Month: November 2021

“Suit are now less clean-cut, however,” said Libby Page, senior market editor at Net-a-Porter. “Oversized and boxy styles are proving to be popular.”

October data from the personal styling service StitchFix showed that demand for men’s suits tripled over the past year, regardless of more people working from home. And across both men’s and women’s fashion, demand for well-fitted styles that are loose or flexible, without being baggy, has increased since the pandemic began. That includes suit pants with partially elastic waistbands. Washable suits have also become more popular.

This trend has been brewing for a long time. June 2021 data from StitchFix showed that there was a growing interest in colorful blazers. At the time, the company’s career wear sales had increased 30% since March 2020. 

Sarah LaFleur, founder and CEO of fashion brand M.M.LaFleur, has seen a similar uptick in demand for comfortable suits and statement blazers. She said the brand’s seen “strong sales” for both its Porter Jacket and Lilia Jacket. These jackets include quirky fringe elements and are made by the Japanese knitwear manufacturer Yonetomi, which specializes in luxurious knitwear.

“They’re incredibly comfortable. They’re crafted from a series of knit panels, which means that, even though they look like tweed, they’re stretchy, highly wrinkle-resistant and lightweight enough for year-round wear,” LaFleur told Glossy via email. “Customers are purchasing items that spruce up their Zoom appearances, knowing that these pieces will also translate into post-pandemic life.” 

She added, “We think this shift toward comfort is a permanent shift in the market, and it is something we will continue to prioritize in our upcoming collections.” The company is also seeing an increase in demand for blazers in jewel tones, including pink and teal. 

All things considered, the fashion impact of the past 19 months may mirror the fallout of the previous pandemic, in 1918.

“Dress historians have recently associated the 1920s fashion response to the 1918 influenza as being about the party mode and the decade’s new Art Deco glamour. However, it’s also true that waistlines dropped to hip level, gowns became much looser overall and corsets disappeared,” said Jancye Hill, the founder of vintage pattern company Revival Designed and an expert in historical sewing patterns and fashion designs. “The decade also saw a turn to leisurewear in situations where only formal dress had been expected.”

She added, “The 21st century’s passion for activewear began in the 1920s.”

These days, fashion brands are seeing higher demand for activewear, as well as more comfortable workwear. 

“Covid has accelerated the [move] to more informal clothing and has increased the tolerance in business settings for less traditional corporate attire,” Hill said.

The increasingly playful and comfortable styles may also reflect society’s growing resistance to traditional roles, whether that’s gender roles or the distinctions between the public and private self.

In short, suits have been around for more than 200 years, and while demand for them will continue to evolve, it’s not likely to fall off. 

For her part, LaFleur said suiting continues to be a core part of her business.

“Many of our customers are choosing to mix-and-match suiting separates with more casual pieces, such as sneakers, to create looks that are suitable for their hybrid home-office lives,” she said. “While we’ve always paid close attention to comfort in our designs, the definition of ‘comfortable’ was redefined during the pandemic.”

The program is one of the ways the company is looking to combat burnout for its roughly 400 employees, many of whom are adventurous and love to travel but were unable to do so early on in the pandemic, according to Dimitris Psaltoulis, vp of people at Blueground. Rather than telling people they need to return to the office, Blueground is exploring what flexibility could mean for the company with the program. Blueground is one of a number of companies trying out new perks or offerings to help mitigate burnout for employees.

“After a year of COVID, we said ‘what is the future? Should we start finding a new office?,’” said Psaltoulis. “Our vision is that people should be flexible [with where they live] so let’s do the same for our people. Let’s give people the maximum flexibility. We said you could go anywhere you could legally work.”

At the same time, Blueground also doubled the amount of time its employees were able to stay in one of its international apartments, from two weeks to four weeks to try and makeup for pandemic-affected travel.

“It makes sense for our people,” said Psaltoulis of the apartment stays. “They get to experience the brand and the product that we have. At the same time, it helps the company. They give us feedback, tell us what works and what doesn’t. They get the experience and understand what we offer so the company also gets better and the product gets better.” 

Being able to work from various cities, travel and stay in the company’s apartments at times is a “huge perk” that helps Khuat “explore and live out personal goals while with the company,” she said. “It helps you balance personal and work life,” added Khuat. “It makes me feel more balanced than if I were working full time in the office.” (Blueground connected Digiday with Khuat and Lee for their perspective.)

Beefing up vacation policies and offering employees flexibility will likely help with employee retention and help companies be competitive now, explained talent recruiter Christie Cordes. 

“We are seeing unlimited paid vacation packages with our competitive future-forward clients,” said Cordes. “The gloves are off in talent attraction. What will retain the best talent, is truthfully caring for each and every person on the company’s payroll.”

Cordes continued: “The very best companies will be the ones who are willing and able to take the very best care of the world’s best creative minds.”

Over the past decade, the third-party cookie has grown into one of the foundational elements of the digital advertising ecosystem. In two years, it will effectively be removed when Google ends its support of third-party cookies. 

How publishers respond to this change will be one of the defining stories of the media industry’s next two years. But the paths forward are numerous, and few are well-paved. That’s why Digiday created this guide, which provides an overview of the possible responses publishers might take to the end of third-party cookies. 

In August 2019, publishers and advertisers panicked when Google claimed that after disabling third-party cookies “for the top 500 global publishers, average revenue in the treatment group decreased by 52%, with a 1 median per-publisher decline of 64%,” results determined through a randomized controlled experiment on publishers using Google Ad Manager’s programmatic services. More than 2 million publishers use AdSense to generate revenue from online advertising, indicating publishers’ dependence on a private though omnipresent company, a reality even more nerve wracking in light of Google’s now delayed deprecation of third-party cookies. 

But looked at in a different light, publishers, who for the last decade or so have been relegated to the role of merely supplying audiences for big ad tech, suddenly have leverage. The publisher has become a primary source for any registered or consent-based data that can be used to target ads in compliance with new regulations. And all of that data is just the foundation on which publishers must build to keep up with advertiser demand.

Up to $10 billion of US publisher revenue could be at stake. Most non-premium publishers depend on ad targeting through third-party cookies for over 80% of their ad revenue, according to a McKinsey study. These industry changes have resulted in a focus on experimenting with first-party data strategies within the advertising ecosystem. This resource presents a catalog of first-party data alternatives and tools, some of which are available today to both publishers and advertisers, and some that are still being developed. 

Google is not the only tech company to end support for third-party cookies, and it didn’t make that decision in a vacuum. Starting in 2018 with the enforcement of GDPR, a patchwork of anti-tracking and data privacy regulations have taken shape in Europe, the UK and individual states in the US. Regulators have become increasingly precise about acceptable use of user data for ad tracking, real-time-bidding methods and user consent. For instance, the UK Data Protection Authority ICO released guidance focused primarily on programmatic advertising practices in mid-2019. “Cookie compliance will be an increasing regulatory priority for the ICO in the future,” wrote Ali Shah, head of technology policy for the ICO.

Non-compliance faces large fines with a higher maximum amount of “£17.5 million or 4% of the total annual worldwide turnover in the preceding financial year, which can apply to failure to comply with any data protection principles, users’ individual rights or data transfers to other countries. A standard maximum fine of £8.7 million or 2% of annual worldwide turnover can be handed down not complying with provisions like administrative requirements of the legislation. 

With both PECR (UK and EU online communication regulation) and CCPA (California privacy regulation, a policy that is influencing the approaches of other US states), there are some clear constraints put on the pool of viable third-party cookie alternatives. The main issue is cookies’ ability to identify personal information about a user, usually without their consent. While the former (PECR) requires both disclosure and consent, the latter is only asking that websites disclose if and what types of cookies they are using. According to CCPA, cookies can be dropped when a user visits a website as long as they are informed; but those customers have to be given the option to opt out of the sale of their data. 

Both regulations clearly lay out the distinctions between types of personally identifiable information that is deemed problematic. In the case of cookies, it is “persistent” cookies that store personal user information post-session that present the larger threat. And IDs created using techniques like fingerprinting, email pixels and plugins that can store personal identifying information also require consent by PECR, methods that most users are even less aware of than cookies. 

