While many news publishers have struggled with the loss of audiences to social media, UK group Reach, owner of the Mirror, Express, and a vast portfolio of regional and local titles, has maintained engagement with users coming to its brands for their local coverage. And in 2019 the business built its own ad tech solution, Mantis, helping to diversify its own revenues while driving monetisation for other publishers.
In this edition of the Sell-Side View, Terry Hornsby, Group Digital and Innovation Director of Reach, and EVP & Founder of Mantis, discusses the company’s use of video, Facebook and TikTok, the rise of curation in helping to bridge the buy- and sell-side divide, and the future of digital distribution for smaller publishers.
What is the greatest challenge facing publishers today?
I think it’s always been the same challenge: understanding what tech partners and tech vendors can bring to them as a publisher. I think there’s more and more technologies in the marketplace, lots of noise, lots of things, lots of promises. Publishers now have got less resource, less time, and they need to commit to the right partnership. So I think that’s a big one for publishers this year and next year, is making sure they pick the right partner.
How important is video revenue to your business?
Really important for us. We have a good mixture of pre-roll and outstream. We’ve launched a studio where we do podcasts, videos, vodcasts, and original content. So for us as a business, video is a big piece. I think for every publisher it is, if they can do it at scale. But we’re very much in that space of social video, and working out what we can do there as well.
Which ad tech vendors are delivering the most value to your business?
We’ve got our own ad tech business, Mantis, so that is adding value to us as a business. And again, you don’t just look at SSPs and DSPs any more. I think if curation is done well, I think curation partners could add value this year. And then on the video side, obviously you’ve got people like the outstreams and the pre-rolls, so I think video vendors are doing well too.
If you could change one thing about the buy-side, what would it be?
It wouldn’t be about the buy-side, it would be the transparency between sell-side and buy-side. I’ve cracked on about it for years and years, hopefully somebody will listen eventually! But we still don’t sit in the same room. We’re still very much buy-side, sell-side. We’re not together. And as an industry, I think we need to forget that principle of buy-side and sell-side separately, and actually realise we’re in advertising together, and work on that. And that’s curation done well, when the buy-side, sell-side, and a curation partner is adding value, and you can all see what you’re doing. That’s definitely the way forward.
Which content types and video formats are working best for you today?
Pre-roll always works really well, so longer-form video – that’s where the advertisers and brands find value as well. There’s a place for outstream too, but I’d say the longer piece is the pre-roll, broadcasty-feel videos that do really well. And you can also stick them up to be vodcasts, or social video. So really the core is generating that really high-quality content, and then slicing it up for social platforms etc.
What do you think is your publication’s strongest USP in the eyes of your audience?
The strongest for us is obviously local relevance. We’re the biggest local, commercial publisher in Europe. But from a user point of view, they come to us because of the local knowledge, the location. We’ve got very strong national brands, with the Express and the Mirror, and they’ve all got their own voice and their own brand, and also very different voices. But that regional strength, that’s where our engagement and our users come in, they go to that every morning. And I think the uniqueness of these brands is they actually compete with the social platforms, because if you’ve got that trust and that localised piece, people actually come to you rather than going to a Facebook or a TikTok. So I think that’s our strength.
What does your identity strategy look like? Has it changed in light of Google’s U-turn on cookies?
We’re still on that journey. We got into a really good place when we built Mantis, so fully contextual, no cookies. We trialled the LiveRamps, the ID5s, we tried everybody out while we were doing it as well. And we’re in a place now where the cookie is there, and we’re using it while it’s there, but if it went tomorrow, we’d be in a very good place. And I’ve said to publishers, don’t stop pursuing cookie alternatives. For us, we use it while it’s there, make sure that we can compare non-cookie and cookie environments, and build that out so that when it does go, it’s no different to us.
Outside of advertising, what other revenue streams are you having most success with?
We’ve chosen to diversify our revenues from just banners and advertising, into the Mantis ad tech, which adds revenue to us, but also gives revenue back to publishers. We’ve also got Yimbly, our ecommerce platform, which sells sofas, garden furniture etc. It’s starting slow and small and growing, but our aim is to have several different versions of that as we go along.
Which social platforms are working best for you in terms of distribution, engagement and revenue generation?
Revenue is different per platform really, but I think from a distribution point of view, we’ve got a lot of Facebook pages that do well in terms of engagement with users. We’ve also got TikTok, and some of the social accounts are our brands, but some are individuals – so we could have a sports writer that has a lot of followers on TikTok.
What person in the industry inspires you the most today?
Not many, to be honest! I’m not easily impressed. It sounds a bit cheesy, but my ex-boss, who is now the new CEO of Reach, Piers North. I’ve worked for him for eight years now, and he’s one of the people in the industry I really respect. There are a lot of challenges in our industry, there are a lot of people in our industry, and I think he really knows what he’s doing.
What does the future hold for publishers?
Lots of challenges, lots of ups and downs, lots of different paths. I think publishers are going to have to think about how their personalisation and distribution of their content is done. We’ve looked at building aggregates of our own network, so that when you search an interest, you get all of the articles across all of our different brands. So I think publishers that have got networks of sites will eventually get to that point of personalisation. And the Mantis recommender will recommend content to people based on the content they’re seeing, not just who they are. So I think publishers are going to have to evolve into that piece.
But for smaller publishers, do they get traction on social platforms, off-network? If I was a small publisher, I’d try and make the most of the audience outside of my own audience. As a large publisher we’re lucky, we get lots of them coming to us, so it’s a bit different. But I think smaller publishers, maybe in the future, need to get together, or say let’s build up brands on the social platforms. And for niche publishers, I always look at these publications about trains or toys and sites like that. What is the future for them? Is it a TikTok channel rather than a web page? But for us, I think it’s a case of personalisation, building out that engagement with the user, and different ways of displaying our content to people.
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