I’m writing this after an inspiring trip to INMA’s Media Innovation Week in Dublin, Ireland, where I’m excited to report advertising was extremely well-represented. 

I had the privilege of leading an advertising case study showcase within the conference, our inaugural in-person track for the new Advertising Initiative, and afterward, INMA colleague Greg Piechota and I led a session focused on the opportunities inherent in unified subscriptions + advertising revenue strategies. 

The experience of the entire week gave me further confirmation that while news publishers all over the world are navigating existential challenges, they are increasingly finding playbooks and pathways forward. And success is as much about sharing and learning from each other as it is about having the ambition to thrive despite all the roadblocks and obstacles. 

Google and Meta alone represent 80% of the advertising spend in the Irish market (and on average 60%-70% in most of the rest of the world). So, as I said onstage, I think it’s important for news companies to start thinking of each other more as allies than competition.

Here are five overarching lessons from our time together in Dublin:

1. Build an advertising strategy playbook around engagement over scale

Gemma Kelleher, group media solutions director at The Irish Times, gave us a great window into how The Irish Times is thinking about their advertising road map in the “post-traffic era” across multiple perspectives, from audience definitions to formats to measurement.

A summary of Gemma’s key points:

• Diversification of products and acquisitions has transformed The Irish Times into a broad media group, reducing reliance on traffic growth. 

• The principle of “slow media” underpins a premium, uncluttered environment that increases reader and advertiser engagement.

• Branded content, audio, and interactive formats are central to growth, supported by rigorous margin management. 

• Audience segmentation, including passion audiences and AI-driven optimisation, significantly improves campaign performance and reduces wastage. 

• Measurement focused on attention and brand uplift provides stronger proof of value than traditional CTR metrics.

Gemma’s presentation was a great example of building an entire advertising strategy and ad product road map around engagement over scale. I loved hearing about the idea of building products for “slow media” (effectively designing editorial and story formats to drive deeper engagement in the service of building direct relationships) and the opportunities inherent for advertising in that line of thinking, such as more engaging ad units and branded content. 

Plus Gemma touched on several different approaches to measurement, such as attention metrics, that I think can provide publishers with opportunities to better demonstrate the effectiveness of campaigns that run in publisher environments.

In Gemma’s words: “Attention is what matters. It delivers brand recall and long-term affinity in ways that CTR never could.”

2. Deploy AI automation to solve ad revenue and operational challenges 

Peter Chabrecek, head of strategy and business development at Ringier, Switzerland, discussed a product they call Floorian. Effectively what Peter and the Ringier team are trying to accomplish with Floorian is to use AI to improve open programmatic CPM floors to incrementally increase the revenue driven by their display inventory. 

It’s a fantastic example of how to employ AI as a pilot in a test-and-learn situation to make real business impact but also to gather learnings for the organisation at large as it implements AI in the larger sense.

In Peter’s words: “This is not a project that starts and ends in three months. It is a journey that will define our revenues for years.”

A summary of Peter’s key points: 

• Programmatic advertising’s share is growing across markets, creating urgency for more effective floor price management.

• Manual optimisation is labour-intensive, reactive, and often biased by perceived brand value rather than market data.

• Ringier developed Floorian, an AI-based tool that dynamically sets floor prices across brands and units. 

• Early implementation showed setbacks during the learning phase, but subsequent results delivered significant uplift in RCPM and revenue, though they are still testing and learning their way to success.

• Safeguards such as control groups and baseline floors are essential to protect revenue while scaling AI-driven optimisation.

And even though the journey continues for Peter and Ringier, I really appreciated the willingness to share success and failures to help others learn from valuable knowledge gained from the process:

“We were always leaving money on the table,” he said. “Floorian proved that our brands were being sold too cheaply.”

3. Apply audience and performance data to power full-funnel campaign outcomes

Katrien Berte, data product manager at Trustmedia/Mediafin, presented the work they’re doing (called “Trust Insights”) applying data across awareness, consideration, and conversion phases of the consumer decision journey. This is incredibly important, because if news publishers are going to win in the era of outcomes, they’re going to have to do it with audience and measurement data applied across the full funnel.

Katrien’s key points:

• Mediafin’s Trust Insights toolkit uses data across three stages: pre-campaign audience insights, campaign optimisation, and post-campaign effectiveness measurement.

