On the one hand, many consumers are now ebbing away from classical news outlets, instead getting their information through social platforms.

On the other, advertisers are following suit – alarmed at either the consumer migration or the increasingly downbeat tenor of news stories in 2019, or both.

You may not expect an ad agency boss to give two hoots about news publishers – but John Montgomery thinks the problem is grave and existential.

“News organizations aren’t getting the revenue that they deserve because … marketers have been worried about adjacency to risky content,” says GroupM’s global brand safety EVP, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“I think it’s (now) coming back, but it’s probably coming back a little too slowly. Marketers are finding that they can get impressions outside of news.”

But that belief isn’t all correct, Montgomery suggests. The news may be bad lately, but that doesn’t mean that bad news is a bad marketing environment.

“There are some very good quality impressions to be bought in news,” he says .”In fact, perhaps (there are) better quality impressions in news, because it’s around the issues of the day. So by not buying in news, we are missing out on a number of opportunities.”

In the US, Montgomery has seen consumer behavior flip, so that the majority of news consumption now occurs through social platforms.

And he wants to stop the destructive effect happening in less-mature news markets.

So GroupM is one of the partners working on United For News, a non-profit trying to help emerging news orgs battle disruptions from fake news to revenue pressure.

“This is a crisis for free press and potentially even for democracy,” he explains. “I think that (ad) buyers might say, ‘It’s not our job to save democracy. But we’ve had a couple of conversations with very big international marketers, and they’ve been responsive.

“We are going to them with a solution that gives them a large body of impressions, brand safety impressions, effective impressions created by journalists who understand local issues, local trends, and the local market. So they’re good quality impressions at a scale.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series exploring the dynamic news landscape and opportunities for marketers.  The series is sponsored by CNN.  For more from the series, please visit this page.

But it is the control, power and automation promised by digital that has made media placement faux pas harder to take.

That is a takeaway from one digital agency exec currently undertaking an audit of every brand client’s risk tolerance.

“Risk is a client by client decision,” says Doug Rozen, 360i Chief media officer, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“We sit with every client. In fact, it’s something we’re doing in Q1 this year, with every single client. We are helping them reclassify their risk.

“In many cases, it might remain the same. We give the client a risk score based on what their tolerance is, what their willingness is, what their brand and audience are like. Therefore, for most clients, we do not look at news programmatically. What we do though look at is the individual.”

In the last couple of years, advertisers that have embraced automated buying became concerned at occasional appearances next to unsavory content.

Now some are even questioning whether to appear on news sites at all, such is the deteriorating tenor of public debate in current affairs.

But, for Rozen, who says: “There’s no such thing as 100% risk free digital media,” bad news can also be good news.

“We’re excited about the fact that attention is being put towards the news, real news, good conversation,” he adds.

“I think that’s what we’re really looking at, is the conversation aspect of it, not just buying banners and buttons that surround the news.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series exploring the dynamic news landscape and opportunities for marketers.  The series is sponsored by CNN.  For more from the series, please visit this page.

For one ad agency veteran who is now a board member at one of the world’s largest news organizations, that may not be enough.

“I do wonder from a value exchange point of view if what the news organisations produce isn’t worth a lot more from $300 million each to Google and Facebook in terms of the revenue they create,” says former GroupM chief digital officer Rob Norman, now on the board at BBC Global News, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

Norman was asked about inequity in the power relationship between technology and social platforms, on the one hand, and news providers on the other.

It is a mutually beneficial relationship, with most publishers having used social to gather large audiences. But those publishers have persistently claims the platforms should do more to recompense them.

“My perspective on this is that the value exchange has been a bit one-sided, that – economically, at least – that the platforms have got more out of the publishers than the publishers out of the platforms,” Norman adds.

“I would prefer (that the) monetization that’s created by that audience was shared more equitably by the platforms with those organisations. The amount of revenue that’s accruing to the original publishers from the platforms, I think, is not enough.”

Norman says that access to quality news would be restricted if publishers are forced to put up hard paywalls.