Other types of cookies, like those necessary to help a site remember what’s in your shopping cart, “load balancing” cookies or an information service requested by a user (like in the case of online banking), fall under a “strictly necessary exemption” that allows sites to continue to use them largely unimpeded. As long as you are using cookies or similar technologies in ways that don’t connect to personally identifiable information, you are in the clear, which is one of the reasons why the use of cohorts, segmentation and non-personally identifying IDs (a bit of an oxymoron, but we’ll get to this later) are on the rise.

However, web analytics cookies, which are key to measuring performance, do fall under this regulation; according to the ICO website, “Analytics cookies do not fall within the ‘strictly necessary’ exemption. This means you need to tell people about analytics cookies and gain consent for their use.” Used to assess consumer behavior on a website, common analytics can help answer questions like time spent on your content, where users clicked and how many times they visited the site and its different pages. And if publishers are using a third-party analytics tool, that falls outside of a direct customer-publisher relationship. That would itself require explicit user consent. 

So with all of that red tape, what’s a modern publisher to do?

Overview

On the tail of the third-party cookie’s deprecation, first-party cookies with appropriate levels of regulation-required consent baked in have become all the rage for publishers, advertisers, and many smaller ad tech and analytics firms (though Digiday has reported on some less than transparent practices in gaining this consent). In fact, almost all alternatives being explored by publishers are related to gathering and monetizing their first-party data efficiently. This includes investment in subscriptions and other registration strategies to gather declared data. And the results are there: According to publishers, in test ad campaigns produced using first-party data, there has been upwards of 50% to 100% better performance on certain key advertising metrics compared to similar campaigns that use third-party cookie data.

Publishers who are focused on enriching their first-party data are also diversifying their revenue streams, one of the advantages being an increase in their pool of user data as they focus on registration-driving tactics like email newsletters and digital events. They’re also building more addressable audiences on the open web so agencies can see what they are buying, and partnering with advertisers and vendors to make their data directly available and accessible.

First-party user data is available to all website publishers and can include many data points that can be highly valuable to advertisers, like profile info, browsing habits, geography, language and other user preferences. But not all first-party data is user centric. With the rise of advertiser interest in contextual targeting in lieu of behavioral targeting, ad targeting that uses site metadata has quickly appreciated in value. It’s more privacy-friendly than even the most squeaky-clean user targeting since it allows publishers to target ads to certain content sections and formats as opposed to individual users. More sophisticated techniques can involve machine learning and AI tools that scan site content to better identify content within a certain topic or theme or even perform sentiment analysis to determine its context. 

Contextual data can enhance user first-party data and can be used to build more specific audience segments. One example might be running luggage ads against a travel section – you might not get the perfect target user with every impression, but the alignment between ad and user intention can be very strong.

1. Setting up registration walls

One key way publishers are reacting to regulation is to get consent and first-party data from their readers directly through registration walls. Registration walls are not new, but they’re certainly on the rise. They use pop-ups or overlays to ask users to register with their email addresses to access site content, either capped at a few articles or through an unlimited ad-supported model. This data, along with the types of pages a user visits, enhances first-party data segmentation and allows publishers to personalize the user ad experience. 

Publishers like The Guardian, LA Times and The Atlantic are gathering as much first-party data as possible before 2023, with registrations seen as the “primary source of gathering first-party data,” according to Sam Rosen, svp of growth at The Atlantic. This gives the publisher a chance to inform the reader of their privacy policy and also helps boost their subscription efforts as publishers glean interest and content preference. According to Michael Silberman, svp of strategy at Piano, conversion rates for a publisher using a registration wall can be 10 times higher for its known users versus anonymous users. 

Publishers are using registration data in experiments with dynamic paywalls, but even if a user does not subscribe and only registers, publishers still get some profile data, have the ability to log the user’s site browsing, and can target ads to them in a more personalized manner than someone who did not register – as long as they ask for (and receive) their permission.

2. Increasing the pool of user data

In order to make their first-party data more appealing to advertisers, publishers are experimenting with multiple ways to grow their addressable audience. Many publishers are pushing email newsletter registrations to gather first-party data consent directly from their users and to capture their emails to build alternative IDs. 

They are also using newsletters to generate more website traffic, as this increases the audiences advertisers can contextually target. Topical newsletters have a 20% higher open rate and twice the number of click-through rates compared with other newsletters and, obviously, they allow for better contextual targeting. In general, newsletters have overtaken Twitter in terms of a source of traffic, according to Remy Becher, vice president, product at The Economist.

Another lucrative way publishers have found to drive user traffic that spiked during covid is through digital events. Digital events often require users to register and login to event websites, further increasing the pool of authenticated users and providing a clear indicator of one of their advertiser-aligned interests: the topic of the digital event. 

“That is now the starting point of conversations with publishers,” said Tessa Barron, vp marketing for events platform ON24. “In a digital-first world, how can we give audiences the opportunity to tell us their interests so we can optimize their journeys going forward, either for ad engagement or ultimately to gain subscribers? […] Suddenly, publishers realize the digital treasure trove of information that comes with that, data you can capture and build a strategy around so you’re not reliant on third-parties.” 

According to Barron, 50% of data gathered that is not volunteered is inaccurate, but with digital events, attendees voluntarily fill out a form often containing their email address, name, location and more. This kind of information is priceless in a post-cookie world.

Advertisers are reacquainting themselves with contextual targeting, as cohort-based interest segments become a reliable method of targeting ads to users while remaining compliant. A poll conducted by Digiday Research of 146 buy-side professionals earlier in 2021 points to a pivot towards and investment in contextual advertising strategies. A little more than half of the respondents are spending more on it, and various programmatic platforms are popping up to provide services which connect to relevant audience segments. 

In a separate Digiday and Connatix survey of 100 publishers, brands and agencies on the state of contextual advertising, 53% of advertisers plan to increase their 2021 contextual budget up to 50% and 12% plan to increase spending by over 50% of current levels. Overall, 43% of advertisers are very optimistic about the future of contextual advertising, but say that capacity and accuracy of targeting or building scalable campaigns remains a challenge. 

In response to this demand and privacy regulations, publishers are experimenting with their contextual capabilities. Apart from the traditional method of tagging content pages according to the topics or beats that are covered – like fashion, cooking and travel – publishers are also investing in AI and machine learning tools that can auto-tag context categories by analyzing page text. Publishers can also classify content type according to industry standards (IAB-type categories) such as video, display, text, and images as key categories. 

Beyond page context, publishers are also experimenting with innovative ways to gather interest-based user data to power segmentation strategies. Buzzfeed and Livingly use quizzes to ascertain user preferences, while Allrecipes draws on user comments to collect signals that help them better segment users. Brand uplift studies and polling site visitors to gather consumer insights and more precise interest-based first-party data are other tactics to learn more about the users already on your site. 

“Publishers knew this was a need for years, but they didn’t always have what they needed to act on it,” said Shachar Orren, the chief marketing officer of Ex.co, a vendor that sells several tools that integrate questions and polls into publishers’ sites. While Ex.co’s tools can be used for several purposes, in the past six months, the number of times publisher clients have mentioned data collection among their needs has shot up by 60%, according to Oren.

Clever segmentation, whether it’s user-based or contextual, can incentivize advertisers to spend more to reach niche and precise audience lists. Publishers like Vox, Meredith and Insider have been investing in platforms that support contextual advertising and utilize first-party data to target ads to users. According to Insider, a client who used their Saga data platform to run part of an ad campaign saw an 11% improvement in performance metrics from first-party segments as compared to use of third-party cookies.

Case Study: The New York Times (by Lucinda Southern. Read the full article here.)

In May 2020, The New York Times announced it was phasing out the use of third-party data for audience targeting in its direct buys by 2021, a year ahead of Google originally planned to slam the gate on third-party cookie use within Chrome. Over the last year, The Times has built 45 new proprietary first-party audience segments for clients to target ads. Those segments are broken up into 6 categories: age, income, business, demographics and interest. At the beginning of July 2020, it started running campaigns using these segments. A team of a dozen people is working on the project, with more help provided by other departments. 

