Clicks, impressions, and pageviews were once the currency of digital media. But those metrics are no longer enough.

“Media is increasingly being valued for its business impact, rather than the impressions delivered,” Gabriel Dorosz, INMA’s Advertising Initiative lead, said during the recent Advertising Measurement and Effectiveness Master Class.

The challenge for publishers is clear: How do they capture the value of quality engagement — and prove it to advertisers?

During the master class, media leaders from Ringier Axel Springer, News UK, and The Guardian, and Newsworks shared how they are making the case for publisher effectiveness in the advertising landscape.

Ringier Axel Springer monetises engagement

At Ringier Axel Springer in Poland, that question emerged directly from client conversations. Clients started to ask not only about delivered reach, but also about quality engagement, Alicja Popiel, head of content marketing development and innovation, said.

The challenge was operationalising the change. Engagement has long been discussed as a valuable signal, but turning it into something commercially actionable is far more complex.

What followed was not a wholesale reinvention of the business, but a carefully controlled experiment. The starting point was data. By auditing their content marketing portfolio, the team identified a format — Big Story+ — that consistently outperformed others, Popiel said: “We were delivering a premium experience, but we were charging commodity rates.”

That mismatch became the opportunity. If the product was already delivering superior engagement, the question became how to price it accordingly, without introducing volatility or complexity that would make it difficult to sell.

The answer was simple: Create two versions of the same product. One would remain rooted in traditional reach-based pricing. The other would introduce a premium layer built on guaranteed engagement.

The results validated the approach. Campaigns measured under this model showed significant uplifts in brand perception — “almost 42% total uplift in supplements campaign, 31% uplift in new car model campaign.” More importantly, they gave the sales team a new narrative: not just that audiences engaged but that engagement drove measurable change.

Nucleus: News UK’s measurement platform

News UK has moved from raw data to proven outcomes that maximise campaign effectiveness and value for its advertisers, Alessandra Corrado, strategic development lead, said.

The next generation, first-party data offering is called Nucleus, and it helps the company activate campaigns across a diverse range of touchpoints including website, apps, radio stations, brands, and CTV channels — all under one News UK umbrella.

Nucleus allows the team to access and leverage valuable audience insights to achieve maximum viewability, reduced wastage, and scalable delivery for client digital campaigns. This allows News UK to reach more than 42 million highly engaged users, resulting in an unparalleled collection of fully consented, GDPR-compliant first-party data designed to secure brand credibility for the future.

“When we started this journey quite some time ago, we really understood that to drive desired outcomes, we first need to understand the inputs and the foundation that ties these things together,” Corrado said.

Nucleus works as the central intelligence engine collecting, connecting, and processing vast data signals. This integrates campaigns, customers, product data, real-time audience behaviours, content, and context signals, Corrado said: “This is what really allows us to unlock unrivaled category insights, build rich first-party audience segments, and consistently engage our audiences at their preferred touchpoints.”

This allows the News UK team to lay the foundation for highly effective performance-driven campaigns for its advertisers.

The Guardian’s FAME Index

As audiences become increasingly more difficult to reach, publishers find themselves in advertising environments that have lost value. CTRs have plummeted and users are bombarded with pop‑ups, stickies, and autoplay videos. The magic is gone, replaced by irritation.

What is driving this madness?

“The answer is probably profit, money, and enshittification,”James Fleetham, director of advertising for The Guardian said. The Guardian explored this trend, partnering with research firm Differentology to conduct a two‑part study.

First, researchers observed 20 people during real‑life browsing sessions — “hours on end,” Fleetham joked, acknowledging how creepy that sounds — and then surveyed nearly 2,000 people nationwide.

From this, they built the FAME Index, a composite score based on four pillars:

• Actual behaviour (eye‑tracking and facial coding).
• User experience (satisfaction, control, trust, intrusiveness).
• Publisher environment (ad‑to‑content ratio, clarity, formats).
• Brand metrics (recall and favourability).

The FAME Index found a 19‑point difference between high‑ad and low‑ad environments — a massive gap. In practical terms, Fleetham said, if you could deliver the same ad to the same person at the same time on two different sites, the results would be dramatically different purely because of the environment.

This factor, he argued, is not being priced into the market — but it should be.

Fleetham closed with a call for change and floated the idea that advertisers should buy fewer ads and reinvest in better environments and better creative: “Stop wasting money on annoying formats that interrupt and frustrate people.”

Newsworks study explores advertising effectiveness

Heather Dansie, insights director at Newsworks in the United Kingdom, shared an insightful study conducted in collaboration with Lumen and Peter Field, an attentiveness expert. This in-depth report revealed a link between high-attention digital media and the effectiveness of advertising.

The data set to answer the question of advertising effectiveness in the UK over a 10-year period.

According to the results of this study, digital displays proved to work well for advertisers, Dansie said: “We can see that ads on the news brand sites dramatically outperform other sites, with more than 40% more attention.”

To determine whether there was relational evidence between news brand attention, brand lift outcomes, recall consideration, and action intent, Newsworks examined hundreds of news brand campaigns against a base of thousands of non-publisher campaigns through the company Brand Metrics, Dansie said.

The results showed that news media brands do provide increased attention across awareness, consideration, preference, and, most importantly, action intent at 32%. In addition to understanding the news brand attention, the study revealed the positive business outcomes news brands generate. For high-attention campaigns, typically involving movies and television, had a 22% increase in business outcomes and 35% uplift to profit.

For low-attention campaigns, the increases were substantial — 50% toward business outcomes and 35% toward profit, Dansie said: “So on one hand it’s staggering, but on the other hand, it’s not really surprising. Because if you’ve got a digital mix with lots and lots of lower tension, when you add news brands to that mix, you are going to see a positive outcome.”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .