”—55% of people report spending more time each day consuming content now than they did pre-pandemic, according to a new report by data and analytics platform, DoubleVerify. Further, two of three (66%) say they intend to continue pursuing online hobbies they began during the pandemic.

• Google Publishes Guidelines for Its Ranking Systems

Google has published a help document that outlines its “notable” ranking systems deployed throughout the years. Some of them are still in use today, while others are not. The list outlines how the company defines each system, how it is used, and what it means for Google Search. The document, A guide to Google Search ranking systems, lists the ranking systems currently used in Google Search, and those that the company retired.

• Why Identity-Driven Clean Rooms May Be Part of the Solution to Marketing’s Challenges

As privacy regulations and browsers crack down on third-party cookies, marketers are searching for alternative solutions that will help them better understand audiences. Enter identity-driven data clean rooms, which many marketers believe will serve as a more privacy-focused method for analyzing and activating customer data.

• Advertisers Oppose Privacy Rules, Watchdogs Call for Curbs

The ad industry and advocacy groups on Monday weighed in with the Federal Trade Commission on potential new privacy rules, with the ad industry voicing opposition to possible regulations, but consumer advocates contending that new rules are needed.

• Google Ads Cost Per Leads Rose for 91% of Industries Analyzed

The cost per lead has increased significantly, with 21 of 23 industries seeing an increase year-over-year. The average overall increase — 19% — is significantly higher than last year’s increase of 5%, in contrast to 2020’s decrease of 4%, but similar to 2019’s increase of 21%, according to a benchmark study from WordStream by LOCALiQ.

• Survey: Email Marketing Provides the Best ROI

There’s building for the future — that is, doing the foundational work that will pay untold dividends down a strictly-sunny road — and then there’s planning for the future. Planning requires keeping the rainy-day forecast in mind and taking necessary precautions. And with the current concerns of a recession looming, those planning considerations are being revisited or reconsidered all over the globe in many industries

• 1 Year Later – Identity Adoption Urgency Doubles for Publishers and Marketers: Global Study

Lotame recently released findings from its ‘Beyond the Cookie: Next Generation Customer Acquisition & Retention for Marketers & Publishers’ report. This third report in the ‘Beyond the Cookie’ research series examines how marketers and publishers are addressing customer acquisition and retention in the runup to a post third-party cookie digital advertising landscape. Conducted in September 2022, the report polled over 1,400 respondents across seven global markets (U.S, UK, Mexico, Australia, Colombia, India and Singapore) to examine identity’s role in the cookieless future, how they are building a next-gen tech stack and their advertising investments today and in the future.

• Some Readers Are Canceling Digital Subscriptions

Readers are pruning the number of digital publications they subscribe to, according to a new study by Toolkits and National Research Group.  Of consumers polled, 29% plan to reduce the number of online subscriptions they hold by the end of the year, 16% significantly so. However, 27% expect to add to the number, and 44% will maintain their totals.

• The Challenges of First-Party Data Capture and Strategy

A report from Merkle is again shining a light on brands and marketers as they operate amidst ongoing privacy issues, though the surprising takeaway may just be the seemingly lack of concern some are showing. The Q4 2022 Performance Media Report surveyed 250 “marketing decision-makers” across a variety of industries to gauge their mood and methods. Of those, only 29% said they strongly agreed with the statement: I’m concerned about the impact of the cookieless future on my business

• Google Topics Attracts Marketers, Publishers As Identity Adoption Becomes Urgent

Google Topics, the newest entrant to the identity space, is the most popular solution when it comes to compliance with privacy regulations to identify and target consumers with ads. It’s actively used or tested by 71% of respondents to a recent Lotame study. The use of probabilistic or predictive solutions like Cohorts, contextual, authenticated email-based and Google Topics has grown 50% year-over-year (YoY), demonstrating a larger jump than any other identity category.

• Web Summit 2022: Five Takeaways for Publishers

We’ve just returned from a week in Lisbon attending the Web Summit. We will be posting a number of in-depth features from the event in due course, but below are some key ‘front of mind’ takeaways. Bottom line: Publishers need to rebuild audience trust and micropayments could soon have their day in the sun. The publisher track featured presentations and panel interviews with a raft of publishers including Vice, Axios, Washington Post, TechCrunch, Teen Vogue, The Atlantic, Fast Company, and more. Here are five key front-of-mind takeaways.

• Why 2023 Will Usher in a Third-Party Data Renaissance

Marketers have been riding a years-long roller coaster regarding new privacy laws and policies governing how they can use data to guide their campaigns and customer relationships. At every turn, they’ve received a constant piece of advice: to avoid disruption in third-party data availability, build first-party data assets.  While that’s good advice for many marketers, it’s also not enough. For most brands, third-party data is still a fundamental requirement for enriching and scaling the information they use for effective marketing, particularly acquisition efforts.

• Google Ads Data Hub Becomes Two Offerings With Distinct Focuses

Google Ads Data Hub (ADH), a cloud measurement solution based on privacy, will become two separate dedicated platforms. The move will allow Google to build more tailored solutions on each to support the needs of two distinct types of customers. One will become Ads Data Hub for Measurement Partners. The other will become Ads Data Hub for Marketers. The features being developed for each will let Google provide the most value each market. It also will help marketers make the most of first-party data.

