Author: rssmasher

Publishers like to talk about the value of user experience, but not all are willing to take the short-term revenue hit necessary to improve it. Le Monde took the leap and lived to tell about it.

The leading French newspaper shed 40 percent of its ad inventory last September, and after losing €800,000 ($985,000) over the following four months, it has recouped the revenue.

Along with reducing its ad inventory, Le Monde also shed 12 ad tech vendor partners, including Teads, Advideum, Mobvalue and Sublime Skinz, an action it took alongside fellow national Le Figaro as part of their alliance, Skyline. The Skyline initiative, aimed at providing bigger reach to compete for ad spending with Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple, generates 35 million unique users, according to Médiamétrie, an audience measurement and survey company. After shedding the vendors, both Le Figaro and Le Monde saw video revenue increase by 50 percent. Le Monde is now getting video ad CPMs of up to €15 ($18), up from around €7 ($9) it was getting before dropping the partners, according to the publisher.

“Our CPMs had been decreasing over time, and we didn’t even know what advertisers were on our sites,” said Laurence Bonicalzi Bridier, president of Le Monde’s ad business, MPublicité.

The ad inventory culling and the dropping of vendors are two steps Le Monde has taken lately to retake control of its digital ad business and improving the ad formats it sells, while guaranteeing clients brand-safe, high-viewability environments. Le Monde stopped running a mix of video and display ad formats including intrusive ones like interstitials that fill the screen.

Like many publishers that have embraced programmatic advertising over the past few years, Le Monde had increased the number of ad tech vendors that could plug into its site to sell inventory. As a result, the newspaper lost visibility and control of what ads were appearing on its own pages. With around 40 percent of the publisher’s ads being supplied via third-party exchanges, it also became impossible to forecast monthly revenue, according to Bonicalzi Bridier.

“Some vendors were aggregators,” said Bonicalzi Bridier, “so only a small percentage [of a brand’s campaign] was on our site; about 80 percent would be on less premium sites. The user experience was a nightmare and not as premium as we want it at Le Monde, so we had to take action.”

The post Le Monde’s culling of vendors and ad slots doubles video ad CPMs appeared first on Digiday.

Trinity Mirror’s latest earnings call March 5 revealed another news publisher facing the structural challenges of falling print revenues and platforms like Google and Facebook sucking up the majority of digital ad growth.

The group cut costs of £20 million ($28 million) as revenue declined 12.6 percent in 2017 from the year before, to £632 million ($876 million). The earnings call was the company’s first since its long-expected acquisition of the Northern & Shell’s Express newspapers for £126.7 million ($176 million). Consolidation is a way to cut further costs and grow audience, but whether it’s enough to help a legacy publishing group thrive remains to be seen.

Here are four challenges that the acquisition highlights about the shrinking newspaper industry.

The need to diversify
Publishers are wary of being too reliant on too few revenue streams. While Trinity Mirror is a top 10 U.K. news site, according to comScore, it’s been hard to effectively monetize this digital audience, with digital ads — which include revenue from video, programmatic and digital marketing services — making up 10 percent of the group’s total revenue. According to Alex DeGroote, media analyst at Cenkos Securities, Trinity Mirror’s acquisition of classified companies like TotallyLegal.com and TotallyFinancial.com, have not helped grow the publisher’s classified revenue, which is just 2 percent of total revenue. The publisher hasn’t responded to requests for comment. More events, content verticals and ticketing services are in the pipeline for 2018, however.

Publishers are no match for the duopoly’s reach
The merger puts Trinity Mirror on a more even playing field with other publishing groups. Trinity Mirror is changing its name to Reach, lest anyone miss the point, but name changes, often forgotten or mocked (see Tronc, Tegna) are rarely a huge success, and reach isn’t a point of differentiation in the duopoly’s shadow.

“It’s a misnomer that doesn’t reflect the origins of Fleet Street’s papers,” said DeGroote. “While Trinity Mirror has a valuable, sizeable audience, the biggest advertisers are moving toward more measurable media models, and newspapers don’t stack up there.”

The threat of homogenization
Managing three national titles — The Daily Mirror, the Express and Star — with different demographics and histories will be a challenge in allocating resource while cutting costs. On the earnings call March 5, chief executive Simon Fox said each paper’s front pages and politics will remain distinct, but content production for sections like sports will be centralized.

