Author: rssmasher

For the past year and a half, Theresa Moore, vp of platform partnerships at Pixability, has been trying to buy video ads on Amazon to no avail. A few months ago, Moore — who said trying to build a relationship with the e-commerce giant has been an “interesting journey” — thought she finally had an in.

Amazon’s user-experience team responded to an email she sent, but instead of giving her the direction she needed to buy, it offered her a $100 Amazon card to learn about her experience trying to contact the company. Moore was flabbergasted: “I told them, keep your $100 and give me the contact information of someone at the company who can help me make progress.” She said she didn’t get a contact, but she kept the $100.

Moore is one of many ad buyers trying to work with Amazon but finding it difficult to secure an Amazon rep and then start the process of advertising through Amazon’s suite of ad offerings, including its in-house team Amazon Media Group, self-serve marketing suite Amazon Marketing Services and programmatic solution Amazon Advertising Platform.

“It’s at a level where you can only develop a relationship with Amazon if you know someone,” said one ad buyer at a large agency who asked for anonymity.

Another ad buyer, who wishes to remain anonymous, said their large agency has begun forming a relationship with Amazon after a year of “stalking,” but only because of a major client’s spend.

Digital agency PMG had a similar experience. PMG started reaching out to Amazon about two years ago and didn’t gain traction with the company until a year in, when its client, retailer Cole Haan, expressed interest in spending with Amazon, according to Price Glomski, evp of digital strategy at PMG. That led the agency to acquire eight contacts at Amazon and start building its own internal Amazon practice. In the past year, the agency has spent well into seven figures on the platform, working on campaigns for large clients like Beats By Dre, Glomski said.

But even when ad buyers have an Amazon rep and footing within Amazon, they don’t necessarily get the answers they need quickly.

The makeup of Amazon’s internal client services teams is murky. None of the five ad buyers Digiday spoke with for this story know how Amazon’s client services teams are structured or how many people each has. There is a general understanding that AMG, AMS and AAP all have their own teams, and one ad buyer, who prefers anonymity, believes Amazon has teams structured around specific brands rather than agencies. Still, this person said, “You never have a holistic idea of what’s going on.” An Amazon spokesperson said the company does not reveal how many people work in each division or how many teams fall under client services.

Moore said after months of pestering Amazon, she finally secured her own rep who directs her to other groups within the company that might be able to assist her. But that’s where the help stops.

“It’s such a black box,” said Moore. “They’ve been really nice, but the groups at Amazon don’t know who does exactly what I want, which is to run video ads.”

Even PMG, with its eight contacts and several Amazon campaigns under its belt, has trouble navigating Amazon’s internal client services teams.

“The teams have really focused expertise, so when you ask a question about another ad product or product road map, it tends to get lost in translation, and you have to be directed to another product team,” Glomski said. “Fortunately, the Amazon team we work with is really good, but even they come back to us and say, ‘Sorry, it’s a development in progress.’”

Ad buyers said Amazon is following the playbooks of other ad platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, which were slow to make their client services teams available to agencies and ad tech providers while developing ad offerings. Rather, they initially focused on building relationships with large brands.

“Amazon definitely gives more interest and more resources to the larger brands,” said one ad buyer. For instance, one brand this person works with has its own assigned Amazon contact.

Moore is not surprised that Amazon would take this approach. “At the end of the day, brands are the ones that have the creative and the customers,” she said. “Amazon can get the information they desire straight from the brands without having too many chefs in the kitchen.”

“Everything Amazon does is to benefit Amazon,” said another ad buyer. “Everything they’ve built, from their tech stacks to their ad units to their content pages is all to benefit them, so why wouldn’t they go to brands with the big budgets first?”

But this might not be the best tactic for Amazon, as ad buyers at agencies and brands with smaller budgets get antsy about spending on the platform. PMG’s smaller clients, for instance, are eager to spend more on Amazon. Glomski said PMG estimates another $20 million to $25 million is on the table for Amazon from the agency’s midsize brands.

“You can tell [Amazon] is continuing to grow, so for some of our smaller clients, which are still good brands, they just don’t have as much mind share for them,” said Glomski. “What needs to happen quickly in order for advertisers to not get frustrated with Amazon is for Amazon to start building out their strategic group to help grow and train advertisers that will be in the system.”