This video is part of a Beet.TV series exploring the dynamic news landscape and opportunities for marketers.  The series is sponsored by CNN.  For more from the series, please visit this page.

Over the last year, concern has grown that some brands are opting out of a news environment where the level of political discourse has turned negative.

Some media agency executives told Digiday they had blocked hundreds of news sites. We have also seen publishers like BBC News, News Corp, The Economist and now Vice Media protest at the move.

In this revealing video interview with Beet.TV, Susan Schiekofer, GroupM Chief digital investment officer, explains how brands currently regard current affairs – and how the agency responds…

“News is very important to lots of our clients,” Schiekofer says. “We have clients who very much lean in and want to surround the news.

“But then we have clients who are a little bit afraid of the category, who are very cautious, especially around political advertising, not wanting to be near political advertising or the front page news that could have violence.

“We really take the lead from the client. If they lean out, that’s okay. Our job is to present the range to our clients and then they make the decision. But what we try to do is find ways to be in (acceptable) sub-sections of news (sites).”

The issue has gained prominence as brand safety tools, which aim to help advertisers get placed next to more desirable content, primarily work using keywords to describe pages. Buyers can opt out of buying programmatically against any chosen keyword.

But that threatens to throw out the baby with the bath water. Several companies are currently trying to bring more nuance to brand safety tools.

Schiekofer says GroupM “throws out” any sites on the “far, far right” and the “far, far left”, leaving a list that clients themselves are asked to vet, sometimes further removing additional publishers.

“Our job is not to be the censor,” Schiekofer says. “We take their lead. “We do advise our clients to make sure that they’re using a brand safety verification tool.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series exploring the dynamic news landscape and opportunities for marketers.  The series is sponsored by CNN.  For more from the series, please visit this page.

That is according to one agency content chief who helps the brands find the best way to meet their goals.

“As we see the paid advertising market continue to shrink, we see the conversation around content and the shows that people are watching, around shows where you’re not able to buy advertising around it,” says Brendan Gaul, UM global chief content officer and head of UM Studios, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“As we’re seeing eyeballs move from ad-supported platforms to non-ad-supported platforms, the VODs, the SVODs, we’re finding that our brands need to partner directly with creators.”

They are doing so “to be attached, involved, and help steer the storylines of some of the content that is landing on the Netflixes, the Hulus, the Amazons, etc” Gaul says.

Marketers used to be able to depend on their several minutes of air time in between rigidly-demarcated content zones on ad-supported television. Netflix and its ilk are changing all that.

It may seem surprising in a world which, it often feels, is swimming in marketing messages, but many marketers are becoming concerned about the real prospect that ad opportunities are drying up.

So agencies like Gaul’s UM Worldwide have either become content creators or are working with major existing programmers to integrate brand content in to TV channels’ core output.

For instance, UM has worked with CNN’s Courageous Studio, an in-house brand content studio serving marketers.

“My favorite piece that we’ve done with them is a program with Charles Schwab, their whole positioning is around asking questions, and it’s around ‘owning your tomorrow’,” Gaul adds…

That approach is contrary to the views of some brands that, over the last year, have turned away from news outlets as the wider current affairs climate has turned negative.

But Gaul sees the VOD rise and the news opportunity as interlinked.

“The thing that’s interesting about that is as we see some of those eyeballs shift on the entertainment side, you see them going up on the news side,” he says. “I think that they’re complimentary in that regard.

This video is part of a Beet.TV series exploring the dynamic news landscape and opportunities for marketers.  The series is sponsored by CNN.  For more from the series, please visit this page.

“We are not moving with enough urgency,” said The New York Times’ leaked Innovation Report. “Our journalism advantage is shrinking as more of these upstarts expand their newsrooms. Many (of our news) desks lack editors who even know how to evaluate digital work.”

Fast-forward to 2019 and “The Gray Lady” seems to be pointing in the right direction – at least, if latest financial results are anything to go by.

For its full-year 2018, the publisher announced it made $709 million in revenue from digital sources, fuelled by 3.4 million out of a total 4.3 million subscriptions being digital. That helped push subscription revenue up 5% and advertising revenue up 11% on a like-by-like basis.