• In the Age of First-Party Data, Publishers Are Rethinking Their Approach to Optimal Ad Space

There are signs that publishers are cutting ad counts to protect reader data. In print, more advertisements generally mean more money. That legacy thinking has dominated digital publishing for a long time. But there are signs that publishers are cutting ad counts, rethinking their approach to optimal ad space in the age of first-party data.

• ‘Google is really nailing us’: Publishers Re-Shift Commerce Strategies After Platform Releases Flurry of Algorithm Updates

As always, Google can cause chaos for publishers depending on the digital behemoth’s whims. This autumn was a whirlwind for publishers as Google released not one but three algorithm changes over the course of a month that affected content rankings, specifically of product reviews. It’s another example of how the tech giant can cause disruption for publishers that have built businesses around trying to take advantage of its algorithm to reach people.

• How Dynamic Paywalls Help Publishers Connect Potential Subscribers With the Right Offer at the Right Time

Dynamic or intelligent paywalls have great potential and are being used by many publishers successfully. John Wilpers, author of FIPP’s annual Innovation in Media report called dynamic paywalls the “hottest new tool” that are helping publishers secure, “significant sustainable reader revenue.”  Dynamic paywalls use machine learning and artificial intelligence to adapt to users’ behavior and restrict access to content accordingly. They can automatically alter article limits and even deliver personalized subscription pitches based on readers’ consumption habits.

• GroupM Drops New Evidence of Disconnect Between Economy and Ad Spending

While analysts, pundits and media continue to focus on negative signals in what is expected to be a recession, “we’re still not there,” GroupM’s Brian Wieser points out in this week’s installment of the “This Week Next Week” podcast he co-hosts with Kate Scott-Dawkins, who added that while there are some negative signals coming out of recent big marketer earnings calls, “consumer balance sheets” remain “relatively healthy” and above pre-pandemic levels, and U.S. jobless claims are “still quite low.”

• ‘News publishers expect revenues to more than double this year’: World Press Trends 2022-23 Preview

In a presentation at the World News Media Congress 2022 held in Zaragoza, WAN-IFRA’s Dean Roper gave an insight into the key trends that are emerging as part of the research into the forthcoming World Press Trends 2022-2023 report… Whilst the news industry is encountering strong headwinds, publishers are expecting significant growth in revenue in 2022, spurred on by investment in new revenue streams. Of these, publisher events are leading the way … and yet … advertising still remains king.

• Ad Spend Declines for Fourth Consecutive Month in September, Report Finds

Ad spend continues to reflect tightening budgets and economic uncertainty, according to Standard Media Index’s September 2022 Core Data report, which found that ad spend was down 5% in September year-over-year (YoY), continuing a four-month downfall.  The report also found that ad spend by channel in the third quarter YoY is down 6%. Coinciding with the lows, major media companies including Disney, Comcast, Paramount Global, Meta and Google all saw revenue fall in September YoY.

• Overcoming ‘Data Desperation’ As the Deprecation of the Third-Party Cookie Looms

The digital privacy landscape has shifted dramatically in recent years, forcing publishers to exist in a constant state of experimentation. Condé Nast (CN) has navigated these new contours of digital advertising while simultaneously reinventing itself for the modern era. Pamela Drucker Mann, global chief revenue officer at Condé Nast, joined Adweek’s senior media reporter Mark Stenberg at Publishing Week to discuss how the publishing giant has balanced the needs of brands with the privacy of readers through a multi-pronged approach.

• Reevaluating Open Rates and Email Marketing Success One Year After Apple’s Privacy Changes

It’s been just over a year since Apple implemented its much-discussed-about, much-fussed-about Mail Privacy Protection feature, and the initial first-year findings confirm many of the impacts that email marketers predicted. Apple’s intent was to provide iPhone iOS15 users who wished to opt-in with “even more transparency and control over the data users provide to apps.” To those third-party marketers, Apple’s feature would prevent them from knowing whether their emails had been opened by automatically impacting the open-rate and thus upending one of the most important metrics for email-marketing success.

• Build Resilience to Stay Competitive in a Cookieless World

Performance marketing inherently promises results—and practitioners rely on customer data to satisfy the expectations set. But the increasing restrictions around privacy has forced brands need to find alternatives to cookies and third-party data sources to build digital resilience and stay competitive in a privacy-first marketing ecosystem… Here’s how marketers can adapt to changing privacy regulations and develop digital resilience for a cookieless world.

• ‘Durable growth and stability’: Subscription Business Revenues Grow 9% More Than S&P 500, Zuora Reports

Times of economic uncertainty can favor recurring revenue businesses, which appears to be playing out today, based on an analysis of SEI companies in the first half of 2022. Subscription Economy businesses continued to show resilience, growing at faster rates compared to the S&P 500 and U.S. retail sales. Churn also remained lower than pre-pandemic levels, demonstrating that these companies are retaining subscriber relationships at higher rates compared to before the pandemic.

• Google Announces First-Party Solution for Publishers

Google officially unveiled PAIR (or Publisher Advertiser Identity Reconciliation), its latest option for publishers and advertisers using Display & Video 360 to “securely and privately reconcile their first-party data for audiences who have visited both an advertiser’s and a publisher’s site.” In contrast to the walking-dead phase-out that Google is giving third-party cookies, its PAIR processes would be founded upon first-party data, or information that customers have willingly agreed to share through their direct relationships as opposed to pooled data.