[Sasha Heroy, senior director, ad products and platforms, joined Digiday Publishing Summit Europe Live to discuss the steps and progress in the publisher’s first-party data strategy:]

“When we started this investigation a year ago into the feasibility of developing a first-party audience business, our first hurdle was proving we could invite readers to share information that would be useful to our advertisers, showing in a transparent way how we would use that data. In the first proof-of-concept, many more readers than anticipated were willing to share information as a truth-set for how we use these audience models. Having 6 million subscribers and many registered users is valuable for a first-party audience business, but an enormous amount of data is used to inform models that are gained from repeat visits and reading habits from registered and anonymous users in the model.

“It’s early to say what impact it will have on the second half of the year, but we have received a great deal of excitement from advertisers. The message we hear is, ‘of course we prefer first-party data, so much third-party data is known to be unreliable.’ We’re in the process of letting advertisers know our approach and whether we’ve selected the right set of audience segments and how they can evolve.”

Time to review

Pros

• Publishers are utilizing their main asset, which is data directly from their users, moving away from the role of just being a data provider to big ad tech.
• Publishers are focusing on their audience and learning more about their preferences and behavior when segmenting and creating lists.
• Compliance: Publishers are able to gain consent directly from users through registrations and site-wide disclosures.

Cons

• Compliance: In order for advertisers to efficiently target first-party user segments, publishers will still need to assign privacy friendly user IDs; certain methods of targeting in this fashion might fall out of compliance frameworks if not understood fully internally. It is also challenging to get users to consent or provide a lot of this information in the first place, especially when the method is reliant on user input in cases like profiles.
• Ad tech efficiencies: The process of creating segments and building platforms to share publisher first-party data segments might still not deliver at the same level as Google or Facebook ad tech efficiencies. This data is usually highly localized to a specific publisher and doesn’t provide the scale many advertisers have come to demand, and furthermore, advertisers might not be willing to pay a higher CPM than what the ad tech giants offer. 
• For premium publishers, making the most of their valuable first-party data makes a lot of sense. But for long-tail publishers, like a recipe site where someone checks up once a month for pancake recipes, using publisher first-party data for audience targeting or frequency capping becomes even less efficient.

But regardless of the cons, laying the groundwork for a first-party data strategy is table stakes for publishers post-cookie. “I don’t know a single publisher or marketer that doesn’t have the ‘cookieless future’ as a top priority right now,” said John Lee, corporate chief strategy officer at Merkle and president of the agency’s identity resolution platform Merkury. “The upcoming changes have gone from theoretical to very real and marketers are now starting to determine their plans to test various cookieless identity technologies [in 2021].” 

Overview

First-party data does the work of allowing publishers to target users on their own platform. But how can advertisers get more direct access to these audiences while maintaining user privacy? 

With pushback by regulators on third-party cookies and other tracking technology, the search for alternative ID methods is booming. From alliances between publishers and advertisers to inventions by ad tech companies to hashed emails and privacy-protecting ID solutions, an entire ID tech and standardization industry has emerged. By the end of 2022, US advertisers will spend an estimated $2.6 billion on ID tech solutions, according to eMarketer. 

IDs allow advertisers to target a user of interest as they visit a webpage or app. Third-party cookies currently provide this access through open ad marketplaces, but they risk “leaking” privately identifiable information to bad actors. Unless blocked, these cookies can be placed on any webpage open to programmatic advertising in the form of a script or tag and are used to create a user ID for ad targeting. Any player outside of the publishers’ walls can then target users through first-party data or a combination of first-, second- and third-party data. As we’ve already seen, this third-party option is scheduled to disappear, and with good reason. 

Privacy-friendly identifiers would allow publishers to make use of their volunteered first-party user data – such as email addresses, names, clicks and more – in larger, more open markets without compromising user privacy. These publisher first-party IDs can be matched with advertiser-created first-party IDs to find an ad placement match within DSPs or other shared tools. Most IDs are built from both deterministic identity data (easy to personally identify: name, email address) and probabilistic identity data (estimating and matching data from multiple sources to determine user preference and create identifiers). 

To keep its users’ information safe, the publisher shares a tokenized ID or something like a hash that refers to the attributes of a user or a group of users such as a location, interests, an age range or desired website activity rather than sharing that user’s information directly. A tokenized ID keeps user information within the publisher domain or system, often by assigning it a random alphanumeric string or hash before sharing it with other systems. For instance, if a unique identification number is ABC4567890, it might be transformed into a randomized token string like 58B0C9476A.

To allow advertisers to then target its users, a publisher shares the tokenized user ID in advertising ecosystems or DSPs, which are then matched with advertiser preferences or other criteria. This process of “matching” IDs or ID synchronization across the advertising ecosystem while keeping the personal identity of users secure has resulted in many new companies and offerings that deal specifically in ID graph solutions. These ID graphs help map the user ID to ad placement and determine attribution. 

Not only do tokenized or hashed IDs limit the propagation of original user data, but they also make it harder to correlate first-party data with external datasets. “In these ecosystems, the first-party cookies are inherently per-site and don’t have any cross-site abilities,” said Garrett McGrath, Magnite’s vp of product management. “Here, it’s the SSP that still has a cross-internet view of things.” This keeps the keys to the data trove in publishers’ hands. 

But it is hard to convince publishers to sign on to identity tech. “Until I hear that publishers are making more money off the identified, authenticated audiences, it doesn’t seem like I have to do anything on that front at all until we’re closer to the date [of Google’s deadline],” said Rob Beeler, who manages ads for publishers as CEO of consultancy Beeler.tech.

How it’s happening

If IDs weren’t confusing already, there are a few different ways publishers can create or adopt ID technology to allow the outside world to target their users. Here are a few. 

1. Building alternative IDs for SSPs

What is it?

Publisher IDs or publisher-provided IDs (PID/PPID) are already part of the programmatic ecosystem. Google has used them with Google Ad Manager and Amazon is also looking at their use to enhance their programmatic identifiers. 

Publishers can add particular code to their sites to create and share first-party IDs, often using open-source services or by working with tech vendors. Publishers can utilize user login information, information from market sources such as income category, and site behavior – for example, how many times a user visits a sports-related story – to build PIDs. Each user requires a unique identifier for the purpose of frequency capping and attribution across devices. The PID is a persistent identifier that can be tracked cross-platform, and segments can be assigned to it, such as “sports-enthusiast”. 

These internally built IDs are then pushed to programmatic marketplaces or SSPs.

Who is it for? 

In the SSP or other ad tech platforms, these IDs are used to match a user profile or segment to an advertiser’s targeting specifications. The importance of publisher provided IDs has increased as publishers enjoy a direct relationship with their readers and are responsible for obtaining their consent to use first-party data. The IDs publishers share allow them to keep user data internal but only share tokenized representations of users or segments for ad targeting. SSPs are trying to become as publisher-ID-friendly as possible so advertisers can access segmented registered user data across many publisher audiences. 

“All of these ingredients are the scaffolding needed for publishers to be able to create and address meaningful audiences at scale from a publisher-led point of view,” said Garrett McGrath, Magnite’s vp of product management.

How does it work?

Here’s just one example: Pubmatic launched an identity hub in 2020. It’s a tool built on top of Prebid that lets publishers manage multiple identity solutions with no third-party cookies. PubMatic handles 134 billion ad impressions daily through its programmatic auctions, generating one trillion advertising bids per day. Over 20% of Q4 2020 ad buying on the Pubmatic platform came from supply-path optimization (SPO) agreements, compared to around 10% for Q1 2020. In an interview with Digiday, Pubmatic CEO Rajeev Goel said: “The cookie is not going to be replaced with a single alternative identifier. […] This means there’s more opportunity for many other SSPs and demand-side platforms that are adapting and adopting other identifiers.”

“Smart publishers aren’t going to want to share their data everywhere because they have obligations to audiences,” he continued. “There’s a chance that those publishers could winnow down the range of ad tech providers and even advertisers that they work with in order to protect that consumer relationship. Giving choice to both publishers and buyers is important.” 

As the advertising industry experiments with multiple compliant ID solutions, if one emerges as a winner, publishers want to invest in it early. These could include sharing publisher IDs or segmented audiences or the data associated with them for the tool to segment according to categories like fashion or business on the publisher’s behalf. The goal is to make it straightforward for advertisers to buy impressions against those IDs if they are supported by a publisher. Over 175 publishers including Cox Automotive in the US and Time Out in the UK have used Pubmatic’s tool, a number that’s expected to grow.