Amazon has made strides in the past year, like bringing training teams to select agencies and making client service hires. The fact that Amazon’s user-experience team is reaching out to ad buyers like Moore also shows the company is considering ad buyers’ efforts to advertise with the behemoth.

“Agency relationships are very important to us,” said Seth Dallaire, vp of worldwide sales and marketing for Amazon Media Group. “We’ve made investments in both agency development and services as our advertising business grows, and this will continue to be the case.”

Some agencies are seeing the effects of these investments. “They’ve gotten much better in terms of having contacts you can work through, and they’ve made themselves more available to agencies,” said Kevin Packler, vp and director of Amazon services at independent agency The Tombras Group.

But Glomski warned that until the majority of ad agencies and smaller brands feel they are getting the attention they need from Amazon, other platforms with robust client services teams like Google and Facebook will continue to retain more market share. This is especially true, he said, when it comes to transparency and data, another area in which Amazon is known for being a black box.

“With Google and Facebook, any CMO can go in and pick apart different aspects of their marketing strategy,” said Glomski. “If Amazon can provide optics to performance on a daily and hourly level, which is what most marketers today need, that will create a sense of trust and willingness to spend $10,000 dollars a day on Amazon.”

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As we enter the era of mass personalisation, tempered by strict data protection rules, we at iCrossing gaze into our crystal ball to reveal eight predictions for digital advertising in 2018. 

1. The Duopoly will finally be breached

Google and Facebook have ruled the digital advertising roost for years, hoovering up nearly all the growth this year. After numerous failed attempts by pure plays to breach the duopoly, Amazon will emerge in 2018 as the realistic challenger. When it comes to searching for products, Amazon has no equal – and over 70% of us search Amazon at some point during a purchase journey.

It’s the rich consumer behaviour data that powers advanced targeting through Amazon’s digital signal processing (DSP) onto unique ad placement that will attract share of spend – plus, of course, the invaluable sales and data reporting so craved by the advertisers.

Expect 2018 to be the first of several big years for Amazon, as the duopoly becomes an oligopoly for the next decade.

2. Watch out for a high profile bust after a short GDPR honeymoon

Friday 25 May 2018 will be a date etched in the history of digital advertising. When the day dawns, the General Data Protection Review (GDPR) legislation becomes law across Europe – and the UK has opted in. That means we have to gain specific, unambiguous consent to use personal data – including cookies, IP addresses, device IDs and so on. It all becomes personal data.

And while the likes of Amazon, Google and Facebook are sitting quite pretty with tens of millions of registered users, the opposite is true for the swathes of ad tech businesses most people have never heard of. I expect a short regulatory honeymoon period from the Information Commissioner’s Office, before investigations begin in earnest. We could see a high profile bust in the autumn.

3. Could the Government finally announce legislation over harmful and illegal content?

This year has been an annus horribilis for brand safety exposures, from Jihadi websites, to fake news and even child abuse. So it’s no wonder marketers cite brand safety as their number one concern. This month the Prime Minister’s independent watchdog, The Committee on Standards in Public Life (CSPL) recommended that social media sites be recast as publishers to stop them describing themselves as platforms with limited control over the millions of messages and videos that they host.

This would have huge implications, and any future legislation could lead to fines or prosecution for not complying with new rules surrounding control of content and take-down. Watch this space over the next two years.

4. Voice search reaches early majority

Voice search has already reached 20% of all queries. That’s critical mass in my business book, so we must be heading for the early majority on the old bell curve. With Google, Siri, Alexa and Cortana there’s a whole gang of virtual assistants taking our commands, and getting smarter in the process.

This will have a positive impact on our SEO strategies in 2018, as we optimise and generate content to respond to longer (and sometimes surprising) consumer voice queries. For those who do it well, this should become a seamless element of the modern brand experience 

5. Chatbots take over the sales and service front line

Businesses successfully implementing chatbots to help answer consumers’ questions in real time have realised great efficiencies in customer service and sales conversion. And it turns out customers love the convenience of chatting with a virtual assistant – just be sure yours is an intelligent one who knows when to hand over to a real human being if the questions get harder.

Your customers expect excellent, fast service and in 2018 we’re going to witness the emergence of some seriously talented virtual helpers.

6. AI rules ‘mass personalisation’ targeting revolution.

Once upon a time, demographic targeting was the height of sophistication. Now we’re entering the era of advanced audience insights. Not just time and place, but known consumer likes and dislikes, search, social and purchase history, even preferred formats.

