Forbes SVP of global sales Kyle Vinansky, Insurads CMO Nuno Brilha, Telegraph senior director of digital solutions Gareth Cross and Newsquest digital transformation director Morgan Stevenson. Picture: ASV Photography Ltd for Press Gazette
Although the tech giant’s about-face caused grumbles in the news industry, executives at Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology Conference agreed the threatened death of cookies on Google‘s dominant Chrome browser provided the impetus necessary to get their houses in order on user data.
That change, they added, appears to already be reflected in increased ad sales.
‘I definitely used the word bastards’ when Google made cookie announcement, says one executive
Asked by Press Gazette editor-in-chief Dominic Ponsford how he had reacted to Google’s July cookie announcement Morgan Stevenson, the digital transformation director at Newsquest, said: “I definitely used the word bastards.
“Simply because we put a lot of work in, preparing. I think it was a good industry kick up the arse to better prepare for leveraging our first-party data.”
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But he said he felt Google had at least been “trying to create a solution to the challenge, unlike Safari and Mozilla, who just said ‘see you later, publishers’…
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“I think there was a part [of me that] would have liked to just carry on with it, pull the plug, let’s see what happens. But there is so much still within the consent challenge to truly be confident that, if they pull the plug, we know what’s going to happen.”
Cookies are packets of data that give websites information about their users. If a website knows about its users it can sell ad space for higher prices, so Google’s planned deprecation of third-party cookies left publishers scrambling to develop strategies to get users to hand over their data directly.
Ultimately, Stevenson said, “it was a bit of reprieve, actually, just to get a bit more time with so many challenges to be ready for it if they really do pull the plug”.
Kyle Vinansky, the senior vice president of global sales at Forbes, had a similar view, saying: “I think everyone on our team really groaned when we heard that news. It was just one more thing in that saga.
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“But I think what Google did, and others that were focused on this cookieless future, is they really got us thinking more about our first-party solutions, about the way that we could better understand our audiences…
“The biggest thing for us is it put focus on an issue where, ten years ago, despite our size and our scale, we didn’t know that much about our audiences. Now we know an awful lot.
“We’ve been investing more, even outside of first party data, and looking at ways with research panels and other levels of engagement that really allow us to dive into those groups that are most core to the advertising partners that are spending with us.”
Gareth Cross, the senior director for digital solutions at The Telegraph, said he had been less shocked: “To say it wasn’t the biggest surprise of the year is probably an understatement.
Newsquest sees success with subscription model for advertisers
Despite their frustrations, the publishers said things appeared to be going in the right direction on ad sales.
Stevenson said Newsquest had “done very well pushing our direct sales with lots of local businesses. That’s predominantly what the Newsquest model focuses on”.
Although most of its concern was with its digital direct-sold advertising, he said “we’ve done significantly better this year at holding on to print revenues.
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“One of the diversifications that we did six to seven years ago was to start introducing digital marketing services, as a reseller of those, to the same businesses that we sell our direct audiences to. That’s helped us become much stickier, for customers to stay with us.”
Services offered within that package included “SEO advice, PR copywriting, website building as well – so a whole one-stop shop and helping them to really navigate how they better improve the marketing of their own brand”.
He said Newsquest had “invested very heavily” in metrics like view time that help prove the value of their services to small business owners, and that they have improved client retention by rolling out a subscription model for ad sales.
“We looked at the best-performing campaigns for different industry styles and turned them into such good value you can’t afford to turn them off,” he said.
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“You need to give three months’ notice if you want to turn it off, effectively… I’d say probably now 16 or 17% of our ad revenue is coming from a subscription model for advertisers.”
Telegraph: Direct-sold advertising revenues up and ‘they will grow again this year’
Cross, from The Telegraph, said that over the last year “we have seen our areas of focus, our direct-sold, grow. We’ve seen our partnerships grow, and digital revenues, from an advertising perspective, are up. And they will grow again this year”.
He said the “beauty” of a subscription-first business was that “the things that come with that are all the things that help you face some other challenges” around advertising.
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“So there’s a hell of a lot of first-party data – whether it’s declared, inferred – and the way we use it, we no longer need to rely on third-party data sources for our direct-sold.”
More broadly, he said, “we do things now that we would never have done before. A good example of that is if an ad format isn’t working, we remove it.
“Often what would have happened in the past – you [wouldn’t] lose that yield, you’d just add something else, and before you know it you’ve got something incredibly cluttered, diluted…
“One of my colleagues says the ad experiences are designed to engage, not enrage.”
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Forbes executive Vinansky also said he was pleased with the year – but sounded a note of caution.
“From an audience standpoint, I think we’re doing better than ever: almost 100 million users on a monthly basis, consistent growth from that regard,” he said.
“From a revenue standpoint we’re pacing ahead of last year, but Q4 for us is an incredibly important time of the year. We’re expecting a lot of information in the next month or so that’s really going to decide where those numbers fall on an annual basis.
“And we’re still up against a very challenging political landscape, as we all know. There’s a lot of economic uncertainty still, and it’s a question for us of whether or not our largest advertising partners are in a position where they want to be a part of those conversations, or they want to wait and they want to stay out of the market.”
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Forbes has a partial paywall, but Vinansky said “the majority of our traffic” does not come through it.
“We continue to grow our registered users, but we view that as multifaceted – it’s people that attend our events, it’s people that subscribe to our newsletters, it’s people that subscribe for digital or print access.”
He said that direct-sold advertising is “our largest business segment”, with ads sold via the open exchange second.