2. Outsourcing compliance to ID tech

What is it?

Publishers have been using PIDs in open marketplaces for years, and they are fairly simple to create, but with the importance of remaining compliant, some are outsourcing ID creation and mapping efforts to keep their first-party data more secure and their policies within the bounds of new privacy and tracking regulation.

Who is it for? 

Buying these services from external ID tech providers instead of trying to build in-house is a good option for larger publishers with more resources. Sharing publisher IDs in SSPs or through open source services like Prebid is a good option for smaller publishers as they do not have large enough audiences to scale their data in a way that makes it attractive to advertisers, nor do they have the resources to invest in expensive tech services.

How does it work?

EU publishers have been outsourcing compliant ID sharing to consent management platforms (CMPs) that can help track data a user has consented to as it is shared across the digital ad supply chain. Consent strings are passed along the programmatic ecosystem while allowing publishers to remain the provider of registered user data, allowing them to maintain control. 

Publishers like Salon are investing in ID technologies like LiveRamp and ID5’s solutions, which explicitly set a publisher notice of consent in their data collection. By linking to ID tech through an API or embedded code, once a user logs in or registers with a publisher site who gets consent to use their data, this information is stored in the publisher’s consent management system. 

That user’s information is then turned into a string or token by the ID tech provider. This tokenized ID is sent back to the publisher and can be stored on their website as a first-party cookie, without having personally identifiable information attached to it. This ID is then shared with all of the publisher’s partners or in SSPs, providing a consent-based workaround to third-party cookies that can be used for analysis and advertising without compromising consumer privacy. 

These are popular options used by many other publishers with resources. “We are integrated with the likes of LiveRamp and ID5 and have been for many months because it’s our job to make sure that we have the platform that can transact the way advertisers want to buy from us,” said Nick Flood, global commercial operations director at Future PLC. “I don’t think ID vendors are finished — far from it.” 

But some premium publishers aren’t convinced: “We’re skeptical of sharing this sort of data with the broader ecosystem because there’s a risk that it ends in a situation where you have ad tech vendors building these huge databases on our audiences that we have no control over, so we’re back to square one of publishers just being providers of users and not journalism,” said Thomas Lue Lytzen, director of sales and ad tech at one of Denmark’s biggest news publishers Ekstra Bladet. 

3. Using industry-wide universal IDs

What is it?

A more standardized and free option for alternative ID creation are opt-in universal IDs. There are multiple ongoing, open source initiatives to build alternate privacy-friendly IDs. One of the popular alternatives that have been endorsed by large media groups like Omnicom Media Group (OMG)  is the advertiser alliance IAB’s Unified ID 2.0. Developed by Trade Desk and IAB Tech Lab. Unified ID. 2.0 (UID) is an open source “privacy friendly” shared ID that offers more transparency by involving more companies and industry groups in its creation. 

Who is it for? 

This ID is supposed to provide a standard method for publishers and advertisers to get consent-based data when a user registers to access publisher content using their email ID. But it does not ask for explicit consent yet and might fall short of regulatory specifications in its current form. Unified ID 2.0 is endorsed and used by Prebid, and other ad tech firms (like Criteo with their COREID) are partnering their ID efforts with UID 2.0 to make it a standard for the industry. 

How does it work?

Publishers can place a script or SDK on their website so that when a user logs in with their email address, they are given an opt-in notice about how their email address and provided information will be used in the advertising value chain. The email address is then shared with a UID host, which automatically assigns a privacy-friendly alphanumeric ID or hash to a unique user. 

Any company signing up as a closed operator is “going to house [UID 2.0] inside their own infrastructure, to generate their own version of it without going outside their walls,” said Bill Michels, general manager of product at The Trade Desk. “The tool will talk back to the main system, so as we make updates it will automatically be refreshed.” This identifier is also gathering more support in the agency world and is giving rise to a new type of “closed operator” role for UID 2.0 within the ecosystem. 

Similar to UID 2.0 is an open-source decentralized ID: SWID or Secure Web ID created by the Secure Web Addressability Network or SWAN. When a user visits a page that uses SWAN, they are given the option to opt into personalized advertising and share their email address. This provides consent across the board to publishers and advertisers within SWAN’s ecosystem. The SWID is then assigned to that user to provide a transparent and consensual targeting method. Users can see and change their preferences at any time, and both sender and receiver of ad transactions are signed to increase transparency within the ad supply chain. 

SWAN is an example of an open source innovation recently launched that can be used by small to large publishers. A number of companies like Pubmatic, Sirdata and EMX are also part of the SWAN community. 

Case Study: South China Morning Post (by Lucinda Southern. Read the full article here.)

South China Morning Post has built its own first-party data platform, which it’s calling Lighthouse. The goal is to increase the addressability of its global audience, girding it for when third-party cookies are null and void for targeting and ultimately improving the effectiveness of ad campaigns. Ad clients can access Lighthouse via a dashboard and build their own bespoke audience segments based on their preferences, campaign targets, distribution channel and content trends. But, Alibaba-Group-owned and Hong Kong-based SCMP has also collated 25 pre-built audience segments such as luxury lifestyle, business travel and health fans that marketers can pick off the shelf based on historical usage of 50 million monthly average users, 37% from the U.S., according to internal figures. Comscore finds it has 22.2 million global unique monthly users.

SCMP said Lighthouse gathers more than 1.2 million data points a day, which it collects through declared data from polls, surveys and quizzes, plus observed data from elements like onsite behavior, ad logs, CMS, content analytics, sentiment, readability and contextual data. The publisher has a registration wall but wouldn’t say how many people have signed up. Increasing this pool plays a growing role, having logged-in users lets it create persistent identifiers, making attribution much more efficient. Beyond simple data like geography and demographics, the publisher can infer the value readers see in its content: A user looking in the parent section could be expecting triplets or already have a toddler, they could be feeling nervous or excited.

SCMP — which is mostly ad funded — has worked with customer data platform 1PlusX. With 1PlusX, SCMP syncs various deterministic and probabilistic IDs under one first-party user ID with all the known attributes about them and assigns an arbitrary name. It then applies the vendor’s audience expansion machine learning to create targetable audiences. “We see more [companies] making the move from a DMP to a CDP,” said Alexis Faulkner, head of FAST UK, Mindshare’s integrated performance business unit. “It means you stop relying on segment data and move to individual user profiles that can build audience understanding. It’s a move any company that has information from different sources on their customer may want to consider [in order to] unify their approach across the different data assets they have.

SCMP has a robust cross-department data, tech and commercial product team which built the platform. In a month-long test of its core 25 pre-built segments in Lighthouse, to determine performance of adding data versus the cohort run of site average, the company saw improved click-through rates by 40%. It applied a business segment to an education campaign looking for MBA candidates saw an increase in CTR from 0.12% to 0.3%.

Time to review

Pros

• User privacy is being prioritized.
• Publisher data and IDs are becoming vital to creation of alternative IDs and deterministic data has higher accuracy than probabilistic data
• Innovation and standardization industry-wide which take less time for cookie-syncing

Cons

• User privacy / compliance not certain as use of email hashes and ip addresses main source for building IDs
• Many alternative IDs have been built to work within the current programmatic system and with third-party cookies, so the latter’s deprecation might cause more change than currently understood. They are also vulnerable to Chrome updates and ITP (Intelligent Tracking Prevention)
• Possible increase in latency and heavy user sign up process with the introduction of new code and stages of consent

As seen above, many alternative IDs are using email addresses or email hashes to gather data on users. This might not end up being a long-term solution as privacy regulations tighten. And apart from privacy-based questions, publishers are also hesitant about ID tech out of concerns that it could increase latency, slowing down their pages, particularly when it requires a code embed on their sites (as was seen with some header bidding technology). 

Alternative ID matching and mapping solutions, whether they use shared logins or tokenized IDs, presents competition for Google. But with control of 65% of global browser share through Chrome, Google might not have to worry about it too much – unless big tech players like Amazon jump in. As they diversify, many advertisers continue to stick with what they know. Six in ten ad buyers (64%) had used Google for identity resolution at some point over 2020. 

