At the Association of Online Publishers (AOP), we’re constantly working behind the scenes to foster agency-publisher collaboration and cooperation. But if you’re working nose to the grindstone, you might never realise how much progress we’ve already achieved.
Here, I’d like to shed light on some of this progress by sharing a few of the most exciting publisher initiatives that bring the two ends of the advertising supply chain closer together, and how they benefit agencies seeking direct audience access and insights.
Leveraging data assets
The fragmented and murky online data ecosystem has turned reliable campaign metrics and audience insights into gold dust. Premium publishers — who, in some cases, have been cultivating audiences for literal generations — have realised the value of their first-party data and are activating it in robust campaign planning and audience research platforms. This is all for the benefit of advertisers, and the quality and transparency of these solutions go toe-to-toe with anything offered by big tech platforms.
Today, you’d be hard-pressed to find a premium publisher that doesn’t describe itself as data-first – and for good reason. Through their data initiatives, publishers have removed much of the friction that previously impeded advertiser investment in their inventory and audiences, facilitating simple and measurable access to direct deal campaigns, as well as insights platforms with more broad use cases, such as gauging audience attitudes towards various topics and brands.
Some examples you may be familiar with include the Nucleus platform from News UK, which unified its data infrastructure across its many brands to provide real-time campaign planning and effectiveness tools; The Telegraph Media Group, which launched its first foray into research and insights with Compass; and Mail Metro Media’s identity solution, dmg::ID, which enables direct matching with agency and brand data sets.
Publishers aren’t only leveraging their own assets; they’re also linking to the broader data ecosystem. An example here is the audience data enrichment that The Sun pursued with Experian Consumer Sync, which links to the latter’s vast consumer database covering 82% of the UK household population. There is a commitment to collaboration that spans publishers, data partners, buyers, retailers, and more, weaving together audience signals wherever they can be found to solve stubborn issues around measurement and attribution.
Climate-conscious media partners
Driven by internal and consumer pressure, brands are increasingly focused on climate-conscious messaging in their advertising. However, the misinformation, disinformation, and despair that characterises so much climate content make the internet a minefield for finding appropriate placements. Beyond brand alignment, many also seek to improve the public’s climate literacy, as part of their ESG efforts, by funding media covering the climate crisis.
Through collaborative initiatives — such as climate workstreams hosted by AOP that bring together top agencies and publishers — it’s clear brands and agencies have a genuine desire to support quality climate media and a belief that society needs it to be educated on the challenges we all face. Publishers also want to be able to cover climate more, but, unfortunately, due to news often being disintermediated from campaigns due to overzealous brand safety blocklists, climate coverage can be difficult to monetise.
Buyers and sellers are working together to overcome these barriers by establishing protocols that remove the need for brand safety tools and instead relying on premium publishers’ strict editorial codes of conduct to mitigate perceived risk. This is far more robust than any governance on social media, where climate misinformation runs rampant.
In the meantime, there are plenty of direct avenues for brands to support climate content. This could range from a brand partnership with BBC Good Food on a series of sustainable recipes, advertising alongside Top Gear’s electric car reviews, or producing environmentally focused commercial content for Guardian Labs.
Early next year, the AOP and the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) will host an event dedicated to this topic.
100% addressability
Anyone buying advertising on the open web is familiar with the addressability gap that has emerged following GDPR and cookie deprecation. Low user consent results in only around 40% of audiences being addressable via ID-based targeting — down to around 30% once frequency capping is applied. While a wealth of “ID-less” targeting solutions is available, DSPs often do not support them, leaving advertisers competing over a shrinking pool of users.
Agencies are under pressure to improve their media selection. However, without alternative technologies being accessible in the bidstream, they often revert to the easiest option and look for an ID to target. However, this is set to change in 2025 thanks to cross-industry collaboration on certification that will level the ad tech playing field, enforcing interoperability for any solution compliant with GDPR. This prevents big tech from calling the shots and will allow a competitive and audited market of ID-less technologies to thrive.
In addition, the Digital Information and Smart Data bill is expected to finally confirm that cookies used for measurement, brand safety, and attribution come under legitimate interest and thus can be deployed without user consent. This would greatly benefit contextual and other privacy-first targeting methods, which are currently hamstrung by nonconsenting users blocking core functionality.
In 2025, we will finally have the consensus needed between the buy-side, sell-side, intermediaries, and regulators to close the addressability gap for good. With interoperability secured for ID-less products and clarity on consent, advertisers can bid against 100% of publisher audiences, instead of just 40%, making the open web a more effective and far-reaching channel.
Opening up opportunities
These initiatives are just a sample of the work publishers are doing to improve the advertising ecosystem. At a time when the negative impacts of social media platforms are in full view, purpose-driven agencies should make an effort to learn about the exciting work premium publishers are doing, the innovations they’re delivering, and the opportunities they present.
Publishers are not just a channel; they are partners and can open agencies up to new audiences and relationships at a depth that simply cannot be achieved elsewhere. So make 2025 the year you reap the benefits of publishers’ incredible work.