As the landscape of digital advertising continues changing rapidly, news media organisations are forced to find new ways to navigate it.

During this week’s INMA Webinar, David Murphy, group head of digital media solutions at The Irish Times Group, shared how the company is diversifying its digital advertising revenue offerings to fit the evolving needs of users. That strategy revolves around finding where users are focusing their attention. 

Ireland’s digital advertising market is experiencing growth and has recently surpassed the €1 billion mark for the first time, increasing 11% year-over-year. Much of that growth came from social media and video, each seeing more than 16% increases. Audio advertising is also growing — at 8% — but still represents a small share.

However, The Irish Times largely competes for advertising in a portion of the market that isn’t growing as quickly: “This includes display, takeovers, newsletters, native advertising, and branded content, which only grew 1.1% last year,” Murphy said. That pace, he noted, is “not even keeping up with inflation.”

Although The Irish Times reaches over 1.2 million adults weekly (which is more than one-third of Ireland’s population) and is enjoying growth in the editorial categories of hard news, business, world affairs, and opinion, it faces challenges, Murphy explained.

“Video is in high demand in Ireland, but the majority of the market is most interested in non-skippable pre-roll video,” he explained. “While we produce quite a bit of video and we publish it daily, the [number of] people who are watching our video content are relatively insignificant.”

Overall, less than 1% of users watch an average of one video per month.

And although podcast growth is experiencing “good growth in terms of the shows and the topics and the listenership,” 90% of users are unregistered — and therefore unknown.

Innovation for a changing market

To remain competitive, The Irish Times has introduced several tactical and strategic innovations.

First, it addressed the video challenge by partnering with the company SeenThis, which provides a streaming technology that is both high-performing and environmentally sustainable. The Irish Times framed this as not just a better video format, but a greener one, helping advertisers reduce emissions without sacrificing performance.

“We’re tapping into that growing trend of video content and not only to make ourselves more relevant to our audience, but also to bring this really important sustainability angle to the table — in case you’re interested as well.”

Since partnering with SeenThis, the company estimates it has saved as much CO₂ as 4,500 Irish homes produce in a year: “Again, not massive, but it’s great that a small thing like this can drive better performance and also have a little bit of a sustainability kicker as well.”

Pivoting with print

To address the rising cost of print inserts — a direct result of declining print circulation —The Irish Times created digital inserts for its e-paper version.

Although e-paper usage only accounts for about 15% to 20% of subscribers, Murphy said the inserts were introduced as an add-on with a flat fee — and boosted its revenue in the process.

“We created a new six-figure revenue stream for the digital department, while inserts as a whole last year achieved more than it did in 2022 or 2023,” he noted.

Murphy acknowledged that while these tactics quickly resolved some specific challenges, “they don’t necessarily address the root cause of the issue.” News media organisations still need to focus on what he called common-sense media planning.

“These are the ideas that get pushed aside in favour of gimmicks or media plans that might look effective on the surface but don’t necessarily deliver real long-term results for advertisers,” he explained.

The first truth advertisers need to be reminded of is that ads placed with trusted news brands earn more credibility and impact. To reinforce this truth with advertisers, The Irish Times selects one partnership campaign each quarter to research.

Before kicking off a campaign, it conducts a benchmark survey to find out what the audience thinks of the brand, its competitors, and the products. After the campaign is finished, it conducts a similar survey to compare responses.

“Usually, we see nice things like uplift and awareness or whatever it is we’re trying to move the dial on,” he said. 

Attention: measuring what matters

The second truth is that ad attention follows content attention, and a cornerstone of The Irish Times’ strategy is measuring attention as a key advertising metric.

Historically, measuring attention has required expensive eye-tracking studies conducted in controlled environments; however, thanks to AI and machine learning, these costs are now within reach.

The Irish Times has partnered with Amplified Intelligence, a company led by attention researcher Dr. Karen Nelson-Field, to use predictive tools trained on historical eye-tracking data to measure ad attention in a scalable way.

While the attention tool costs The Irish Times roughly 2.5% of media spend per campaign, it offers advertisers detailed insights into how much time users spend on specific creatives, formats, and placements. This allows for fine-tuned optimisation and creates a compelling argument for advertisers.

“We can get very granular in terms of which creative, which format, which site, which line item is delivering better levels of attention,” he said. “And this all is allowing us to establish our own benchmarks and also improve our trade marketing communications.”

Murphy acknowledged the Irish market is still in the early stages of embracing attention-based planning but said the company is actively educating agencies and marketers by creating a series of videos on the topic.

“[They don’t] necessarily pitch The Irish Times, just more so pitch the concept of attention,” he said. “And then if we can rise or lift that tide, hopefully then we’ll start pitching more Irish Times-specific pieces.”

To push this further, The Irish Times recently launched a new product combining first-party audience data, AI-driven optimisation, and attention measurement. After testing it across eight advertisers in Q1 and Q2, results showed improved view time, click-through rates, and reach.

The tool can identify audience segments more likely to engage and optimise campaigns in real-time, helping advertisers get more out of their budgets while reinforcing The Irish Times’ value proposition.

Looking ahead

Murphy emphasised the importance of closely monitoring market trends to identify emerging opportunities, such as what new products could be launched or what messages publishers could “put out into the market to reinforce your position.”

Also important, he said, was collaboration with trade bodies and industry peers to advance shared interests.

“It can be really, really important, and it makes it a little bit less about the individual publisher and as opposed to a healthy industry.”

Proper measurement tools that align with advertisers’ KPIs are crucial, but so are those that align with the unique strengths of the publisher.

“Aside from that, it’s a case of regularly reviewing and, where justified by some performance data, increasing rates,” he concluded. “We need to make sure that we are getting as much out of our engaged audiences as is possible.”

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