Prensa Ibérica focuses on first-party data to grow digital ad revenue
Conference Blog | 23 July 2024
Digital ad revenue brings up a lot of worry for many media companies. When technologies and laws change, along with consumer behaviours, news publishers tend to see monetisation slow down.
At Prensa Ibérica in Spain, they believed automated, programmed advertising through third parties like Google were going to be the avenue in which their digital ad revenue would grow.
But that is not happening the way they thought it would.
Jesus Carrera, general manager of business development at Prensa Ibérica, told attendees of the recent INMA Latin-American Conference that another worry they have is being able to adapt and evolve along with social networks and the content generation on those platforms.
This has also brought up a challenge for the news company much like what many publishers are seeing: how to target different age segments. They’re asking themselves how they can be relevant for younger generations to sustain growth as well as appeal to the “silver economy.”
Big Tech advertising
Buying ads through Google was the first programme Prensa Ibérica was really committed to using to help them with digital advertising revenue. The strategy didn’t lead to sustained growth. Consumers didn’t like being taken to pages that had no value other than to generate ad revenue.
Advertisers didn’t like it either and wanted to disassociate from Google network and advertising. While the Google network is not growing, video and display ads are growing all over the world. While encouraging for news publishers, this strategy is not without fierce competition.
“But here we are also competing against the growth of connected television and everything that has to do with the digital homes, all the outdoor advertising that has been digitised and is really triggering large investments and impacting our investments,” Carrera said.
Third-party cookies
Another challenge is the slow elimination of third-party cookies and, depending on the country, 40% to 60% of users are now being identified through third-party data.
“And this from our side, we also have to understand that this is happening to the entire purchasing side, to the advertisers in their technologies that they have to purchase those products as well as the efficiency in the programming system,” Carrera said.
News publishers have been talking about first-party solutions for years and are evaluating the value that their own data has.
“As editors, we considered what would be more appropriate to replace the dependence on third-party cookies?” Carrera asked. “Advertisers are wanting solutions based on first-party data and they are investing in this arena, so publishers need to keep up with how first-party data works to support advertising so publishers aren’t missing out on that revenue stream.”
News publishers, of course, don’t want advertisers going elsewhere to companies that are playing the first-party data game better than they are. First-party data is also how news publishers are able to personalise ads. The advertiser and publisher will need to work closely together to determine how to best personalise to each segment of the audience.
There needs to be good conversation around who is in charge of making the decisions on segmentation. Is it the advertiser? The publisher? A combination of both? How does that work? It can’t be left up to AI alone or algorithms by themselves. These technologies need a lot of oversight to make sure the segments are what the advertiser wants.
“It is much more important than the segmentation capacity on our part that we give the buyer’s technology the ability to find the audiences they want to find,” Carrera said. “We need to focus on how we are going to be able to connect with the segments that the advertiser has.”
A first-party data strategy where Prensa Ibérica is spending a lot of time and resources is getting more and more people to register on their sites. Carrera’s recommendation is to make it really simple for users to register. He suggests linking their phone number or e-mail to their registration to make the effort worthwhile for the publisher and to encourage the user to register.
Data analytics
There are also many data solutions out in the market today.
Carerra said he knows they can be valuable but warns that to see that value, news publishers need to put a whole lot of data through the systems. Otherwise they may not be worth their cost.
With all the new technologies, data and changes, it’s easy to get wrapped up in it and forget what the goals of publishing companies are, Carrera said:
“This is more about going back to the basics because I really also believe that the entire digital ecosystem has often driven us crazy in the sense of losing focus. What are our assets, our values, really.”
Brand advantage: content
The content created by news publishers provides the differentiating value for advertisers. News publishers have high-value brands they’ve built over decades and have loyal audiences.
Media companies with long histories aren’t “fly by night” tech companies trying to capitalise on new technologies and then are gone. Social media often needs that credibility and wants to attach ads to high value and credible brands like long-standing news publishers.
“The prestige our brands have today, the coverage that our audiences have on social networks,” Carrera said. “If we show them that we are capable of adapting to their environments, they’ll see we know how to do it.”