01/31/2024
Content Can Be King Again, by Charlie Swift, EVP, Head of Marketing & Account Management, Adstra
The digital media industry stands at a crossroads. Publishers are widely seen as having the keys to the future of advertising, due in part to third-party cookie deprecation.
While it’s true that publishers have a unique opportunity to own their audience like they once did, they need to shake off several decades’ worth of bad habits. Truly “owning” the audience relies on building a unique brand and capturing consumer loyalty in a way that many publishers have long since abandoned.
The old saw is that “content is king,” but in today’s media economy, clickbait is the real king. Over the years, publishers have moved away from relevant, high-value content that builds connection, bringing people back to their sites again and again. Instead, they’ve opted for a strategy that gets people to click onto their site once, read a headline and maybe two sentences, and then leave the site.
That pursuit of transactional scale at all costs has led to a commoditization of online publishers, eroding brand loyalty. In the old paradigm, publishers could earn revenue by simply accruing traffic and impressions and selling them via programmatic marketplaces. But as time has evolved, advertisers are waking up to the realization that the connection between a click and a customer is tenuous at best, resulting in a deterioration of results. The increased focus on identity and ad performance means accuracy of the audience matters much more than scale.
Content can be king again, if publishers build and install mechanisms to understand how to connect with the audience and then follow that audience over time to create a true customer journey ecosystem. This requires evolving the strategy beyond the moment that a consumer clicks on the site and sees a targeted ad. It’s about being part of the purchase journey.
Publishers can be part of that journey only if they have a technical ecosystem that persistently recognizes the audience that's coming in, as well as helping brands perform, target and measure.
Content is about engagement. Without a mechanism to harness that engagement correctly, there is no way to capture the value of that engagement. Publishers stand to benefit – and in fact, gain most of the leverage in the advertising ecosystem – if they can reinstate the value that comes with engagement.
Doing that requires an investment in both the editorial (engaging content) and technology (capturing insights and identity) sides of the business. Publishers who make these investments and elevate accuracy above scale stand to benefit within this new order.
