Ahead of next week’s Advertising: Who Cares? summit in London, we get a sneak peek of its work advocating for re-upping ad spend on high-quality channels.
While ad spend on traditional channels continues to drop, a group is making the case for the power of quality media channels
Next week, a group of concerned marketing leaders will meet in a central London cinema. Their task? Proposing some possible solutions to the most existential problems facing the industry.
It’s the second time the group – called Advertising: Who Cares? (AWC) – will have met. Since the first gathering a little over a year ago, the movement has gathered 70 active members working across nine ‘workstreams’ and 700 signed-up supporters.
Those nine workstreams include evolving agency business models, the shifting role of adtech, trust and the future of creativity.
The event will also deliver the results of a months-long research project scrutinizing the embattled relationship between advertisers and high-quality publishers. It’s a collaborative project featuring media and marketing leaders as well as publishers.
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Media budget allocation isn’t quite a zero-sum game, although it sure can look like one. As one channel becomes ascendant, another will often see losses.
In recent years, cash for influencer marketing and other digital channels has risen, with corresponding losses for the likes of TV and print. Last month, Kantar found that 54% of marketers plan to increase their spend on streaming, while 26% plan to decrease spend on linear TV.
The effect of shifts like that over the last few years: this year’s edition of WPP Media’s ad revenue forecasting predicts that 81.6% of all revenues will come from digital channels, with print media’s share of that pie falling another 3.1%. Overall, according to the News Alliance, spend on “higher-attention channels” like news media “has dropped from 70% to 30% in 10 years.”
The result on the publishers’ side is familiar – news publishers shuttering or surviving by pivoting to non-advertising revenue streams; TV learning to tighten belts. But what the AWC movement hopes to assert is that, in this process of erosion, advertisers lose something too.
“The fightback is starting,” says Jamie Credland, chief executive of World Media Group, an organization that represents publishers including BBC News, the New York Times and CNN.
That fightback has four components.
Advocacy for traditional channels is nothing new in an industry now decades into a digital transformation. That advocacy often comes with implicit criticism of ‘the platforms’ or ‘walled gardens’ of Meta and Alphabet, which account, between them, for around 66% of ad spend.
But Brian Jacobs, veteran media man and co-founder of AWC alongside Nick Manning, says that advocating for ‘quality media’ isn’t about detracting from those platforms so much as an attempt to redress an overcorrection in their favor. “We’re not suggesting for one moment that all platforms and social media are terrible and traditional media is wonderful. It’s a question of balance and we think maybe it’s gone too far in that direction, while all the evidence seems to suggest that people should be considering context rather more than they are at the moment.”
Jacobs and his team, he says, have reviewed 35 recent studies on the values of different media. “Whoever the research is from, it all points in the same direction… underfunding of traditional media forms. Investing in quality media works, it is brand effective and it is brand safe,” Jacobs says.
Simon Wilden, executive director for media planning at agency Good Stuff, cautions against the publishers-platforms bunfight, in part because, he argues, it’s not true from a historical perspective that all of the platforms’ gains are traditional media channels’ losses. “Early in my career at JWT media, 60% or 70% of everything we spent was on TV and I remember the first time I saw Advertising Association figures on industry spend. I fell off my chair when I saw that print took 55% or 60% of all ad spend. But that was because of the classified stuff at the back of local newspapers. It was ad spend that was never going to appear on TV, or be part of poster campaigns, or in the front half of national press.”
Still, that doesn’t diminish the effects of erosion on publishers, says Wilden: “We are certainly seeing the effects of a lot of traditional media not having the budgets they used to have.” And worse, we’re seeing on the horizon some potential hasteners of that erosion, including ‘zero-click search’ in which search and generative engines are able to surface publishers’ content without delivering any ad revenue to the publisher. “I wonder if we’re at some kind of tipping point,” he adds.
One of the group’s findings is a particular problem for online news publishers: oversensitive ‘brand safety’ cautions that prevent ads from being served alongside a wide range of news stories.
During the Paris Olympics, for example, advertisers missed out on serving their ads alongside the wealth of unobjectionable content that came from the event because the keyword ‘Paris’ was blocked for historic reasons.
While examples like that spike interest in the keyword issue, what’s under-understood by advertisers, World Media Group’s Credland says, is that “it’s a baked-in problem” across digital advertising – or, worse, “a problem that has gone out to find a problem.”
Beyond the case of the Olympics – a sporting event with no obvious brand safety concerns at all – Credland says that there’s equally no evidence supporting the idea that an ad alongside a ‘negative’ news story works to the detriment of the advertiser. On the contrary, “if it’s published in the Wall Street Journal, it’s almost guaranteed that it’s brand-safe” since the story has been fact-checked, reported and associated with a premium publisher that the reader has chosen to engage with.
The study cites several pieces of research that find increased effectiveness for advertising in high-quality news environments – including a Newsworks study diagnosing a “halo effect” from advertising on news sites: “trust is 1.5x higher when a brand advertises on a news brand website compared [with] a non-news brand website”.
For his part, Credland isn’t convinced that advertisers actually see a brand safety concern with news publishers – the error is with over-applied technology rather than faulty thinking. “It’s less to do with anyone making that conscious decision, and more to do with the momentum of technology within the industry,” he says.
That uplift in trust is just one of a wide range of positive arguments about the positive bottom-line-related value of ads within a high-quality media ecosystem; just this month, Newsworks released another study claiming that digital display ads on news sites see a 40% uplift in attention compared with baselines, for example.
“There’s a societal issue here too,” says Jacobs: we want and need high-quality news and entertainment, and advertising has a long relationship with publishers, providing the lion’s share of their revenues.
“Media and advertising are there to fund a decent media ecosystem and if too much ad spend doesn’t head in the direction of quality media, then we might cease to have the quality media,” says Goodstuff’s Wilden (with the caveat that ‘quality media’ isn’t necessarily limited to traditional channels). The good news? There’s a growing (or perhaps returning) consciousness among advertisers of this dynamic.
“Clients are starting to think a bit more broadly about the impact of their budgets; we’re hopeful that the quality media agenda is starting to become one of the key secondary considerations when they’re deciding where to spend their money,” Wilden says (the other key secondary consideration: sustainability).
And this argument, Credland says, isn’t one of hectoring advertisers into altruism; rather, it’s about foregrounding the mutually beneficial and time-honored tradition of safe, well-produced content, paid for by advertising that itself has results for the advertisers: “There’s a huge group of affluent, well-educated readers who want to read this stuff!”
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With programmatic buying chains growing more complex and opaque, one route the group suggests is making quality media buys as transparent and simple as possible. As Jacobs says: “We’ve got to make it easier for advertisers to buy broadcast, because it’s very easy for them to buy Facebook.”
Publishers are already experimenting with measures to maximize simplicity with measures like Channel 4’s ‘high impact digital advertising experiment’ and – announced just last week – the Guardian’s ‘fewer ads, more effective’ (Fame) framework.
Credland also encourages efforts to make direct media buys more straightforward and cites strides by brands – especially in the B2B and premium space – forging specific partnerships with high-quality publishers.
For Jacobs, it all comes back to the venerable tradition of buying media strategically based on the value of the channel and its brand fit. “You just have to look at the evidence,” he says. “Advertising a certain way on certain channels has a greater effect on business results than others”.
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