Overview

In times of crisis, relationships matter. As ad tech giants deal with looming regulation, and compliance becomes increasingly complicated new partnerships are emerging or being reignited. 

“There’s a positive correlation between the increased demand for longer, bigger partnerships and the degradation of the cookie,” said Josh Stinchcomb, the global chief revenue officer of Dow Jones Media Group, which includes The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and Marketwatch. “Advertisers have been able to cobble together performance metrics across multiple sites; that’s going to get harder… We can measure multiple exposures to their messages using just our first-party data. […] They have to accept our first party as valid, but that’s what they accept from the walled gardens today.” 

Direct-sold advertising and branded content are the largest focus areas for publishers, according to Digiday+ research, signalling that advertisers and publishers are getting cozier than ever in the face of uncertainty: 

But those aren’t the only tag teams providing solutions. Publishers are increasingly putting competition aside and turning to each other for support in scale as the third-party cookie continues to crumble. 

1. Publisher alliances

Publisher alliances are flourishing in Europe and the US, particularly seen in an acceleration of “login alliances”. These allow publishers that are party to the alliance to use the same registration and login for their users, making it easier to share consent-based user data across multiple organizations. This increases the user data pooled between publishers in the alliance and effectively scales their ad targeting. Publisher alliances are particularly attractive for advertisers as the pool of segmented unique users increases and they can target ads to millions through one system or tool. Here are two examples of well-known publisher alliances:

• The Ozone Project is a publisher alliance formed in 2018 between well-known publishers like The Guardian, The Telegraph, Independent and News UK, among others. It offers advertisers the ability to target over 100 million monthly users across these publishers. The alliance runs joint ad campaigns and has built their own ad stack to maintain control over their data and the resulting ad dollars. They have also invested in creating standard contextual targeting segments and taxonomy across all members. Read more about the alliance’s tactics here.
• TrustX is a US-based publisher advertising alliance that sells its members’ ad inventory in a private marketplace. It was created as a non-profit in 2016 by members of Digital Content Next, a trade association for premium publishers including News Corp, Hearst and The Washington Post. TrustX has attracted advertisers by boasting of their 250 million+ unique audience reach across the US and through pilot tests with advertising alliances like the Association of National Advertisers. Read more about the alliance’s tactics here.

2. Advertiser alliances

One of the biggest challenges for advertisers in this environment is comparing performance or “matching” of cookie-based segments to segments built using disparate publishers’ data. Enter advertiser alliances, which are more geared towards providing standardization across the ecosystem. Advertiser alliances are providing the ability to get all their members on the same page through standards for shared logins, IDs and consumer data. Here are a few examples of well-known advertiser alliances:

• The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is active in providing standardization and guidelines geared towards compliance. The IAB Tech Lab is functioning as Technology Standards Working Group within PRAM (see below) and has launched Unified ID 2.0 in partnership with The Trade Desk. Recently they published Best Practices for User-Enabled Identity Tokens in partnership with PRAM, giving advertisers and marketers guidelines on how to collect and use user data. Read more about this alliance’s tactics here.
• The Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media (PRAM) represents 400 companies and trade associations from around the world and has been created precisely in order to respond to privacy based challenges and alternate ID needs. The alliance is linked to IAB Tech Lab and both are working closely with regulators and publishers themselves to develop actionable policies and shared IDs. Read more about the alliance’s tactics here.

Case Study: NewsPassID (by Max Willens. Read the full article here.)

The Local Media Consortium, a strategic partnership organization whose membership includes local newspaper publishers such as Gannett and the Seattle Times and broadcasters such as Tegna, has developed a product to find strength in numbers. NewsPassID is a sign-on technology and the precursor, LMC hopes, to an ad network that can leverage the collective audience scale of thousands of local news sites.

NewsPass ID is a single sign-on technology created for local news publishers who are trying, like everybody else in media, to gather more first-party data from their users. For publishers that deploy NewsPassID, the data gathered can be used not just for digital advertising but also to drive a subscription strategy: A registered user is easier to bring down a subscription funnel. NewsPassID launched in a pilot stage in Q1 2021, with four publishers testing integrations in a few SSPs. Right now, the LMC has to ensure that its different sites can support single identities, and that there’s no data leakage in open auction environments. If all goes according to plan, NewsPassID will begin testing integrations with buy-side technologies some time in the third quarter of 2021.

In theory, the success of the sign-on technology will drive success for the network: More scale in the number of known users identified using NewsPassID means more impressions that can be bundled up and offered to advertisers. More scale should attract more advertisers, and the resulting boost in demand should mean more revenue for publishers, which should, in turn, attract still more publishers, and so on. 

Time to review

Pros

• Publishers have more bargaining power when banded together and can share resources and strategies
• Ad tech giants came between the publisher-advertiser direct relationship so new partnerships provide renewed opportunities to reclaim lost revenue.
• Shared logins and IDs provide an opportunity for compliance related changes and innovation which prioritizes first-party user data.

Cons

• Large ad tech companies rely on a lack of standardization within the publisher-advertiser ecosystem so they stand to lose if alliances become strong. But alliances like the non-profit TrustX don’t always have the same engineering resources to compete with ad tech giants.
• Alliances struggle with issues of standardization when it comes to measurement and taxonomy. Getting registration data on most of their users is also not easy. 
• For smaller publishers and advertisers, alliances might not always work as fewer audiences lead to lesser bargaining power

Overview

First-party data, privacy-friendly IDs and even partnerships all require new tools and technologies to function and connect. To share first-party data with advertisers and to build contextual targeting capabilities, publishers are investing in both in-house and external tools and platforms, many of which fall outside of the categories we’ve already covered. 

According to a report by McKinsey, the data platform market in the United States was worth $5 billion in 2020 and it is expected to grow in light of the recent rush to diversify ad targeting capabilities. According to a Digiday Research survey in December 2020, more than half of publishers — 53% — said that they’d increased the number of ad products offered since the start of 2020.

In terms of in-house tech, publishers are focused on making their segmented first-party user data accessible directly to select advertisers using dashboards and data studios. Large publishers like The Washington Post, The Economist, Vox, South China Morning Post , Penske Media and The New York Times have even been investing in building proprietary tools to replace large DSPs, aiming to give advertisers the ability to directly target ads using consensually procured first-party user data or IDs for their millions of users. 

Investment in in-house product teams has grown for years now, and with the rise of new first-party data enhancement strategies, proprietary tools to more conveniently buy premium publisher ad inventory will become more common. But most publishers will be licensing tech services from external vendors. Here’s a look at some of the other tools that can help shore up the post-cookie gap along with who’s using them:

• The Washington Post has built a proprietary first-party ad targeting tool Zeus Performance in 2019, which is a header bidding wrapper and ad rendering engine. The platform utilizes contextual data and machine learning technology for ad targeting. The Post has also launched Zeus Prime, a self-service ad platform open to ad buyers to reach audiences of all the publisher sites using Zeus Performance. Publishers can connect Zeus Performance to any SSPs. The platform currently offers more than 4 billion impressions per month across all its participants’ owned-and-operated sites. Read more about the platform here.
• VICE news is investing in external tools like Experian Match and Grapeshot to beef up their first-party user data, which consists of 57.5 million global unique visitors per month, according to Comscore. Their strategy is geared towards improving its registration process and doubling down on contextual ads. Read more about their strategy here.
• The UK’s Channel 4 and Immediate Media are mollifying regulators by partnering with advertisers on using “neutral” third-party tools or data clean rooms for first-party data sharing like Infosum. These “neutral” platforms allow advertisers and publishers to share their data and make ad targeting recommendations without sharing users’ personally identifiable information. Read more about neutral platforms here. 
• Verizon Media sees the furor around deprecation of third-party cookies by Google as an opportunity to push its own DSP and ID, called ConnectID. ConnectID currently reaches 148 million logged-in users spread across some 400 million devices. Verizon is beefing up its DSP platform with a round of partnerships with tech and data providers to build IDs, add contextual components and expand to addressable TV inventory. Read more about the DSP here.
• Comscore, traditionally a media measurement company, is partnering with a number of other companies to provide a contextual targeting service to its clients. Their contextual audience segments are built using a global panel of 3 million internet users, with two thirds of these users located outside the U.S. An advertiser with first-party data on users it wants to target can upload it into the tool and target ads to Comscore’s available segments. Read more about Comscore’s contextual targeting platform here.