Subscription revenue at the publisher, more than $1 billion, is now almost double advertising revenue. But, to Lisa Howard, SVP and GM of media at The Times, those two very different revenue streams are interrelated and co-dependent.

“Your subscription business plays into your advertising business,” Howard tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “If we’re making something that’s worth consumers paying for, it’s worth their money and it’s worth their time, then that’s a valuable product.

The Times’ revenue growth means that it is approaching its target of $800 million in digital revenue by 2020, so it is setting a new goal – 10 million subscribers by 2025.

And Howard wants more of everything.

“Paying visitors means a higher quality, more engaged environment,” she says. “Advertising won’t be much of a business in the future in the digital space, unless we have real engagement from our readers and for our advertisers.”

Can both models happily co-exist? That is a key question for many kinds of media business in 2019.

As economic waters have ebbed and flowed, both advertiser and reader revenue have each grown in emphasis. Newspapers have had dual revenue streamed for hundreds of years. Now operators like Netflix are showing that, in entertainment at least, subscriptions can sustain a business without advertising.

When it comes to news and current affairs, the jury is somewhat more out. But Howard hopes that advertisers stay in the news game.

“I think advertisers understand that consumers want the truth,” she says. “That they want to read and engage with compelling, trusted news sources.”

Now publishers are fighting back. Vice has accused brand safety platforms of censorship and others like BBC News, News Corp, The Economist and CNN are protesting that bad news can be good news for marketers.

One executive who has sat on both sides – ad agency and publisher – sees mutual benefit.

“The news has never been more valuable in every respect than it is today,” says GroupM senior advisor Rob Norman in this video interview with Beet.TV. “News audiences are up. News consumption digitally is up. We’ve had things as similar but as varied as the ‘Trump bump’ and the Brexit-related news, which has put politics and therefore the news front and center of everybody’s agenda.

“It seems remarkable to me that people can consider that not running advertising in environments that engage the public enormously is of little value. It concerns me that there is an unintended consequence of some of the ways that advertisers and by extension agencies think about the news.”

Advertisers’ alarm at what they may be appearing next to comes after the earlier outcry over brand safety control, with the PewDiePie controversy spooking some big brand backers.

But such concerns have also spilled over in to mainstream publishing, with some advertisers looking for ever more granular control over the context in which they appear. For many, placing next to negativity is a no-no.

But Norman, the former GroupM chief digital officer who also now sits on the board of BBC Global News, says there has always been a “tension” over individual placements, but not a general desire to shun news as a whole.

“When people have (brand) safety on their mind, the easiest way to react to it is to take a belt and braces approach and think of every eventuality,” he says.  “The idea that a whole category of content, and eventually almost all of what I would referred to as hard news could be determined as bad news … is patently absurd.

“News organisations can only produce great news if they have great funding. Advertising is a principle source of that funding. And so, the net, net is the advertisers end up contributing to an under informed public. I don’t see how that can be good for anyone.

The trend also comes as more publishers are looking to make money from consumer subscriptions, buoyed by the success of subscription entertainment platforms and by the swings of the advertising market.

But Norman says publisher-produced brand content could allow advertisers both to have control and gain effectiveness.

This video is part of a Beet.TV series exploring the dynamic news landscape and opportunities for marketers.  The series is sponsored by CNN.  For more from the series, please visit this page.

For Marissa Freeman, it’s all part of a trend in which she sees appearing in a news environment as moving the needle.

“For us, it’s all about being in service to the reader or the viewer – when we’re producing branded content, we are journalists,” says Freeman who is chief brand officer at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), in this video interview with Beet.TV.  HPE is the business solutions unit of the computer giant.

“If you’re talking about technology that’s going to change the world and do something great for business, for humans, for society, that’s newsworthy and that belongs in a news environment.

“Depending upon what your brand is, I would say it’s a really smart place to be for some advertisers.”

The last two years have seen a sometimes-toxic political climate and a growing trend for some advertisers to shun news publishers and broadcasters.

But the news organizations lately are fighting back to make their case – news, they say, is where high levels of audience engagement can be found.