It’s that ‘big data’ we kept talking about five years ago that can now be analysed in nanoseconds with artificial intelligence to customise messages in the moment. Welcome to the era of mass personalisation.

7. Wholesale shift of programmatic to private marketplace.

Programmatic ad trading is highly advanced in the UK, and in 2018 we expect a whopping 80% of display spend to pass through the trading desks. In the early days, nearly all the programmatic spend was on open exchanges, but as the market matured and the big publishers started to take part we saw growth in the Private Marketplace (PMP) offering premium inventory.

While the open exchanges gave us access to millions of consumers on thousands of sites at low CPMs, the brand safety and fraud risks were higher. Witness then the inexorable rise of the PMP which should cater for around 75% of programmatic spend in 2018, with growth formats in video, native and high impact display. Again – it’s all about the brand experience.

8. Static banners die off as video becomes all-pervasive.

The first ever online ad was a banner for AT&T on www.hotwired.com back in 1994, and for almost 20 years the majority of digital display spend went on banners, skyscrapers and things called ‘mid-page units’. These formats have not only been in decline for the last few years, but the far more dynamic and engaging video, social, native and paid content ads are due to account for three quarters of online display spend. All very much better for the consumer experience, and improved brand engagement for the marketer. Which also means…

A bonus prediction… CPMs will go back up (at last).

OK – I’m sticking my neck out for the publishers here. After years of decline, following not just the recession, but a veritable tsunami of cheap content available on the exchanges – which led to ad blocking, ad fraud and brand safety issues – we took a long look at what actually worked and what the consumer might actually accept.

So, given the above predictions for the continuing growth of video, content and native, traded on private marketplaces; and the associated declines for static display formats and spend on open exchanges, the outlook for CPMs is…. pretty encouraging.

So there we are. As always, the New Year is full of exciting and innovative opportunities, but it’s also tinged with tough challenges as the digital ad industry continues to mature and take the lion’s share of media budgets. We at iCrossing are all over this stuff, but, like everyone else at this time of year, we’ll press pause for a few days before whacking the fast forward button in 2018.

Guy Phillipson is the chairman at iCrossing UK and the former chief executive officer at the Internet Advertising Bureau UK.

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Amazon is gearing up to be the next big player in search for 2018, predict industry experts

“We are all kind of pretending to know what we’re doing with Amazon, but no one has really become an expert yet. I’ve tried Alexa. It’s interesting and it’s there in your house listening. That’s an amazing experience,” according to Greenlight Digital director of paid media, Hannah Kimuyu.

“Earlier this year, I was at the annual Independent agency summit in New York and Google stood up and said that they’re worried about Amazon. That’s the first time they’ve ever said they’re concerned about anyone.”

Many believe that voice search will be making leaps in the new year, MediaCom senior executive officer, Edward Cowel does not dispute this: “2018 isn’t going to be the year for voice search, that will be further down the line. The big trend for next year is the search industry understanding their audiences more and from an organic search perspective, that will feed into what Google does around artificial intelligence, personalisation and results.

“It also will affect us from a local search perspective with things becoming increasingly localised and personalised. And on the paid search side as well. From what I saw as a judge of The Drum Search Awards, was people really using audience data in very smart ways, not just to target key phrases but to really understand who they are targeting.”

The Drum Search Awards showcases data-driven work driving performance across screens from agencies, search engines, technology providers and all other outfits active in the space. The awards are open to entries for 2018, with the deadline fast approaching on Friday February 2.

Jessica Leader, client partner at Propellernet, the winner of the Grand Prix and best use of content awards, said: “Winning a Drum award has been an incredible accolade for us at Propellernet, and winning the Grand Prix even better! We’re incredibly proud. It’s helped to showcase our agency’s talent, insight-led creative approach and our impactful results.

“It has been a fantastic confirmation for existing clients, a great endorsement for new prospects, but most importantly, motivated and rewarded our incredible team.”

Founder of VCCP Media and chairman of the 2017 judging panel, Paul Mead,  believes that the full potential of search is yet to be realised. He said: “Search is a point of connection between all of a brands activities and one of the most effective ways to measure the health of a business. It is therefore vital that we provide a platform to promote this and to celebrate the amazing thinking and creativity of the talent in the UK search industry.”

