image from AEIdeas

There’s a growing awareness in journalism that simply reprocessing content from elsewhere – whether press releases or newswires – isn’t going to be viable in a world where publishers are no longer gatekeepers. ‘Do what you do best and link to the rest‘.

Now advertising seems, finally, to be waking up to the same reality.

Here’s La Press in Canada on why it spent 5% of its app budget on research:

“$2 million of the investment went on research into how consumers interacted with content and ads. One of the most important lessons they learned was that interactive ads captured a user’s attention for an average of 9.4 seconds, compared to just 3.4 seconds for a static ad.

“Ads in the edition, served every three or four pages, are designed with this in mind

“The firm has also focused on measuring the impact of its ads from impressions through interactions to sending direct traffic to an advertiser’s website. From January, it will begin offering guarantees on the number of interactions an ad receives and is working with advertisers to serve the right sorts of ads in the right parts of the newspaper.

“They are also able to offer advertisers an attractive audience: with 35 percent are in the hard-to-reach 19-34 age range, 51 percent have an income in excess of $100,000 Canadian, and 42 percent have a university education.

“[Guy] Crevier claims the newspaper is now able to charge around $16,000 (Canadian) for an ad”

And here’s Jasper Jackson on NewsCorp’s new global advertising exchange:

“We saw growing demand for advertisers to buy across titles and across regions,” says [Greg Clayman, executive vice-president for digital strategy and commercial development]. “So for example the WSJ has a large number of people who read it in France.

“By themselves these audiences (in individual territories] are tiny, but once you bring them together and add first party data that becomes a real segment that you can sell to an advertiser.”

Finally, here’s Newsquest Digital combining similar technology with weather data:

“National advertisers have seen a 5 times higher CTR, and Newsquest facilitated a programmatic buy – allowing advertisers to react quickly and make use of regional differences and rapid changes to the weather.”

In short, news organisations are having to provide more data on who will see those adverts, what they’re doing in response to them, and react more quickly in selling them.

And that’s not even getting started on relatively new forms like ‘native advertising‘ or ‘content marketing‘…