Google’s U-turn on cookies this summer came as little surprise to many in the industry, potentially limiting its impact for premium publishers. For Immediate, 60 percent of the audience are Safari or iOS users and therefore already cookieless. “Cookie deprecation had basically happened for us,” says James Florence, Head of Advertising Technology at Immediate.
In this edition of the Sell-Side View, Florence discusses the publisher’s burgeoning video and digital subscriptions businesses, as the group diversifies its revenues with the introdution of premium paid apps for its most popular brands, including Good Food and the Radio Times.Â
What is the greatest challenge facing publishers today?
I think there are quite a few headwinds, but they’re ones that maybe present opportunity as well. Certainly for us, perhaps even more than cookie deprecation, it’s the consent landscape. For publishers who rely on the open web for the majority of their advertising revenues, I think that losing a huge volume of people who don’t consent – as per the latest regulations with ‘reject all’ on the front pages – that is a massive concern to publishers.
I think there is an opportunity there; the great thing is that reputable publishers that people trust, have relationships with their users, and they can ask those questions to users. Whereas some other ad tech businesses, it may be more challenging for them to collect and curate consent. So longer-tail websites who don’t have trust and authority with their own users, I think again they struggle a bit with that. We will have to see where the regulation lands, including ‘consent or pay’, which I think is an interesting model for publishers.
As publishers we also need to lean into educating users about what this choice actually means. I don’t think most users really understand it in any real sense, and I think if they did, they’d probably be happier to consent than they are. So I definitely think that’s our biggest challenge, which we’re working really intensively on.
How important is video revenue to your business?
At the moment, to be honest, it’s a relatively small part of our business. I think how important it is though, is that it’s one of the really key areas that we see driving our future growth. We’ve made a huge investment in video, we’ve got a cross-functional team working on it, it’s one of the business’s main priorities. Perhaps, at the moment, it’s not as important as we would like it to be, but in the future, we really see it being an absolutely core part of our business.
Which ad tech vendors are delivering the most value to your business?
We really try to collaborate as closely as possible with our ad tech vendors. In being collaborative, we try to get the most value out of those relationships, rather than it just being a transactional relationship. We find it best when it’s genuinely a partnership, with us offering value from our side as well, rather than it just being about low price, low margin, transactional stuff.
We get a huge amount of value from our data partners like Permutive and Mantis; I think they really understand the publishing business, and we work really closely with them to produce a data solution that’s really unique for Immediate’s businesses and needs. We work really closely with Magnite, and their Demand Manager product for our wrapper, for our video and display monetisation. And actually, those guys have been great to work with. That’s a great example of someone who has invested in tools for publishers and making them available at a reasonable price and taking into account our feedback.
If you could change one thing about the buy-side, what would it be?
I think the buy-side sometimes gets a bit of a bad rap from publishers. I think sometimes that’s our problem to solve; the buy-side buy what they buy because it’s effective for them. As publishers we need to come up with solutions that suit the buy-side, and then they would buy from us. I would want the buy-side to be open to those solutions, and to be agile enough to test them. And to be fair, I think if you can offer them something of value, they are – you just have to know the right people to speak to and how to navigate their structures to get something up and running sometimes!
Which content types and video formats are working best for you today?
This has actually changed quite a bit this year for us. We had a really good run of selling a lot of the usual sort of web publishers’ video inventory, autoplay stuff predominantly. And for the KPIs that our clients wanted, it was really effective. But with competition from some of the CTV players, and with new IAB taxonomy rules around placement, we’ve seen that kind of stuff be less popular.
So part of the work I mentioned earlier in our cross-functional group is driving more sound-on, click-to-play, actively viewed, lean-forward content. But also we found a big market for really high-quality video formats which probably wasn’t there a couple of years ago. Driving high viewability, high completion rates from really impactful, bespoke ad formats is where we’ve seen a huge amount of our video revenue growth from, which was perhaps slightly unexpected.
Do you produce video in-house? How do you go about it?
We produce an enormous amount of video in-house, both for our own purposes and for clients as part of partnership deals. Paul Doyle’s [Director of Video Strategy & Delivery at Immediate] team has done an amazing job at massively scaling up our video production; our video output last year was up 93 percent, and views on our website up 70 percent.
