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AOP Programmatic

‘We mustn’t give up as publishers and become aggregators of audience’ – News UK’s Abba Newbery on programmatic trading

By Angela Haggerty, Reporter

October 9, 2014 | 4 min read

Publishers and agencies must work more closely together to ensure the value of content isn’t lost amid the rise in programmatic trading, according to News UK director of advertising strategy Abba Newbery.

Abba Newbery

Speaker: Abba Newbery

Speaking at the Association of Online Publishers' (AOP) autumn conference in London, Newbery warned that publishers risked forgetting purpose and becoming “audience aggregators” if they allowed the programmatic space to be led too dominantly by the tech side, and said the issue was particularly prominent as publishers tried to monetise mobile more effectively.

“The real challenge for us is that as a publisher when you look at revenue growth coming through programmatic – and we’re growing mobile through what we would call the worst of web trading – there’s a danger that a cold hard trading desk, as efficient on the agency side as it is, doesn’t and can’t value the environment,” she said.

“I think the real challenge for us as publishers is to work with the agencies to get this right because we truly believe that engaged content makes advertising more effective.

“We did a piece of research recently speaking to our subscribers, and we found the very fact that we give them choice means they have a stronger relationship with us, and that stronger relationship with our brands doubles the advertising impact. We’ve got to find a way of bringing that through.

“The principles of programmatic are great in terms of automation and efficiency, but we mustn’t let it get in the way of the value of the content or we have to give up as publishers and say we are just aggregators of audience.”

News UK brands the Sun and the Times sit behind paywalls, giving the publisher more specific information about its customers. It also recently announced the launch of a content marketing agency to capitalise on the boom in native advertising, and commercial content will sit outside of the paywall.

Newbery added that the evolving media model had led to a change in the kinds of skills sought by the publisher to further its commercial strategies, with programmatic in particular prompting the need for an investment in staff from analytical backgrounds and a rethink in how publishers themselves value their data.

“The biggest skills gap that we see and changes we need to make – and I think agencies have got there before us – is in audience behaviour. As publishers we now have the data to scribe that behaviour but we’ve been too obsessed with top line reach figures and that game is gone for us.

“So our big investment in terms of skills is around analysts, people who can understand consumer behaviour, which will allow us to have different conversations with advertisers and with that advertising has a better outcome.”

Earlier at the conference, Future chief executive Zillah Byng-Maddick said in a keynote speech that the evolution of digital in the media industries had led to Future no longer considering itself as just a publisher.

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