• Exclusive reliance on first-party data ensures transparency, quality, and compliance, strengthening trust with advertisers. 

• A case study with KBC Bolero demonstrated the value of contextual targeting, passion audiences, and retargeting for lead generation. 

• News publishers can move closer to the lower funnel by applying robust data models, though Meta and Google remain dominant in conversion. 

• The value proposition lies not only in volume but in the quality of leads, which tend to be more valuable than those from big tech platforms.

While focused purely on B2B audiences, Katrien’s presentation made clear publishers shouldn’t take it at face value that they can’t win when it comes to lower-funnel performance across multiple categories. Given the right application of data, publishers can identify ways they can deliver on KPIs at multiple stages, including conversion.

It’s also an important reminder that publishers often deliver more value than they’re given credit for. I’ve heard publishers consistently deliver fewer but far more motivated leads (often called “engaged leads” or “motivated traffic” by agencies who judge them not in terms of quantity but in terms of the value they provide by taking a post-click action).

As Katrien said: “The leads we deliver may be fewer, but they are far more qualitative than those from Meta.”

4. Monetise high-value audience intent with data and ad product innovation 

Connor Diamond, head of data insights at Mediahuis Ireland, presented learnings from Mediahuis Ireland’s exploration of data-driven advertising targeting products, specifically focused on ReClick and InMarket — two products that focus on capturing high-value user intent and monetising that for advertisers. 

Like Katrien’s presentation, it’s another reminder that publishers can win by investing in data, and I remain convinced that activating publisher audience data is the single most important success factor in the post-traffic era.

As Connor said: “Data is not just a resource; it is a relationship builder between publisher and advertiser.”

Connor’s key points:

• Mediahuis Ireland is investing in advanced segmentation and modelling to uncover deeper audience behaviours.

• Integrating first-party data into sales strategies has strengthened value propositions for advertisers. 

• Data-driven storytelling demonstrates campaign impact more convincingly than simple reach metrics. 

• Emphasis is placed on building advertiser confidence by aligning campaign insights with market benchmarks. 

• Continuous iteration and transparency are required to sustain advertiser relationships in a competitive environment.

The products Mediahuis Ireland built demonstrate how much valuable audience data publishers actually have and how many creative opportunities there are to gather and activate it. We heard a wide range of examples of this in our September first-party data master class as well.

And most importantly, first-party data also opens the door to demonstrating how effectively publishers can achieve outcomes for advertisers, which Colin also emphasised: “Our role is to move beyond reporting impressions and clicks to telling advertisers a story about impact.”

5. Monetise publisher-audience attention with best-in-class emerging ad formats 

Tuomas Airisto, chief commercial officer (B2B) at Sanoma Media, emphasised Sanoma Media Finland’s overarching strategy to “win back from social media,” demonstrating that news companies have the absolute right to compete with the big players for advertising spend. 

I can’t applaud the ambition enough. News publishers have advantages they are only just starting to put into practice, such as superior quantities and qualities of attention, which Tuomas emphasised in his presentation.

Tuomas’ key points:

• Sanoma Media is adapting its commercial strategy to balance advertising with subscriptions across diverse portfolios. 

• Strong B2B relationships depend on combining data-driven solutions with brand trust and contextual strength. 

• The Finnish market shows advertisers are willing to invest in premium environments when transparency and value are evident. 

• Innovation in product bundling and cross-platform campaigns strengthens long-term advertiser retention. 

• Sustained growth requires shifting from transactional campaigns to partnership-based models with shared outcomes.

Tuomas emphasised how these differentiating factors can enable publishers to create ad products in new areas like video, which Sanoma Media Finland has brought to market. They are in the process of gathering and applying learnings as they iterate forward.

Tuomas also teed up the key point Greg Piechota and I delivered, which is that subscriptions + advertising strategies must be unified rather than acting at cross-purposes (you can read more about that here). In Tuomas’ words: “We must deliver commercial strategies that serve both advertisers and our subscribers.” 

Well said.

I hope this gives you a sense of how inspiring the day and the week were. We had a great crowd for the Advertising Initiative who really appreciated our five presentations and had a number of fantastic questions that created great dialogue in the room. It was so valuable to get a chance to see and hear from so many fellow practitioners in-person.

I hope you’ll join us in the future. We’re just getting started.

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