You remember contextual targeting don’t you? That’s when you sold an ad placement based on where in your publications it would have the most impact.
What’s that? You say you’re still selling ads that way? Well, you’re not really. So-called programmatic advertising has eaten away at the very idea that publishers would care about where ads ran. Instead, news outlets and others have been trained to believe that it’s the reader – and the readers’ habits – which matter more.
Of course, your average news publisher never really bothered to learn about those habits. It was enough to say that an outlet dominated a geographic area. After all, what choice do readers have?
Plenty as it turns out if you believe that this programmatic ad talk is everything it says it is.
But, increasingly, there are sceptics. One former Google exec has gone so far as to write a book comparing what’s happened in ad tech to the 2007 mortgage banking crisis: A bubble, he says, that can’t be sustained for much longer.
Why? Because bubbles depend on believers. And the faithful – that’s publishers – are staring to leave the church.
All this will have a big impact on a small but often very influential group of ad buyers: Political and advocacy campaigns. Accustome to being told that they can target individuals (on and off-line) campaigns, given special rates for TV ad placements and preferential treatment (still) by the Post Office, political campaigns have taken to programmatic ad buying with remarkable enthusiasm. Lots of ads for not a lot of money? A deal, they think.
Lately, however, that enthusiasm is starting to fade. Call it the “Facebook effect.” Unreliable platform rules, client disapproval and blocks on the free flowing use of user data are making the practice of buying programatic ads in bulk an unreliable way to reach voters.
But voters still like news. They’re a ripe target for contextual ad placement. So there’s an opportunity on the horizon.
It’s likely that the Congress that takes office in 2021 will be younger, more Internet-savvy and interested in updating changes in election law to create a market that’s less chaotic and safer. Some in Congress have suggested that they support local news outlets with ad dollars.
The idea of reining in Big Tech has already helped publishers make some progress in Congress to level the selling field, getting wording to let them negotiate as a group with Facebook and Google on ad rates.
There’s a ways to go to get back to the revenue streams that publishers enjoyed 20 years ago. But the idea that a digital publication – and digital revenue – can and should equal print is gaining traction fast.
Spot-On has long been a supporter of local news outlets. We know – as anyone in the news business appreciates – that people who read local news care about their communities. And people who care about their communities vote. In other words, we were putting things in context before it was cool.
Over the past few months, we’e been putting the finishing touches on an ad buying platform that will make it easier for outlets of all sizes to reach political campaigns – in their backyards and across the country. If you’d like a way to help speed up the move to this ‘new’ contextual targeting for political and advocacy efforts who may want to reach your readers, give us a shout and we’ll hook you up with a demo and some demo code.