The Search Awards return for 2018 to recognise and reward the very best in the industry across both SEO and PPC. These awards create collaboration across the whole industry bringing together search engines, agencies, technology providers and all other businesses and brands that contribute to the search industry.

What categories will you enter? There is a wide variety of search areas you can choose, including: performance agency of the year, most innovative search campaign, best use of connected devices, biddable team of the year, organic team of the year and many more. 

To enter, submit your application before Friday February 2.

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The Liverpool-based creators of national mental health database The Hub of Hope  have launched a poster campaign to raise awareness of the vital resource in the lead-up to Christmas 2017, six months on from its launch.

Mashbo, creative designers and trustees of Chasing the Stigma (CTS) – the charity behind the web-based app – have funded the fly poster campaign, which will promote the Hub of Hope in Liverpool city centre using funds ordinarily reserved for client Christmas cards and gifts.

The 50 posters carry details on how to access support via the resource, alongside the striking yet simple message that ‘the doors are open’ to thousands of grassroots and national organisations 24/7 throughout the Christmas period.

The decision to launch the campaign was made based on research from multiple sources including Rethink Mental Health, which revealed that the pressure to be cheerful and splash out on presents can cause mental strain, exacerbating symptoms such as panic attacks, depression, low moods, sleeping problems and cause thoughts of self-harm and suicide.

Since its launch in July 2017 the web-based app, which brings help and support together for all mental health issues in one place, has received almost 10,000 unique visits from 751 different cities and towns across 59 countries.

The digital platform has been designed to revolutionise the way people seek help for their mental health difficulties by using the device’s location to discover the nearest services to its user, as well as national organisations. The campaign reiterates the message from CTS Founder and Liverpool comedian, Jake Mills that “there is always hope”.

Jake said: “Christmas can be an extremely difficult time, especially for those who are affected by mental health issues.

“Since its launch in July we have seen an amazing response to the Hub of Hope and the Christmas we want to ensure that people know there is a place they can go to easily find access to free and immediate help available.”

The launch of the poster campaign also comes in the same week of the first anniversary of CTS becoming a limited charity.

Gavin Sherratt, managing director of Mashbo, said: “The initial response to the Hub of Hope has been incredible and we are proud to be lending even further support to this fantastic resource. As a business we are focused on using technology for good and the Hub of Hope has been a fantastic way for our team to use its skills to really help people, especially at this difficult time of year.”

The Hub of Hope database, which the first of its kind in the UK, has been publicly commended by mental health charities such as the Samaritans and public figures including Jeremy Corbyn and Davina McCall.

The web app is free to use and also free for organisations to register.

 

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The skaters-turned-commentators say their sport is missing the sort of stars it had in the ’90s.

In the 1990s, U.S. Olympic figure skaters were household names. But today, you’d probably be more likely to know the names of the skating commentators, Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir.

“We’re very proud to educate people in a different way than maybe they have over the last many moons,” Weir said on the latest episode of Recode Media with Peter Kafka. “Tara and I do things more conversationally. We’re very direct with our audience, and it’s a huge audience for us to be carrying figure skating.”

Figure skating is, in Weir’s words, “the diamond in the tiara of the Winter Olympics.” Talking with Kafka and Weir, Lipinski said part of their goal next year will be reminding viewers why that is — despite the shortage of household names.

“There really hasn’t been a name that is in the media on a daily basis and that’s what skating in the ’90s was,” Lipinski said. “Everyone knew, after the Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan incident — Tonya Harding, Nancy Kerrigan, Kristi Yamaguchi, Michelle Kwan — everyone knew these names; they were household names because they were winning, they were on TV.”

“The perception of skating was different,” she added. “It had a little more glitz and glamor, it appealed to all ages. Whereas now, we haven’t really had that star. If we do, and that star starts popping up in pop culture moments, that would change the sport, in my opinion. You never know when that could happen.”

You can listen to Recode Media on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

On the new podcast, Weir said that when he competed in the Olympic Games in 2006 and 2010, he found himself having to compete with a completely different type of celebrity than his predecessors. And the older generation of people who coach and judge the skaters don’t always appreciate how interesting and different today’s personalities can be.

“I understood, in the twilight years of my skating, who I was and what I was going to be able to do at the Olympic Games,” Weir said. “… When I was going to my second Olympic Games, it was Gaga and it was Kardashians — it wasn’t as wholesome as maybe the ’90s would have been. You have to be, in some ways, competitive in an entertainment format with that sort of person.”

He and Lipinski also reflected on how the internet is changing the sport: Figure skating superfans can follow their favorite skaters year-round, thanks to the proliferation of livestreaming options online. But during their first turn in the booth, at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, the commentators took advantage of social media.

“Our main audience really isn’t that [superfans], and I think we established that in Sochi,” Lipinski said. “We brought in a lot of people that never watch figure skating at all. We really don’t know, [but] we go off of our Instagram and our Twitter.”

“I think back to my time when I was skating: I was 15 and there was no such thing as Instagram,” she added. “Nowadays, it can only be helpful that these athletes can engage with fans and become visible on a different platform. For Johnny and I, it was a huge blessing in Sochi … we made a joint Instagram account just because we thought it would be fun, and I remember one morning knocking on Johnny’s door and saying, ‘We had 11 followers last night, now we have 20,000 more followers!’”

If you like this show, you should also sample our other podcasts:

• Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher, is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with the movers and shakers in tech and media every Monday. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.
• Too Embarrassed to Ask, hosted by Kara Swisher and The Verge’s Lauren Goode, answers all of the tech questions sent in by our readers and listeners. You can hear new episodes every Friday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcastor wherever you listen to podcasts.
• And finally, Recode Replay has all the audio from our live events, such as the Code Conference, Code Media and the Code Commerce Series. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

If you like what we’re doing, please write a review on Apple Podcasts — and if you don’t, just tweet-strafe Peter. Tune in next Thursday for another episode of Recode Media!

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On stage at Edinburgh’s Leith Theatre one evening last week, the Scottish stand-up comedian Vladimir McTavish was playing his part in funding the rise of an alternative UK news media.

McTavish, a popular act on the Edinburgh Fringe, was part of the bill at the Festive Ferret Fundraiser, an event generating income for the investigative journalism website the Ferret, which launched two years ago and is already having significant impact on Scottish politics and society.

Backed by nearly 700 paying subscribers, who have input on the subjects that the site’s journalists probe, the Ferret went undercover to expose a neo-Nazi backed group, Scottish Dawn; it revealed how Donald Trump received a £110,000 hand-out from Scottish taxpayers; it disclosed how Police Scotland extracted data from 36,000 private mobile phones; and it ran a ten-story series on the potential impact of fracking.

Nearly 400 miles away another member of the new publishing breed, the Bristol Cable, lays out its investigative reporting on a sharp website, and on the 36 pages of a monthly magazine produced on high-quality paper stock and distributed throughout the city. The Bristol Cable is the product of an 1,800-strong co-operative who contribute an average £2.70-a-month and are invited to monthly meetings around Bristol to discuss the progress of the three-year-old project and where it should be directing its editorial resources.

The Cable’s impact on Bristol life has been considerable, affecting council policy on housing developments and helping to persuade Bristol University to stop investing in fossil fuels. It also uncovered the use by local police of eavesdropping IMSI-catcher devices used to intercept mobile phone messages, prompting a national news story. Operating out of an old factory building (now a community project space called ‘The People’s Republic of Stokes Croft’), it is also backed by the Chicago-based Reva & David Logan Foundation, a philanthropic trust which gives grants to social justice and investigative journalism projects.

Its various income streams, including five pages of print ads sourced by Ethical Media Sales & Marketing, an agency dedicated to social justice, allow the Bristol Cable to sustain the equivalent of six full-time jobs across its team of editorial ‘co-ordinators’ and to pay its large pool of ‘contributors’ for their work on articles. The team has won a reputation for its data journalism.

But projects as ambitious as the Ferret and the Bristol Cable are isolated examples in the landscape of UK news media.

As we near the end of 2017, the overwhelming majority of news produced in the UK – including that on social media – is still the output of organisations founded before the digital revolution. The emergence of digital-native news brands has been limited in a market where audience loyalties to public broadcasters and well-established newspapers run deep.

In the United States, venture capitalists and legacy media companies have poured money into new digital news initiatives which have become part of popular culture, from trailblazers such as the Drudge Report and Slate to the likes of Vox and Mic. Some, such as HuffPost and BuzzFeed, are now major international news operations.