A really key component of that has been was getting all of the teams to really engage with video, so that we’re producing video across all of our different editorial streams. Paul’s also expanded the types of content that we make, so everything from long-form panel shows to two-minute cookery tips to video podcasts. There’s way more variety than there used to be on our sites, which helps get all the different types of users who visit our pages and social and YouTube channels to engage with video.
What do you think is your group’s strongest USP in the eyes of your audience?
We’re really focused on on our core areas of food, entertainment and knowledge, and I think it’s great to be a market leader in virtually all of those verticals. We have an incredibly strong proposition and knowledge in those areas that our audience appreciates. They’re massively trusted brands – Radio Times, Good Food etc. – and that’s a massive part of their appeal. They bring joy to those users and really speak to their passions so that they keep visiting again and again.
What does your identity strategy look like? Has it changed in light of Google’s U-turn on cookies?
Our identity strategy is kind of boiled down into three buckets, and has been for several years. And it’s been a strategy that has proved to be quite a durable approach. We have what we’re doing with our own first-party data, which our direct sales team sell and that we curate internally. Then there’s our open market strategy, for inventory where we’re selling through a technology partner. And our approach there has always been to engage where we see ROI, and just continually test. So there’s an absolute plethora of solutions in that space. We’ve tried to be very open to testing all of them, asess the impact on our direct business, which has to be prioritised. But a lot of the time, actually, they’re complimentary; they’re not fighting for the same budgets, it’s to do with performance or scale or remarketing, it’s different to what we offer, so we’re comfortable with that.
And then to assess whether it works for us, whether there’s demand there, whether buyers are buying it. I think that’s probably been the biggest disconnect in our strategy; we’ve seen some really cool, really interesting ideas, and they haven’t quite got the traction – which is probably to do with the last part of the question around Google’s U-turn on cookies, which, to be honest, I don’t think has changed our strategy too much. We were not shocked that it happened. I think we realised quite quickly, probably 18 months ago, that cookie deprecation had basically happened for us, because we have tons of Safari and iOS users on Macs and iPhones, so they already don’t have cookies. So we need to offer solutions for that. It’s maybe 60 percent of our users. So I guess the rest of our inventory is slowly catching up with that.
Outside of advertising, what other revenue streams are you having most success with?
One of the things the business identified a couple of years ago is that we wanted to significantly diversify our revenue streams outside of advertising. The advertising business has always been a major focus for Immediate, but we’ve always been great at print subscriptions. Jess [Burney, Managing Director, Customer Marketing and Subscriptions at Immediate] and her team have done some amazing work over the last two years, growing out print subscriptions, but also really putting in place the foundations of a successful digital subscriptions business.
At the moment that’s primarily around premium paid-for apps, such as the Good Food app, which has been amazingly successful, and the Radio Times app, which has just recently launched. We also acquired a business called Nutracheck, which is a digital subscriptions business, and we’ve been able to grow that really rapidly using our marketing expertise. So digital subscirptions are a massive focus for the business, and premium apps within that.
What person in the industry inspires you the most today?
It’s always a loaded question this one! I’ve been fortunate in my 17 years at Immediate that I’ve had some really inspirational leaders here: Guy Jones, Dom Perkins, Cath Waller now, in that MD of Commercial role, they’ve pushed me to think more strategically.
As for someone outside the business, it’s always a pleasure to work with the guys at Magnite. And Rebecca Ackers (VP DV+ at Magnite] has done an amazing job leading that in the UK recently. In terms of partners that we work with, their support and investment in publishers is second to none really.
What does the future hold for publishers?
To some extent I’m pretty optimistic about the future. I think that the trends around privacy, around cookie deprecation, around brand safety and around sustainability, they’re all narratives that bring advertisers and agencies back to working directly with publishers, and the current struggles of the platforms I think also do the same. A way to guarantee you’re getting fraud-free, brand-safe inventory at a reasonable price, that’s effective and trackable and ultimately low-carbon, is to work directly with publishers.
I think what we need to do as publishers is make that inventory really easily accessible and performant for those people. I think that’s our biggest challenge, without all of the intermediaries in there at the moment who I feel like don’t necessarily add the value that they could. There’s some that we spoke about earlier that add incredible value, it would be absolutely impossible to do this stuff without them. But I think we can really streamline that supply chain and get more of those media dollars onto effective media.