Case Study: Penske Media Corp. (by Max Willens. Read the full article here.)

Penske Media Corp. is trying to find more ways to sell across its brands and it’s hoping a data studio called the PMC Atlas Data Studio, built using a homegrown targeting platform, will help whet advertisers’ appetites. In March, Penske, which owns a mix of consumer- and business-facing publications including Variety, Rolling Stone and WWD, launched Atlas, which allows brands to target readers across Penske’s portfolio, which reaches 134 million unique users every month, according to Comscore. Atlas offers some 500 different audience segments, many of them either modeled directly on established segments typically reached using third-party segments or pulled directly from advertiser and agency RFPs. 

Penske built Atlas using an ad routing platform originally designed to control the ads that ran across BlogHer, a network of female bloggers operated by Penske brand SHE Media. The technology was rolled out across the rest of Penske’s portfolio in August 2020, so each brand’s sales group could use it in their own sales efforts. Like many of its peers, Penske’s decision to invest in a data studio is partly a response to the third-party cookie changes coming to the media industry. And for now, the price of audience segments available in Atlas are identical to the ones available using third-party cookies. 

Atlas also uses a mixture of on-site user behavior, including article and video views, poll responses and shopping data. It also taps first-party data gathered from its newsletter and magazine subscribers, event registrants (the company produced close to 200 virtual events in 2020), plus a number of data partnerships, to build those segments. About 10% of its portfolio audience is authenticated, meaning users can be tied to a permanent identifier like an email address, chief advertising and partnerships officer Mark Howard said, adding the company is actively exploring ways to increase that percentage. 

Time to review

Pros

• Publishers are moving away from dependency on big tech DSPs and exploring alternative plus direct ways to share their inventory with advertisers
• Publishers will have more control over their first-party data and which advertisers can access it, so for instance, content spreading misinformation or extremism cannot be shown on their websites. This helps rebuild trust with consumers. 
• There is more transparency in ad placement mechanisms as data is not being shared in open DSPs but through licensed services or “neutral” more transparency-friendly tools

Cons

• Building proprietary tools or licensing external data platforms is not always an option for smaller publishers as it might require significant financial investment
• Each new toolkit requires financial and training investment
• Compliance is not guaranteed in the mapping and matching industry as alternate IDs use email hashing, IP addresses to share publisher data with advertisers. The future of these is still uncertain as the policy environment evolves. 

Paul Cuckoo, PHD Media’s worldwide head of analytics, put it succinctly when he spoke to Digiday: “The two areas [in which] we’d anticipate the most change is the increase in the value of first-party data for both advertisers and publishers as well as an increase in scarcity of third-party audience data sourced through data brokers and partners who do not have a direct relationship with users.” 

But as easy as it is to draw up a few steps and call it a roadmap, monetizing first-party data is not everyone’s game. Large publishers like The New York Times have the resources to invest in new methods of selling directly to advertisers. Advertisers are also more interested in their audiences in the millions. Most of the partnerships and alliances described above are also between large publishers and advertisers. 

Smaller publishers are likely to continue to rely on large DSPs like Verizon and Comscore and ad tech giants like Google and Facebook for a majority of their revenue — they neither have the ability to scale, nor the resources to invest in alternative ID technologies. And these smaller publishers from recipe sites to tech blogs make up a majority of web content. In fact, a full half of small publishers plan to not rely on advertising revenue at all come the deprecation of third-party cookies, according to Digiday Research. 

“The big tech platforms and the mega publishers have the resources to swim in these waters,” said Ken Harding, senior managing director and global publishing leader of FTI Consulting. “Everyone else is floating along, and they’ll take what they can get…maybe you plug in where you can, you get your $1.15 CPM, but you’re not going to invest.” 

Even when it comes to first-party data, ad tech giants have unprecedented amounts of it stored in data centers around the world, and users seem more than keen to consent to their terms and services for quick access. It is more than likely that millions of publishers will continue to use Google’s Ad technologies, without even attempting to look for alternatives. And it’s in Google’s interest to make it a smooth transition to the post-third-party-cookie world. In the end, Google and the like will make the rules and train most publishers in how to remain competitive by being compliant – and using their technologies.  

The Pinterest-publisher linchpin

The Pinterest-publisher relationship is changing, and it’s causing some media companies to take a more serious approach to their Pinterest strategy, including figuring out how to use the platform for more than just driving traffic back to their sites.

This strategy shift is partially due to the fact that Pinterest itself is going through a period of redefinition. The company wants to keep people on its platform for longer, but despite years of trying to position itself as a visual search platform, it is still trying to shake its identity as a social media company. With the help of publishers, it is working on making those image changes happen. 

The key hits:

• Pinterest wants to be known as a search platform that goes beyond sending people to other websites and gets them to spend money and time on its platform. 
• Pinterest is paying publishers, in some cases, to help the platform achieve this mission.
• Other media companies are noting this identity shift and are having to adjust their own Pinterest strategies to keep both editorial output and brand campaigns performing well. 

Per a suggestion from the platform itself, PureWow’s editorial team has “stopped thinking of Pinterest as a social platform and really started thinking of it as essentially an SEO platform,” said Jillian Quint, editor-in-chief of the Gallery Media Group-owned women’s lifestyle publication. She described Pinterest as a place where people oftentimes go specifically to find a new “low calorie burrito recipe” or find inspiration for their homes or weddings or fall wardrobe. Meanwhile, Pinterest’ head of content and creator partnerships Aya Kanai told Digiday in an email that she views the platform more “like a catalog personalized to you and your taste,” leaning into the idea that Pinterest is gearing up to be a new shopping destination. 

Both of these perceptions of Pinterest have been backed up by the launch of two new products this year: “idea pins” which debuted in May, and Pinterest TV, which was announced this week.

• Idea pins feel almost like Pinterest’s take on Instagram Stories (or Twitter Fleets and LinkedIn Stories — R.I.P.), allowing users to post a series of up to 20 videos or photos within one pin. Only they don’t disappear after 24 hours. 
• Pinterest TV is a new shoppable video product that gives a better opportunity for creators to sell products on the platform, a feature that has been traditionally dominated by Facebook and Google, according to Matthew Schulte, the CRO and COO of Brit + Co. 

But the actual execution of these launches have left publishers needing to adjust to potentially yet another algorithm change, starting with prioritizing the type of pins that the platform is naturally boosting. 

“We have seen static pins’ organic numbers drop over the last year,” said Schulte, adding that this original photo pin format will generate on average 1,000 to 6,000 views in the first 30 days. Idea pins, on the other hand, will easily reach more than 100,000 views for Brit + Co and have an engagement rate (like a person saving it to their board) of a couple thousand per pin. 

Based on his anecdotal observations, Schulte concluded that Pinterest “definitely changed the algorithm.” In response to a question from Digiday asking whether the company has changed its algorithm to prioritize idea pins over traditional static pins, a Pinterest spokesperson did not directly answer the question but said the platform has “been investing more in making sure this type of content also shows up in the places Pinners expect to find ideas like home feed and search.”

Asked about the platform’s efforts to retain audiences for longer periods of time, Kanai said, “We have made several advancements with shopping and creator features recently, and this continues to build on that momentum in a big way through live video.”

This change is something that Brit + Co has needed to brace its brand partners for since about 80% of all of its client campaigns have a Pinterest component to them. That means adjusting performance expectations — idea pins do not allow people to click through to external websites, so click-through rates have turned into pin-saving rates — and getting clients on board with higher production costs for creating videos and multiple photos to create a robust and engaging post. Additionally, since creators cannot yet pay to boost idea pins on the platform, like they can with static pins, the performance of these campaigns cannot be guaranteed. 

PureWow has a strong editorial strategy for Pinterest, largely because Quint sees a high crossover rate between the brands’ audience and Pinterest users, she said. The publication has a Pinterest following of more than 850,000 accounts at the time of publication, and a lot of its audience growth came after Pinterest’s changed to its algorithm. In the six months after the idea pin format was released, PureWow saw a 32% increase in impressions and a 22% increase in the number of people posting its content on Pinterest, when compared to the six months prior, Quint said. 

