Amid all the challenges facing news publisher, German media giant Axel Springer’s aim is to “drive and spearhead” transformation, making strategic moves which enable it to stay ahead of trends while maintaining control of its operations as much as possible, says Miriam Zand, Head of Sales UK at Axel Springer Global Advertising. Rather than simply reacting to the growth of AI and the rise of fake news, Axel Springer tries to be proactive – as evidenced by its early moves to seal licensing deals with AI businesses.
In this edition of The Sell-Side View, Zand discussed how this desire to lead the way and maintain control shapes everything from Axel Springer’s video strategy to its programmatic setup.
What is the greatest challenge facing publishers today?
Our company has been around since 1946, and print still has a massive part to play in Germany, so digital transformation is definitely an ongoing challenge, as well as everything that comes along with it.
We need to ensure that journalism has its place in the digital world too, and there are a lot of things coming our way that independent journalism constantly needs to defend against: AI, the rise of fake news and social media, and challenges that we have monetising our inventory.
We’re always adapting to new trends. And we aim to drive and spearhead that transformation, both in Germany and through our transatlantic publications like Business Insider and Politico. We’re always trying to be proactive around topics like AI and advertising technology.
How important is video revenue to your business?
Video is very important for our digital first strategy. It’s what the users expect from us. It’s visually engaging, it’s easy to digest, and it just gives the journalistic work more impact and more reach.
When it comes to the monetisation of our video content, it’s very in-demand, and the fill rate is amazing, especially on in-stream. Having said that, it’s not our primary source of revenue, because we have more reach through things like display and native content.
We distribute our video everywhere – we use the big digital platforms, and WELT [a German newspaper owned by Axel Springer] has a TV channel, so shows from that get distributed digitally. We use social platforms and YouTube and have big video strategies for those. Everywhere you can find video, we try to be there.
Do you produce video in-house? How do you go about it?
Our journalists always make sure they integrate video production into the newsroom workflow, it’s an integral part of what they do. Video content is always created alongside written and multimedia content, wherever it makes sense of course, and video storytelling complements our broad editorial strategy.
BILD [a German news and entertainment site owned by Axel Springer] has a big live stream strategy, with a lot of different shows. So there’s BILD Live on weekdays for example, which is a current affairs show that runs from 9am to 2pm on the website. There are different shows around football as well – we bought lots of highlights clip licenses in Germany for the Bundesliga and international football.
Then WELT has its TV channel, so gets content directly from the studio for things like breaking news and current affairs.
Business Insider produces a lot of video as well. They have a series where they simplify complex business topics and make them accessible to their audience, and a really cool documentary series called Risky Business where the presenter tries out some of the world’s most dangerous jobs. I also love ‘So Expensive’, which explains the economics and the behind-the-scenes production of some of the world’s most expensive products, and shows why they’re as expensive as they are.
Which ad tech vendors are delivering the most value to your business?
We always make sure to identify which vendors bring value to our business, but also allow us to stay independent.
Media Impact, which is the exclusive advertising sales house for Axel Springer’s German titles like BILD and WELT, chose Xandr [now Microsoft Advertising] as the core ad server and SSP. We wanted to be able to integrate multiple demand sources for seamless competition of bids. That means that our ad stack is entirely holistic, we always want to make sure that the highest price wins the bid. It doesn’t matter if it comes from the open marketplace, a private marketplace, or an IO deal – nothing gets favoured, and we wouldn’t favour SSPs either.
Our priority is being transparent and independent when it comes to maximising revenues. And where we can, we try to keep control on our side, which plays into our goal of being drivers of change in the industry. So we work with all the major partners in the ecosystem who support this strategy.
If you could change one thing about the buy-side, what would it be?
It’s quite an easy answer to be honest – commitment to quality inventory and a rethink of brand safety!
Brand safety shouldn’t mean implementing random settings in a platform. I would say that’s not good enough anymore, but honestly it’s never been good enough! It blocks content which is very high quality and very engaging.
There are lots of studies that show we shouldn’t use brand safety in the way that many advertisers do use it. Stagwell and Business Insider recently released a study on ad adjacency which showed that advertising next to hard news doesn’t harm brands. And there was another study from IAS which I liked a lot as well, which found that consumers find ads 74 percent more likeable when they appear next to high quality, trusted content. So the media brand’s credibility is way more important than the specific content the advertiser appears next to.
Having said that, we are open to supporting clients who don’t want to run on hard news content. Some just have a funny feeling about it, even if there aren’t studies to support that view! We have our own contextual solutions which support those advertisers, but we would like to see more conversation and collaboration.
So if I was on the buy-side, I would favour high quality news environments, and try and incorporate societal responsibility into the buying strategy
Which content types and video formats are working best for you today?
There aren’t many video formats which aren’t monetisable to be honest, because video has been all the rage for a long time.
We have the highest demand for our primary in-stream ads, and for KPIs like view-through rates, that performs the best. Our live stream ads and OTT inventory perform very well too, so they’re very valuable to us.
We’re always trying to be creative as well, and to see where we can incorporate video into different formats. So for things like home page takeovers, which are a bit more connected to display, we can incorporate video there – it can be used within lots of different strategies across our websites.
What do you think is your publication’s strongest USP in the eyes of your audience?
It’s definitely the quality of the environment, next to the massive reach we have, particularly in Germany. I hope that we’re seen as digital first, which would be a USP for our audience. And from an advertiser’s point of view, the fact that we’re a transatlantic publisher with inventory in EMEA and the US is a big focus.
I’d also say our creativity is a big selling point – our brand studios do an amazing job across all kinds of brands.
What does your identity strategy look like? Has it changed in light of Google’s U-turn on cookies?
Our identity strategy has been very robust. When GDPR came into force in 2018, we started moving away from third-party data and built a scalable first-party data strategy, so we can always categorise and segment our audience without relying on external data sources. Again it aligns with what I’ve already said about driving change and maintaining control – we wanted to make sure we were prepared no matter what.
Axel Springer has made an investment in the data management platform 1plusX, so we work with them a lot. We’ve also explored data clean rooms like InfoSum for secure data collaboration with advertisers.
In general, we see the cookie drama as an opportunity for us, because it helps strengthen our first-party data initiatives further.
Which social platforms are working best for you in terms of distribution, engagement and revenue generation?
In general, we try to complement our brands with everything – all social platforms that will drive distribution, drive engagement, and eventually drive ad revenue as well. So anything which gets popular, we will jump on it and try to adapt and use it.
Facebook and Instagram have been big for us, but they’ve been around longer as well. We also try to work with platforms that advertisers are interested in, like LinkedIn and Pinterest. We’re testing WhatsApp and TikTok too. There are always new projects going on! And since our journalists use them to distribute content, I wouldn’t go as far as to say those platforms are threatening to us.
What does the future hold for publishers?
AI has obviously been a major topic recently, but it will continue to be in the coming years as well.
Axel Springer was the first publisher to create strategic partnerships with the large AI companies like OpenAI and so on. So ChatGPT users can actually receive summaries of global news content from Axel Springer’s media brands, even if it’s usually paid content.
On top of that, content from our media brands is used to train OpenAI’s large language models. And we’ve integrated AI tools on our largest news sites, which are growing really quickly. BILD has an AI tool called Hey_, which has a 19 percent market share in Germany, which is insane! That shows the trust that users have in our media brands.
In general, I think the future for publishers is that we will stay relevant and we will secure our place in the market, because our independent journalistic work is really important for democracy.
