Kelly Barrett
SVP, Product ManagementComscore
This year is shaping up to be pivotal for the media industry, with both significant challenges and opportunities for publishers. At the recent Digiday Publishing Summit (DPS) in Vail, industry leaders zeroed in on key issues such as engaging cross-platform audiences, overcoming signal loss, and harnessing the potential of generative AI.
During the Summit, Comscore led a panel discussion around ‘Monetization & Validation Techniques for Optimal Audience Reach’ which unpacked some actionable takeaways from publisher panelists.
Joining me on the main stage to discuss how to balance a cohesive strategy with revenue opportunities were Amanda Gomez, SVP, of Revenue Operations & Ad Technology at the New York Post, and Josef Najm, Director of Programmatic and Partnerships at Reuters.
Helping Publishers Activate and Measure, to Monetize and Optimize
During the Digiday Publishing Summit I encouraged publishers to think about Comscore beyond our traditional measurement role. I highlighted the verbs "optimization" and "monetization," in describing how we collaborate more closely with publishers to meet their goals.
Through our Proximic platform, we offer ID-based segments that are widely utilized. However, as the industry shifts towards more scalable and privacy-focused contextual technologies, now is the time for the adoption of new practices.
Proximic by Comscore delivers contextually-driven, ID-free Predictive Audiences that allow publishers to effectively monetize their inventory on a larger scale while moving away from dependency on ID-based data. These AI-enhanced Predictive Audiences have a broad reach within key categories, enabling robust audience targeting without ID reliance and now account for over 60% of inventory (a figure that is continually rising).
Comscore’s strength is also in ‘optimization.’ Comscore Campaign Ratings (CCR) validates audiences with a holistic, de-duplicated view of campaigns across TV, CTV, desktop, and mobile platforms, allowing for views into audience reach and platform incrementality.
At a time in which local optimization is going to be critical, CCR also delivers national and local level insights for precise in-flight monitoring and optimization, ultimately helping to drive audience reach and results.
Hearing it Directly: Strategies from Publishers
Both Reuters and The New York Post are working to effectively balance their monetization of content, ensure the best user experience, and align across the organization to execute. Brand safety strategies will be important to each in the coming months while ensuring opportunities that can be monetized are delivered and validated.
In the DPS session, Amanda Gomez from The New York Post emphasized the need for alignment of all departments at the media company towards providing an impactful visitor experience while simultaneously maintaining revenue. Rather than merely increasing advertisements in high-traffic areas, the strategy involves balancing audience retention, content development, and monetization, all while ensuring that these efforts do not exceed a critical threshold. To accomplish these goals across her organization, there’s a new level of cooperation, in part driven by a major UX audit to ensure the user is happy while dollars continue to flow.
- "That involves looking at everything that's on our site right now, every tag, all the fonts, all the photos, and every team, trying to find that balance of what is going to be great for our user versus still making the revenue needed. It's not always easy, but for us it definitely starts at the top down and getting everybody aligned."
Amanda Gomez, SVP, of Revenue Operations & Ad Technology
New York Post
Josef Najm, Director, Programmatic & Partnerships at Reuters, also shared that finding alignment is important — striving not only for the success of their business but also delivering on their mission and goal of providing facts and information to the consumer.
Najm is in talks with agencies and advertisers about how brands can continue to support news and journalism with biddable media across their on-and-off platform strategy. He identified their brand-safe buckets, including sports, entertainment, and lifestyle as examples of areas where brands can continue to engage safely from its dot-com properties to its app, and off-platform strategies in places such as LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube.
- “As we get into the second half of the year, we're excited about opportunities like Paris Olympics and what that brings and activations that we can create for our clients and on that, but I also do have concerns because I know there's history around keyword block lists where there's still potentially blocking Paris, because of the Notre Dame fires back in the day, and people need to go back and look at these things, if they want to support journalism, do those audits and make those checks.”
Josef Najm, Director of Programmatic and Partnerships
Reuters
As opportunities continue to stem from change, Proximic and CCR are two tools from Comscore that publishers should explore to support their efforts to monetize and optimize and keep pace with the ever-evolving future of media.
To continue the conversation around monetization and optimization with me, please use this link to get in touch.