BDG, too, was an early adopter of the idea pins, according to Jessica Jones Studholme, svp of sales at the media company. Already since the format launched, she said it’s generated millions of impressions for BDG’s publications. 

That said, Pinterest has paid BDG in an effort to get the media company’s audience to use the platform’s new products and, in some cases, even to get them to start using Pinterest in the first place. Studholme declined to disclose exact revenue figures for this partnership.

On Aug. 30, Bustle, Elite Daily and Nylon started a month-long sweepstakes campaign called “Storm the Dorm” where the BDG publications called on their audiences to create a vision board of what their dream dorm room spaces look like using the idea pins on Pinterest. Five winners were then selected to win $1,000 in Visa gift cards with the goal being to get the publications’ combined Gen-Z audiences active on the platform, according to Studholme.

The BDG brands also used their other social media channels and websites to drive audiences to Pinterest. The company declined to disclose the number of impressions or reach it garnered through this campaign.

“We’ve definitely prioritized Pinterest as a primary platform,” said Studholme. — Kayleigh Barber

What we’ve heard

“Owning our own network allows us to cut through the noise of all the paid media being spent today. We don’t have to pay a [third-party] media company to get the word out; we are the media company, and we are able to deliver our messages with more focus and authenticity. It’s a huge competitive advantage to own the media company [versus] rent the eyeballs of the media company.”

— Penn Interactive head Jon Kaplowitz on sportsbooks becoming media companies

Men still dominate news bylines at print and digital outlets

Men continue to dominate news bylines and credits across American newsrooms. Across media organizations during the first quarter, men received 65% of the news bylines and credits, while women only received 34%, according to the Women’s Media Center’s study “Divided 2021: The Media Gender Gap,” which published on Oct. 28. This is the report’s seventh edition.

Researchers at WMC, an organization focused on women and girls in media, analyzed 62,002 pieces of content from Jan. 1 through March 31 this year for 30 U.S. news outlets across four channels: print newspaper, online news, broadcast network and cable TV news and wire services.

“When you look at all the platforms combined, there was no news topic in which women dominated,” said Julie Burton, president and CEO of the Women’s Media Center. She added, “How can we possibly report and understand the perspectives, concerns, experiences and lives of over half the population if women are not allowed to be half of the storytellers?”

The main findings

• Prime-time weekday evening news broadcasts were the most equitable: 50% of anchors and correspondents were men and 50% were women.
• Print newspapers and wires were the least equitable, according to the research: 69% of print articles were written by men and 31% by women. When it came to wire services, 63% of pieces were written by men and 37% by women.
• A majority of online news articles — 57% — were written by men and 43% by women.

A complete lack of parity at print outlets

None of the 14 print news organizations in the WMC study achieved gender parity in byline credits:

• The widest gender gap was at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where men wrote 84% and women 16% of news articles.
• The narrowest gaps were at The New York Times and The Washington Post, where men wrote 59% and women 41% of articles at both organizations.
• At USA Today, 61% of articles were written by men and 39% by women.
• The Wall Street Journal’s bylines are 67% by men and 33% by women.

Disparity on the digital side

The WMC study looked at seven online news sites’ bylines, too:

• The widest gender gap was at MSNBC, where men wrote 88% of articles and women wrote 12%.
• Women had more bylines than men at:
  • CNN.com (54% women, 46% men)
  • HuffPost (54% women, 46% men)
  • Vox (50% women, 47% men and 3% nonbinary).
• At The New York Times and The Washington Post, 56% of online articles were by men and 44% by women.
• At the Los Angeles Times, 69% of online articles were written by men, and 31% by women.

Coverage inequalities

Men dominated coverage of the news in topics like COVID-19, race, politics and media. The biggest disparity was in election coverage (63% by men, 37% by women). Women were as likely as men to report on religion, lifestyle and leisure and social justice, according to a WMC spokesperson. — Sara Guaglione

Numbers to know

10: Number of publishers that are responsible for 69% of interactions with climate change-denying content on Facebook.

455,000: Number of new digital subscriptions that The New York Times sold during the third quarter of 2021.

95%: Percentage share of subscriptions that the top 50 U.S. magazines have retained through the pandemic.

$430 million: Axios’ valuation after its latest funding round.

>80%: Percentage share of Politico’s eligible U.S. employees who support the news outlets’ unionization effort after being acquired by Axel Springer.

3 questions with The Washington Post’s Kat Downs Mulder

Late last month, Kat Downs Mulder became the first chief product officer of The Washington Post. Reporting to both the Post’s chief information officer and its top editor, Downs Mulder will push even harder to grow and change what one of America’s biggest news brands looks like. She spoke with Digiday by phone. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. — Max Willens

What’s the near- to medium-term goal for the Post as an org from a product standpoint?

I think the biggest opportunity for us is to bring really tight synergies between the news teams and the product teams. We want to move faster and experiment more. We need to be really bold in our experimentation and the way we think about organizing ourselves internally.

We’ll create products that expand the impact of our journalism. We have a lot of focus on expanding internationally. We have a lot of focus on attracting younger readers.

When you think about being bold, where do you expect that to manifest? The Post’s owned-and-operated properties? Platforms? Where are those big bets going to be made?

It’s going to be across all of it. We have to innovate on the core product. Whether it’s the beat or the way we cover things, we have to continue to push on owned and operated. That’s where most of our habits are. That’s where we get the majority of our subscribers engaged.

That said, embracing what’s new and embracing experimentation is essential. A lot of it will be off-platform. We have a fantastic TikTok team, we’re investing in that, we’re growing that team. We’re heavily invested in Instagram. We’re really exploring whatever new features come out of either of those apps; we have Peloton for the Washington Post.

There’s also a cultural aspect to innovation. You don’t really know what’s going to be a flash in the pan and what’s going to be persistent and long term. You have to place a lot of bets. I do think it’s important that what we learn off-platform — maybe it’s Discord, maybe it’s a live-stream partnership, maybe it’s creating an exclusive podcast — hopefully those things can be brought back to the core product.

What’s top of mind for you when it comes to innovating internally? Is it more about analytics? Tools that allow reporters to experiment more?

Innovation is something you have to foster on a multitude of levels. First is making teams more cross-functional. That is a huge part of the innovation culture we’re building. We created 41 new jobs for editors with different skill sets. Some of those people are senior visual editors. enterprise visual journalism; service journalism positions, audience strategy positions; part of it is cross-pollinating the skillsets.

We are also thinking about specific things we can do, and one of them is innovation in formats. Whether it’s doing more with vertical video, or more personality-driven experiences, or allowing reporters to go live, either on social platforms or on O&O, doing more with texting, those are all things we’re very interested in doing.

Analytics is a big part of it too. We already have a very accessible analytics culture, but making that information more actionable is something we’re focusing on and building into our tools and trying to do more around. Empowerment is critical for an organization of our size.

What we’ve covered

Billboard looks to sponsored TikTok strategy to help it become a more consumer-facing brand:

• The Penske Media Corporation-owned publication has rolled out a singing competition on TikTok that is sponsored by Samsung.
• The competition is part of Billboard’s recent audience development strategy push to create more consumer-facing programs.

Read more about Billboard here.

A majority of publishers now sell products directly to their audiences:

• In a Digiday survey of more than 80 publisher professionals, 54% said they make at least some revenue by selling products directly to their audiences.
• Advertising was the most common revenue stream among the survey respondents.

Read more about publishers’ direct revenue products here.

The Verge’s Nilay Patel talks about how Vox Media’s tech publication has and hasn’t changed after 10 years:

• The Verge has largely stuck to its original editorial vision of covering tech and the culture surrounding it and that it surrounds.
• The publication has recently expanded with a connected TV app, subscription product and a live in-person event.

Listen to the latest Digiday Podcast episode here.

Amazon tiptoes toward building another podcast brand:

• This month Amazon will premiere a new original weekly podcast centered around country music.
• The company has released roughly a dozen original podcasts since launching its podcast operation in 2020.

Read more about Amazon’s podcast push here.

