For news outlets, the advertising landscape is shifting drastically on multiple fronts, but there are still winning strategies that tap into the strengths of the media industry with great results for both news outlets and their clients.

At the Advertising Town Hall, as part of the INMA Advertising Initiative, media leaders from Globe Content Studio, VK Media, and Tribune Publishing shared how their companies are leveraging podcasts, viral traffic, and programmatic strategies to power their advertising revenue.

Globe Content Studio helps advertisers reach the right audience via podcasts

For Globe Content Studio, the key to balancing advertiser and audience needs when it comes to podcasts is rooted in journalistic-style storytelling.

Kiran Rana, manager of podcast/content strategy and executive producer at Globe Content Studio (the content marketing arm of The Globe and Mail in Canada), said the data around podcasts is what drew The Globe to the medium.

An annual survey called the Canadian Podcast Listener Survey reveals this audience is diverse, affluent, and educated, Rana said, adding this is the very audience advertisers and media organisations alike are trying to engage with.

Stress Test, is The Globe’s longest running show to date. It is an editorial podcast, journalistic by nature, with no brand integration into the content itself.

The sponsor is CPPI, the investing arm of the Canada Pension Plan. This client wanted to raise awareness about the fund for younger Canadians, for whom retirement may seem off on the horizon. A personal finance-focused podcast seemed a perfect solution for this client — reaching out to Gen Z and Millennial audiences via a format they clearly engage with.

Brand lift studies showed strong recognition of CPPI as a sponsor and an understanding of its mandate, which was perceived very positively. The show also won multiple awards. One of the biggest indicators of success is that the show is in its 11th season, in production for its 12th, all with the exact same sponsor.

“That's been six years of a partnership,” Rana said. “Six years in advertising, you know, when you're thinking about how people are always looking for the next shiny new thing, to have the same advertiser see the value in this program speaks volumes to us about how well it's done and how well we've fostered that partnership.”

VK Media’s Article Horn maximises the potential of viral traffic

What if viral traffic didn’t just come and go but became a predictable, monetisable asset? VK Media in Sweden is proving it’s not only possible but scalable.

Anton Gunnarsson Molin, the company’s head of sales and digital media strategist, said a tipping point came after a reporter wrote a piece about her addiction to a reality TV show named Paradise Hotel.

The article exploded, with “75% more pageviews than any other article that year,” driven entirely by Google Discover. But as traffic slammed directly into their hard paywall, it bounced. The publisher’s most viral moment of the year produced no financial value whatsoever.

Instead of treating it as a fluke, Anton used the moment to rethink how viral signals could be harnessed rather than wasted: “Boom! The idea fell down in my lap.”

That idea became the Article Horn — a predictive analytics engine designed to detect viral traffic in real time, alert the newsroom and commercial teams, and trigger immediate actions that would transform sudden spikes into measurable revenue.

When an article begins to surge, especially through channels like Google Discover, the system sends a Slack alert showing where the traffic is coming from, how quickly it’s rising, whether it’s already “super viral,” and whether it’s generating conversions.

“We need to act, like, agile and quickly,” he said, because Google Discover traffic typically peaks for only “12 till 24 hours.”

The content isn’t just unlocked. It’s repackaged and redistributed to maximise long-term value. Often, the team will “dress it up a little bit, and then … throw it onto our social media strategy and put it onto Meta,” where younger audiences are more engaged and more conversion-friendly.

This transformation coincided with major changes in Google’s ecosystem, which further amplified the impact.

“Something that made it explode at the beginning of this year,” Anton said, was the tighter integration between Google Discover and Search, along with the Material 3 redesign that improved UI and sharing behavior.

As a result, VK Media saw Discover-driven alerts increase by roughly 50%, pushing even more traffic into their predictive workflow.

Tribune Publishing’s programmatic strategy

How important is it for media publishers to have a programmatic strategy?

Brian Brownie, director of programmatic advertising at Tribune Publishing in the United States, said some publishers consider programmatic as secondary to direct selling so they don’t build a real strategy around it: “I’m here to tell you that is not a good idea.”

According to eMarketer, programmatic will account for 90% of worldwide advertising budgets by 2026 — equating to US$435 billion.

“A strategy is an absolute must if you would like to take advantage of this growing trend and this explosion of marketers levering this technology to deliver ads.”

Using a Display Lumascape, Brownie acknowledged the programmatic landscape is a convoluted mess that makes it confusing, although some of that has consolidated.

“This particular programmatic space in the digital advertising landscape is really all over the place,” he said. “I’m here to explain a little bit about this and ease fears. There are solutions, and you can do it really well without investing a lot into massive teams.”

The Tribune’s pre-bid header bidding solution has driven an average increase in eCPM by 25%. This integration allows the team to work with eight partners client-side and over 30 in the server. The reporting repository has decreased the amount of overhead by 3x and improved efficiency by 10x.

Brownie shared two examples:

• An environment exposed solely to Google was recently introduced to competition via pre-bid with astounding results: 22% life in AdX price against the prior period and a 34% life YoY.
• A new site added to the Tribune footprint relied solely on a single partner to manage all programmatic. Once exposed to the Tribune stack, the revenue doubled and the eCPM increased by 50%.

“It’s fundamentally necessary to create that environment where you have this competition and this bidding pressure if you are looking to drive yield and drive your revenue,” he said.

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