“This is the thin end of the wedge before centralizing more aspects,” said DeGroote. “Each title could end up losing its distinction for advertisers and readers.”

Collaboration has its limitations
Facing strong headwinds, some publishers agree that by working together, they are stronger than alone when up against Facebook and Google. Unfortunately, fiefdoms exist within ad sales, and publisher consortiums face recurring challenges, even if this does make buying at scale more convenient for advertisers. When Trinity Mirror acquired Local World it pulled the publisher out of 1XL, a regional newspaper programmatic ad sales alliance.

“The paradox is that it’s known it’s a dying industry,” said DeGroote. “Yet The Mirror could still compete with The Sun rather than working together as a consortium, leading to downward ad pressure.”

The post What Trinity Mirror’s consolidation signals about the UK news industry appeared first on Digiday.

As a sports league that both produces a ton of its own content and needs to market its brand to younger and newer fans, NASCAR exists as both a publisher and a marketer. It’s forced the league to restructure how it approaches its editorial and marketing content internally.

Last summer, NASCAR created a new 40-person content strategy group to oversee the league’s editorial and content marketing operations. Previously, NASCAR had separate teams dedicated to its website, social pages, video production, creative design, advertising partners and entertainment marketing efforts. These were individual business units, with their own, often overlapping goals, which created natural inefficiencies with how NASCAR created and distributed videos and other content across platforms.

“Entertainment marketing would come up with a project that they thought was good for entertainment marketing, and then they would tell the social team to share the video, but there were no conversations about whether that video even made sense for our social audience,” said Evan Parker, managing director of content strategy for NASCAR. “Even if it was something as simple as getting referrals back to the website — the social team is trying to build as big a following on social platforms as they can, and sometimes referring people back to the website doesn’t make sense.”

The new group, which is overseen by Parker, was created to oversee all of NASCR’s digital and social content and marketing efforts. It consists of the previous teams as well as six new digital content producers with backgrounds in writing and video production and editing. NASCAR’s TV production team and entertainment marketing team still exist as separate units, but have several staffers embedded within the content strategy group and participate in the group’s daily meetings every morning, Parker said.

A big focus for the content strategy group is to develop new projects that help bring the sport closer to new and younger fans across different platforms, according to Jill Gregory, CMO of NASCAR.

“Content strategy plays a major role and now we’re able to be smarter about it and funnel resources into channels like Snapchat’s Our Stories that expose our brand to [younger] audiences,” she said.

In addition to a deal with Snap to produce and curate four public stories during NASCAR races this year, NASCAR recently sold a show for Facebook Watch, which aired on the platform last month. The docu-series, called “Behind the Wall: Bubba Wallace,” which chronicled the racer’s preparation for and performance at his first Daytona 500. The series collected nearly 5.3 million video views on Facebook Watch across its eight episodes.

Other projects the content strategy group is involved with include the “Glass Case of Emotion” podcast hosted by driver Ryan Blaney and a YouTube talk show with driver Austin Dillon.

As Parker described it, the Facebook Watch show is a direct byproduct of the entertainment marketing team, which is routinely pitching TV and digital video series in the market, collaborating with the NASCAR productions unit and NASCAR’s social team, which oversees the relationship with Facebook.

“Bring those three together and we now have knowledge on how to sell a show, how to create content for social platforms and the ability to actually create high-quality content,” said Parker. “It’s not something that would have been easy to do in the old model because those three teams would not be talking to each other as they are doing every day today.”

Up next for NASCAR: ramping up its ability to create even more digital and social videos. The league is currently building a new digital and social studio space at its Charlotte headquarters.

It’s a necessary move for NASCAR. Just like with other American sports and linear TV in general, the league’s TV ratings are down. This year’s Daytona 500 drew 5.6 million TV viewers, down 15 percent from the previous year.

“People are getting their info elsewhere; they’re streaming content or following along on Facebook and Twitter, instead of being parked in front of a TV,” Parker said. “It’s a trend that’s probably going to continue. If we didn’t adapt, we would be left behind.”

The post NASCAR revamps its content group to meld edit and content marketing appeared first on Digiday.

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