Today’s news publishers must offer more than traditional advertising, including options such as content marketing and branded content.

During this week’s Webinar, INMA members heard from members of the Newsday team in Long Island, New York, about how they are increasing advertising value through innovation while at the same time building community connection.

Andrea Rothchild, chief advertising revenue officer for Newsday, focused on three key initiatives that have proven transformational for the company: branded content, cause marketing, and AI.

Leading with branded content 

Nannette Fevola, head of the Brand360 Content Studio, told attendees the branded content studio was built specifically for the needs — and limitations — of hyper‑local advertisers.

Whilst big brands have jumped on the branded content bandwagon, “local marketers have been a little bit slower to acclimate,” she noted, because they are “in the selling, not the telling business.” Often operating with limited staff, tight budgets, and a direct‑response mindset, they can be a hard sell for branded content.

But Brand360, launched in 2016, was created specifically to demonstrate the power of branded content to local businesses. It was one of the first in the New York area to help small businesses tell their stories at scale, and with 90% of Long Island’s businesses classified as small, Newsday saw an opportunity to expand its reach and differentiate itself through storytelling.

Early on, the team learned that long‑form articles didn’t work; local advertisers needed shorter, highly visual formats.

“We moved to what we call a photolistical format,” she explained. “That’s the sweet spot we learned over the years: 10 captions and 10 large images or carousels of images.”

Consumers loved this easy-to-read format, she said, and engagement soared. It became a hit with both readers and clients because it was modular, snackable, and easy to repurpose across social media, blogs, and Web sites.

“Some even played it in their trade show booths,” she said.

As the clients’ needs expanded, so did the studio’s offerings. Brand360 added e-mail marketing, infographics, contests, and lead‑generation tools, along with detailed campaign reporting to satisfy ROI‑driven buyers. Video capabilities followed, including custom one- to two-minute productions and even shorter AI-generated options.

Making branded content accessible to even the smallest advertisers was an important part of the mission, so Newsday introduced shared content pages that allowed non‑competitive businesses to participate at a lower cost:

“By sharing content, those small businesses could still benefit from the power of branded content, as well as the extended reach of Newsday, and ... the halo effect of the overarching promotion that we used to drive to those pages,” she explained.

Brand360 functions like a turnkey agency, Fevola said: It writes copy, designs ads, manages projects, and guides clients through every step. By making the process turnkey, the company has more than doubled its business.

She shared one tactic that has proven especially effective: creating custom comps before meeting with the client:

“The message really becomes personalised, and the client can see directly how their content would look and how it would sound just the way the consumer would see it,” she said. “It’s an effective way to present branded content to your clients.”

Leaning into cause marketing

With its content studio going strong, Newsday expanded its Brand360 capabilities into a full‑scale cause marketing initiative with the launch of Together Long Island.

Stephanie Karnik, strategic sales manager, explained the programme is designed to address declining volunteerism and nonprofit support in the post‑COVID landscape. Inspired by similar efforts at The Dallas Morning News, Newsday spent several years researching how to build a model for the local landscape before launching in 2025.

“Something we learned was launching a successful cause marketing programme was not about having the right team to do it or the idea and the concept,” she said. “It was about building the right partnerships, both internally and externally, by bringing partners into the programme — and then also having a team that can navigate different challenges that presented themselves along the way.”

A key breakthrough came when United Way of Long Island not only joined the programme but brought more than 40 nonprofit partners into the fold.

“That really helped us develop content for those partners, and it helped us secure additional founding partners along the way,” Karnik said. “Those founding partners not only believed in the Together Long Island mission, but they also believed in supporting those nonprofit community partners that United Way partnered with us on.”

Programming for Together Long Island was shaped around issues companies were already invested in: workforce development, environmental sustainability, education, transportation, and housing.

“We weren’t asking them to get involved with [or] talk about something new for them. We were basically giving them an opportunity to scale something that they were already doing,” she said. “They were already invested in those topics, and we were able to help them get the message out in a bigger and broader way by partnering with Together Long Island.”

The initiative leveraged involvement across the board — editorial, Web development, IT, consumer marketing, and advertising — to build a dedicated channel, integrate sitewide navigation, and produce both partner and editorial content that reinforced the programme’s mission.

In its first year, Together Long Island delivered more than 50 content sponsors, 68 original content pieces, nearly 20 million media impressions, and over US$1 million dollars in media value. It was also named a 2025 INMA Global Media Awards finalist: “What that meant to us is we’re not only having impact locally, but we’re having impact globally, and we can inspire others to do the same in their market.”

Leveraging AI

Tom Napoli, director of digital sales, shared how AI is fundamentally changing the way the company sells.

“Broadly speaking, we use AI in our sales efforts from start to finish in the sales process, including prospecting, pipeline building, creating campaigns and proposals — and even producing video content for our advertisers,” he explained.

Newsday’s sales transformation uses AI to help every salesperson be more prepared and efficient.

“We start by identifying the right prospects from a given set of criteria, a potential sponsorship opportunity, and from there, converting that prospect list to a scalable pipeline — along with an idea of a composed e-mail to send to these prospects,” he explained. “We’re just scratching the surface here, but even early on, we can see how helpful it has been.”

One of the biggest breakthroughs has been automated research. Instead of spending hours gathering background on a business, sales reps now receive AI‑generated briefs that synthesise public data, competitive activity, category trends, and potential marketing opportunities. That means reps walk into meetings with a clearer understanding of a client’s challenges — and a stronger point of view on how Newsday can help solve them.

“This helps our sales team save time while managing an already stressed workload, giving time-pressed salespeople smarter proposal creation and prospecting campaign management,” Napoli said.

Perhaps the most transformative change is in prospecting and pipeline management.

AI models can develop a specific target prospect list, help craft  an e-mail for those prospects, and “even include either a recommended target audience for the prospect or client to go after, or an example campaign proposal for the prospect or client to digest.”

This isn’t about replacing human judgment, Napoli said — it’s about giving the team better visibility and more time to focus on relationships.

Video, he said, “has been huge” at Newsday. The company started using Waymark, a third-party AI generative tool that creates commercial spot videos for clients, a couple of years ago. The 15- to 30-second spots can be created in about a minute just by scraping business information, content, and images from an advertiser’s Web site and social media profiles.

“We leverage this technology to offer these advertisers free video content development for their business, which they can use across their owned and operated if and when they move forward with a multi-month video advertising campaign.”  

For Newsday, AI isn’t a futuristic experiment. It’s a practical, operational advantage that strengthens the sales team’s confidence, accelerates revenue conversations, and positions the company as a more strategic partner to local businesses.

“In short, AI has been an extremely beneficial tool for Newsday and our sales teams, and one that we anticipate continuing to grow in importance and scope,” Napoli said. “We are certain it will continue to impact our sales efforts and revenues in the years ahead.”

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