Sportsbooks are spending millions on media deals, but publishers should hedge their bets:

• Sportsbooks have been spending millions of dollars with media companies to accrue customers in the U.S.
• However, media companies should beware of sportsbooks becoming media companies themselves and looming consolidation undercutting this revenue source.

Read more about sportsbooks’ media strategies here.

What we’re reading

Who’s looking to buy The Athletic now:
After unsuccessful bids to reportedly sell to The New York Times and Axios, The Athletic is now receiving acquisition bids from DraftKings and FanDuel, according to The Information. The Athletic’s sale situation seems emblematic of two trends in the media industry: a resurgent wave of consolidation as publishers have weathered the worst of the pandemic and a flood of interest among sports betting companies in the media industry.

Why people unsubscribe from news publishers:
Nieman Lab polled more than 500 of its readers to ask why they have canceled their subscriptions to some news outlets. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the biggest cause of cancelation is money, though the underlying reasons range from pressure on personal subscription budgets to promotional periods expiring. Other factors were largely content-dependent: people not wanting to support publications they didn’t agree with or to pay for articles they didn’t feel were worth the money.

Why an independent journalist quit Substack to join The Atlantic’s newsletter program:
Six months after leaving The New York Times to start a Substack newsletter, tech journalist Charlie Warzel is departing the newsletter platform to return to working for a publisher (sort of). Warzel is among the nine journalists that are joining The Atlantic’s new newsletter program. In a post announcing his move, Warzel explained why he’s leaving Substack for The Atlantic. The gist is that he ended up making less money on his own than he did while working at the Times. But there’s more nuance to it than that, which seems to boil down to not consistently putting out pieces that people would have needed to and been willing to pay for.

How Spotify is building its podcast platform:
Spotify wants to become the YouTube of podcasting, according to Bloomberg. The streaming music service seems to be following the digital video platforms’ playbook by opening up to a wider array of podcast creators and rolling out an ad network to make money from those podcasts. More recently, it’s expanding into video podcasts, which have been popping up on YouTube for years. As Spotify looks to replicate YouTube within the realm of podcasting, what will be worth watching for is how it will manage the associated content moderation challenges.

Spark Foundry passed Digiday’s inquiries to Meta and a A Meta/Facebook representative offered up the following statement: “We are pleased to announce that Spark Foundry will be our new global media planning and buying partner across Meta’s brand portfolio.”

As has been widely discussed, several holding company rivals either were dropped from consideration (Havas) or took themselves out of the running (WPP/GroupM/Mindshare) for Meta/Facebook’s business. Dentsu was the other holding company still in the running until the end.

Here are a few things that merit consideration from some of the agencies that passed or were passed over in the review: 

• How do you say, “Careful what you wish for” in French? Privately, agency executives say the price of winning Meta/Facebook was simply too steep, and they breathed a sigh of relief once the company either passed or they dropped out. 
• Among the advertiser’s demands were preferential rates on pricing — better than other major clients were getting — baked into the contracts. If those contracts were leaked, the damage done to the winning media agency could be devastating in losing other clients. “They were deaf to give and take of negotiation,” confided one executive who spoke on condition of anonymity. The Meta representative responded by saying, “We disagree with that characterization.”
• Meta/Facebook was also said to be asking the winning holding company to steer client business towards their walled garden, which represented a major conflict of interest. One agency executive was particularly bothered by the “balance of trade” expectation, with Meta asking for an increase in spend from the winning holding company’s other clients. The Meta/Facebook representative said this is “100 percent false — we don’t influence the business decisions of our partners’ clients.”
• Facebook is also arguably the most influential digital platform in the world that every agency spends clients’ dollars on, but isn’t the only one that’s also a major advertiser. Google, Amazon and TikTok are platforms that advertise but are also appealing to marketers because of their reach. One exec said none of those platforms were as heavy-handed in their demands as Meta has been. 
• Though details were scant, other agencies said Meta/Facebook was interesting in “grading its own homework,” refusing to submit to audits from the winning media agency to check on effectiveness and appearing in responsible media. 
• Several agency execs told Digiday there’s a noticeable air of relief in their agency because other clients were questioning where the agency’s loyalties would land. “Our clients are challenging us to move their dollars elsewhere” in part because of Facebook’s behavior and recent public relations challenges. Said another agency source, clients were asking “Are you meeting an obligation to me or to Facebook when you’re recommending I spend there?”
• One agency CEO also said to take note that more and more of the company’s advertiser base is made up of small to medium sized businesses rather than leading marketers. 

With the start of Q4 and the holiday season, marketers are still adjusting their strategies from Apple’s iOS 14 update, which limited targeting and then iOS 15, which limited email targeting. 

On top of all of this, the deprecation of the third-party cookie is slated to begin in spring 2022. 

All of these changes reinforce the same story — first-party data collected from consumers is no longer a “nice to have,” it’s a necessity. Publishers and retailers realize that the value exchange they create with users is more important than ever. And the engagement brands have with subscribers along the way is critical to the success of that value exchange. Media companies can and should look to retail marketers, who are laser-focused on tactics to drive conversion — and there’s a lot to learn. 

The customer experience drives all decisions

At the end of the day, publishers offer content with which their audience will want to engage. However, as methods of consumption change, formats must keep up — mobile, social, desktop, podcast, video and email — they all matter now more than ever before.

The most successful publishers are conscious of orchestrating content across all channels to reinforce their brand and to deliver an optimal user experience (and for ad-supported publishers, still satisfying advertiser needs, too). While it’s a lot to juggle, segmenting those customers is one way to improve both the customer experience and that of the advertisers. 

A loyal reader has a particular series of actions that they will predictably take. They might visit the site every morning, or perhaps they open their mobile app every evening as they hang out on the couch. A search-driven reader might have another set of behaviors. They might average 30 seconds on the page, with a possible second article before abandoning the site. 

These various user profiles are different customer segments. Each offers its own set of value opportunities and paths to conversion. Many publishers have already created segmented strategies and content personalization. However, multichannel revenue-driven marketing, including email, usually takes a back seat, which can reduce the ability to re-engage, offer deeper personalization and drive conversion.

Test segmented triggers with product search and cart abandons

Retailers will often trigger a personalized email when someone abandons a product search. Publishers can do the same, tracking everything from scroll depth to which search terms drove them to the site. By testing segmented triggers to bring different readers back to the story, or to similar or different stories, publishers come across as more relevant and more interesting.

Similarly, retailers will trigger a personalized message via email or SMS to remind people of what’s in their cart. Publishers can do the same with event and subscription signups, or with articles saved for later reading.

Identify interests for better segmentation and triggered messaging

Whenever a consumer reviews a product or clicks on a link, that information is gathered to improve personalization and triggered messaging in the future. This information, whether driven by content behavior or more transactional behavior, should be collected by publishers to build richer user profiles and to inform segmentation and marketing actions. This data is also hugely valuable for editors seeking to better understand reader interests.

During peak shopping periods, such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday, retailers use live content to drive interest in sales, grow engagement and more accurately — and effectively — manage inventory. Streaming content that showcases employees explaining products or influencers explaining why they love them is an effective way to drive growth and additional sales. If publishers incorporate everything from breaking news and live entertainment to real-time interviews and podcasts into an email experience, the impact stands to increase exponentially.

Increase insights and improve performance by optimizing channels, triggers and touchpoints

Testing within and across every channel helps marketers understand how to get people to stay engaged based on their preferences and habits. For example, testing the success of driving engaged readers on mobile to download the app or transitioning engaged mobile app readers to in-app messages and push notifications instead of email can help publishers meet readers where they are without any friction. For brands that cover breaking news but don’t have standalone apps, utilizing SMS can take things one step further, much in the same way many D2C retailers alert shoppers about sales.

These common triggers in a retail strategy also serve another purpose: To test messages and collect more data. Adding triggers along the customer journey doesn’t just provide opportunities to re-engage, they help businesses work smarter. Combining insights and measurement across different parts of an organization can help speed up learning. Personalizing different elements of the customer journey can help speed up conversion.

While content is the primary product on which publishers focus, they must also give attention to gathering and acting on consumer data if they want to succeed in a privacy-first world. By optimizing the transactional touchpoints along the reader journey, publishers will capitalize on more chances to increase their insights and improve performance.