But the economic signals for digital news media in general have not been good. BuzzFeed has this month made major job cuts, including to its UK newsroom. Its founder, Jonah Peretti, previously a big supporter of Facebook as a distribution platform, has complained bitterly of the social media giant’s failure to share its advertising revenues with companies that provide it with content. The female-focused publisher Refinery29 last week became the latest in a long line of digital publishers to lay off staff this year.

In such a climate, projects like the Ferret and the Bristol Cable – and other UK operations that choose to emulate them – face a challenging future. But both have been careful to limit their dependency on commercial backing, in fact, neither publisher carries digital advertising.

“We had to do something that made us different, more credible, more transparent….,” explains Rob Edwards, one of the founders of the Ferret. “We had long discussions and we decided we didn’t want to use ads, we wanted to raise money by subscriptions and grants.”

Lorna Stephenson, a member of the editorial team at the Bristol Cable, says that digital ad revenues have fallen so low that “there’s almost no point” in the project even looking for clients. Furthermore, the project has an “advertising charter which is voted on and agreed by members and is quite strict”, taking business only from “local and ethical businesses”. So the site is ad-free.

The Bristol Cable launched in both digital and print form in October 2014 after a series of meetings attended by journalists and other interested parties. “People liked the idea of co-creation of the media and they liked the idea of it being independent,” Stephenson says.

The motivation for the Ferret, which was first mooted in 2012, was to create a platform for the kind of probing, in-depth reporting that the founders felt was in demise. “We were very conscious that, with the malaise that’s causing the decline of the mainstream media, investigative journalism was suffering,” Edwards says. “We all felt very strongly that a modern democracy like Scotland was incomplete without proper investigative journalism to hold power to account.”

The Ferret is run by a board of five journalists (Edwards is also the environment editor of the Sunday Herald, a Glasgow-based national Scottish paper) and four ‘reader’ board members. As well as having no advertising, it opted for a co-operative model “to show we were not-for-profit and were working together and that we were not run by some distant corporation or some media mogul”.

It publishes an annual report of its finances and editorial record. The latest records show that it has published over 330 stories and now has a base of 6,000 people signed up to receive push notifications of latest articles.

Its subscriber base – paying £3-a-month for access to a website that allows three articles free per month – is currently insufficient to sustain full-time employment of journalists or an office (the Ferret’s team mostly communicate via an online chat group). Contributors are paid £110-a-day for their journalism.

Edwards says that the Ferret is anticipating new income from grants. It already has a €50,000 grant from Google’s Digital News Initiative which funds the Ferret Fact Service, compiled by Alastair Brian. The service, which typically analyses the veracity of claims made by Scottish politicians and pundits, is also published in the Daily Record newspaper.

The Ferret might be an alternative approach to producing news but Edwards says that it is not intended to undermine existing media. It has partnered on stories with many news outlets, including the Guardian, the Times and the BBC. And it recently co-ordinated a complaint by 23 journalists from different news outlets over the Scottish Government’s failings in responding to Freedom of Information (FoI) requests.

What marks the Ferret out is its openness, publishing its FoI documents and other material, provided it doesn’t reveal confidential sources. “We try to be as transparent as possible and give readers all the tools they need to make up their own minds about what we are writing about,” says Edwards. “It’s all about trying to re-establish trust with readers.”

Unlike other websites that emerged in Scotland around the time of its 2014 independence referendum – such as Bella Caledonia and Common Space – the Ferret is studiously non-partisan. “None of our journalist directors are members of any political party and we don’t do opinion or editorialising,” says Edwards. “We just look for fact-based investigative reporting.”

The climate for digital news publishers might be a harsh one, but the Ferret, with its mission of “nosing up the trousers of power”, is convinced by the evidence of its first two years that it has a viable future. “We were embarking on something that none of us had ever done before,” Edwards points out. “We have written hundreds of stories, broken dozens of exclusives, we are talked about and we are gradually raising our income to a point where we can become a sustainable operation.”

The Bristol Cable is now a fixture of the local media scene, alongside the 85-year-old Bristol Post newspaper and other outlets. Its stories evoke the campaigning spirit of the lively West Country city but Stephenson believes that its ground-breaking model is one that could be adopted elsewhere in the UK, citing Manchester, Leeds and Brighton as examples. “Bristol is a creative place but there are other very vibrant cities where you could definitely do something like this,” she says.

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