Alessandro De Zanche is a longtime media professional in London, who has previously held positions including Head of Audience and Ad Systems at News UK and product manager at Yahoo. He has seen the industry from its ad, media, research and media sides, and regular comments on issues at notjustadz.com and AdExchanger.
This week, Overtone’s Chief Product Officer Christopher Brennan asked Alessandro his thoughts on what the future holds for publishers in the ad space. The answers have been edited below for length and clarity.
People who read the Overtone newsletter largely come from the publishing side of media, including editorial. You have a lot of experience on the advertising side at major news companies. For you, what does it look like when advertising for media like newspapers works well?
A big mistake in today’s web is the idea that publishers can differentiate their revenue channels by simply plugging-in new ones and keeping them siloed and run independently from each other and detached from the value proposition which attracts the audience, the content.
We cannot say any longer that “advertising works well” for a certain publisher. When it does, it is because every department within the company “works well” and it is complementarity aligned behind an overarching company-wide goal.
This kind of business transformation is one of the most, if not the most, urgent initiatives that quality publishers must take if they want to take advantage of the opportunities that privacy, policy and technology changes are offering them today. Publishers have two customers: the audience and the advertiser. While the second cannot exist without the first, the first can exist without the second. They must start thinking and acting like consumer brands.
2. In many cases it seems like advertising has not been working particularly well for publishers, which is no secret. I’d be particularly interested in your take on the www3.forbes.com scandal.
“Forbesgate” is annoying on several fronts, but it also represents a glimpse of hope, as it proves something about its opposite.
- The Forbes scandal is, first of all, part of a major legacy issue. Historically, many quality media owners have offloaded the responsibility for their entire monetisation onto ad tech execs, for whom often the product is the ad slot, not the content. Their objective (to be fair, the one they have been given) is advertising revenue and not, for example, Average Revenue Per User. And the obsession with infinite scale contributes this. Forbesgate is a perfect case study of the effects of misalignment and wrong incentives inside a media company, which I mentioned in the previous answer.
- Forbes was employing an external company to manage its programmatic channel. It is extremely risky to hand over the keys to your environment and reputation to third parties without providing clear boundaries. Unless www3.forbes.com was actually part of the brief…
- As a side note, it is worth mentioning that most, if not all, of the inbound traffic to www3.forbes.com came from content recommendation widgets, which are often hosted by quality publishers. Unsurprisingly, this turned “Forbesgate” from being an opportunity for differentiation for quality, trustworthy media owners, into a potential accusation of being indirectly complicit.
- Not even advertisers emerge unscathed from this mess. Their noisy reaction makes me wonder: if they were so concerned about the destination of their budgets, why wouldn’t they buy direct from premium publishers, media alliances and high quality advertising environments in the first place? By doing so, they could take firm action when their trust is betrayed, and they know exactly what door to knock on.
The silver lining is that situations like this are, drop by drop, making the advantages of buying directly from premium sources very evident.
3. Now with more hindsight, how do you think that people, publishers specifically, will look back at the 2010s and time periods when chasing after clicks was a focus?
I am an incurable optimist, but I would not call the “click chase” over yet. Chasing after clicks is only one of the wrong choices we will remember. Many publishers today publicly declare the need to move away from quantity and shallow metrics but practically are doing very little (i.e., not moving away from the programmatic open marketplace, acting as an entry point of MFAs via content recommendation widgets while sidelining their quality content with trashy click baiting, collecting consent via non-transparent or cumbersome tools, providing the wrong incentives to their employees which lead to chasing the wrong KPIs, etc.).
Overall I would say that, every single day, the evidence of what publishers need in order to thrive and return to self-sustainability is becoming stronger and stronger. That is focusing on a unique and differentiated value proposition, and packaging and communicating it accordingly. This is valid for their relationship with their audience but also for the one with the advertiser. Promoting your product as high quality and unique to the audience but then offering your ad inventory in rubbish buying environments is a contradiction and total nonsense.
6. Do you think publishers, and quality publishers specifically, overestimate or underestimate their leverage in the ad space around issues such as Made for Advertising?
They definitely underestimate their potential. Many have been brainwashed by certain ad tech narratives and still struggle to have an independent vision. The cage is now open but they suffer from a Stockholm Syndrome preventing them from seeing a future where their role is not that of an ad slot farm anymore. There is still the urban myth going around of quality publishers “not having enough reach”. But what constitutes “enough reach?”
Also, it’s obvious that competing against Google or Meta on reach would result in carnage for publishers, but who says that the value proposition of quality publishers must be identical to the one of the big platforms, just on a micro scale? Quality publishers should develop alternative narratives (i.e., focusing on branding, higher quality advertisers) and formats.
All the other things above push them towards same tracks as the Made for Advertising sites, with all the issues it creates. I recently wrote that it is only a question of months before quality publishers start complaining about third-party ad tech companies labelling them as MFA, identical to what happens with keyword blocking. I was totally wrong: the moaning has already started.
5. You said earlier that you are an optimist. What are you looking forward to most in the next year, in the media tech ecosystem or otherwise?
It will be an amazing year for those who believe in quality media and recognise the opportunities that the first-party web is offering. A quality advertising environment can only exist within a quality media environment: the sooner publishers will understand that and act accordingly, the sooner they will reinforce their role also in that space. I feel that moment is getting closer.
We also need to stop saying that we need to fund journalism. Journalism can fund itself, with the right strategy in place. Advertisers need to be provided with real value: let’s stop asking for charity and playing the part of the victims.
As for technology, I strongly and passionately believe that it is an enabler and a tool: the success of publishers and their ability to leverage it effectively will depend on their strategies and how they will implement and manage them.