Forbes SVP of global sales responds to revelation the site had been running ads on a low-visibility subdomain
Press Gazette editor Ponsford also asked Vinansky about a story that broke in March which revealed that some ads Forbes had been paid to run had appeared not on the main site but on a subdomain that could not be accessed through regular site or search engine navigation. (Forbes has denied that it had been running a so-called “Made for Advertising” or “Made for Arbitrage” site.)
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“I think it’s really caused us to think about transparency in a different way,” Vinansky said.
“From a data compliance standpoint, and some of the verification partners that they were using, we taught our partners how to actually identify any advertising that ran with us on that subdomain. It just wasn’t something that they were looking for.
“The primary issue that we were dealing with there… was a matter of the page templates that we were using, and them being gallery-style templates.” (The ads on the subdomain appeared while a user clicked through slideshow-format content.)
He continued: “Once we had that conversation with our partners about why these pages existed, the way that we were using them, the way that they supported some of our most deeply-reported editorial, it had a very different outcome than the article alone that really put us in a spotlight and had us on our heels in a pretty negative way.”
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A specific change following the incident, he said, was that Forbes now provides “a templated lookbook of every single page design that we use on Forbes and every single place that an ad could theoretically run.
“It was nothing that we had done before. We’ve provided screenshots before after a campaign went live, but now we’re getting to granular detail as to where your ads might run before a campaign happens.
“From a reporting standpoint, we are dialed into all of the ad verification partners and have direct relationships with them ourselves. So we encourage our partners to use that data. We encourage them to use our first-party data. We encourage them to use third-party data segments that are outside of those.
“It’s the mixed approach to making sure that everyone feels the highest levels of confidence in that reporting and where the sources are coming from and being able to tell a more complete story with it.”
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A carefully orchestrated operation by Ukraine has led to the destruction of a Russian A-50 surveillance aircraft, marking a critical blow to Russian air capabilities.
Targeting ‘Moscow’s eyes’
According to a senior military intelligence officer who spoke anonymously to The Times, the strike utilized both Patriot and S-200 missile systems, showcasing a strategic evolution in Ukraine’s defense efforts.
The planning for this operation began two years ago, in 2022, when Ukrainian officials recognized the need to target the A-50, often referred to as “Moscow’s eyes.”
This aircraft, which can detect airborne and ground targets over vast distances, is a valuable asset for Russian operations. The Ukrainian military needed to restore the S-200 system to effectively challenge this threat, according to WP.
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To achieve this, they sought out experienced personnel familiar with operating the S-200 and conducted essential maintenance to prepare it for frontline use.
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Israeli warplanes continued to strike Lebanon on Tuesday, extending a massive bombardment of Hizbollah strongholds that has killed hundreds of people so far in the worst violence to hit the country in decades.
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Hizbollah too fired on Israeli military targets on Tuesday morning, targeting an explosives factory, a military warehouse and an airfield. The attacks set off air raid alarms across northern Israel but were mostly intercepted, causing limited damage.
Lebanese authorities reported that 492 people were killed on Monday, including dozens of women and children, with more than 1,600 injured in the bloodiest day for Lebanon in decades.
World leaders warned that the operation, named “Northern Arrows” by the Israel Defense Forces, has left the region on the brink of an all-out war.
G7 foreign ministers meeting at the UN General Assembly (UNGA) released a statement calling for a halt to “the current destructive cycle”.
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“No country stands to gain from a further escalation in the Middle East,” the group said. “Actions and counter-reactions risk magnifying this dangerous spiral of violence and dragging the entire Middle East into a broader regional conflict with unimaginable consequences.”
Fear and panic gripped Lebanon following Monday’s attacks. Thousands of cars jammed the roads as people fled from the south and east of the country, where the bombing campaign was concentrated, towards the capital Beirut.
Schools across the country were transformed into displacement shelters while some village residents sought refuge from bombing in mosques.
An entire family — a retired army major, his wife, and their three daughters — were killed near the southern coastal city of Tyre on Monday, Lebanese state news reported.
Speaking to reporters at the UNGA in New York, which began on Tuesday, the EU’s foreign policy head Josep Borrell described the situation as “extremely dangerous”.
“I can say that we are almost in a full-fledged war,” Borrell said, adding that world leaders should work to prevent the fighting from escalating further. “Here in New York is the moment to do that. Everybody has to put all their capacity to stop this path to war,” he said.
Lebanon’s Prime Minister Najib Mikati departed on an urgent trip to New York “for further communication”, his office said. A cabinet session scheduled for Tuesday morning was cancelled.
Israel said it would continue the operation until it became safe for residents of its northern regions, displaced by the fighting, to return to their homes. It blamed Hizbollah for provoking the Israeli bombing campaign.
“Let me be clear: Hizbollah is responsible for this situation. This is Hizbollah’s plan — to turn southern Lebanon into a battlefield for its attacks on Israel,” Israeli army spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said. “We cannot accept a terrorist group storing weapons inside people’s homes, and using them to fire at other civilian communities.”
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Twenty-eight flights out of Beirut — most of those scheduled — were cancelled on Tuesday, according to the airport’s website.
Hizbollah rockets landed in the far northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona on Tuesday morning, causing a fire to break out, but no injuries were reported. One woman received minor shrapnel wounds in the town of Yarka.
Israel’s Home Front Command extended its school closures policy to several more areas in the north of the country.
The Philippines’ DOST-ASTI introduced blockchain, NFTs, and crypto to youth, with a focus on real-world applications, fostering innovation for the future.
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