For Freeman and Hewlett Packard, it seems like the kind of engagement found in news is rubbing off.

“What we’re trying to do with our storytelling is build a trusted relationship and leave a lasting impression and reinforce the positive brand attributes that we already have in the minds of our customers and prospects.

“We tell stories. ”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series exploring the dynamic news landscape and opportunities for marketers.  The series is sponsored by CNN.  For more from the series, please visit this page.

Some media agency executives told Digiday they had blocked hundreds of news sites. We have also seen publishers like BBC News, News Corp, The Economist and now Vice Media protest that there is nothing bad about being placed next to bad news.

Now one media buyer turned sell-side executive is speaking out against platforms that, in a bid to make “brand-safe” environments in which to buy ads, are actually employing policies that may be tantamount to homophobia, racism and censorship.

“A complete misunderstanding by the tech world is the fact that they will take decisions through algorithm and these keyword blacklists without literally being transparent about it,” says Vice Media international and global chief revenue officer Dominique Delport, the former global MD of Havas, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“I feel Vice has been the first to say, “Guys, enough is enough.” We’re talking about literally censorship. We took 18 months of research to look at all the blacklists that have been used for words that was supposedly brand unsafe. (They included) ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, ‘Muslim’, ‘black’, came before ‘guns’, ‘shooting’, ‘war’ and ‘killing’. It’s insane.”

Delport made a similar disclosure back in September. Vice, of course, is an edgy publisher whose journalism often takes readers on a roller-coaster through the under-bell of culture.

After a couple of years of outcry over the accidental programmatic placement of brands’ ads against less-than-salubrious stories, ad-tech platforms introduced brand safety tools, often working by running keyword checkers on article content.

But that may be a blunt instrument, and Delport thinks things have gone too far, possibly leading to denying younger audiences, especially, the kinds of news they want to read.

“The pendulum became literally too far on that kind of fake safety,” he says. “We’re having that current discussion with other great publishers for trusted news, to really put that at the top of the agenda of the tech platform and the tech community.

“This is really serious, and we need to fix that to avoid that kind of technologic filtering behind the back of our young audience.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series exploring the dynamic news landscape and opportunities for marketers.  The series is sponsored by CNN.  For more from the series, please visit this page.

Some ad buyers buyers even blacklisted news sites, prompting one publisher to accuse them of censorship and others like BBC News, News Corp and The Economist to protest that bad news can be good news for marketers.

The latest to do so is CNN, which – given the president’s own news agenda – is often dragged in to the political mire itself.

But, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Andrew Morse, Executive Vice President and General Manager of CNN Digital Worldwide, says current affairs has never been a better way to engage an audience.

“(Some marketers) worry, if they delve into politics, they’re going to alienate half your audience,” Morse says. “That’s not necessarily the right lens to look at things.

“People are desperate for news, for information, for truth. I’ve never experienced a time like this, truly, in my whole career, whether you’re at a dinner party or at a business meeting or you’re on a plane, you’re on a train, everybody wants to talk about what’s going on in the world.”

There is plenty of bad news out there in the world. But news executives like Morse counter that an audience which can not just withstand reality but seeks it out in a bid to understand the world is actually a valuable one.

Turning the Tables on Social Networks with In-House Innovation

As CNN looks to profit from that appetite, it is on the same journey along with many other news organizations, figuring out how to build its own audience whilst also leveraging the big social networks.

“We spent years working with the platforms … We’re now turning the tables a little bit,” Morse says.

“We’re experimenting with them and, when we decide to do a product experiment with a platform, the goal is to try to figure out, ‘Is this a way that we can harness and engage audiences on our own platforms?'”

CNN’s own-platform growth will involve investing in data science, technology development and product development to deliver in new ways.

Under its parent Turner’s ownership by AT&T’s WarnerMedia, Morse says the company needs to build a content recommendation engine that better understands consumption.

Barely a week goes by without the news network becoming the target of a presidential critique. But Morse says the imperative is to play it straight.

“We’re not in the game of playing left or right, that’s really not what we’re there to do,” he says.

This video is part of a Beet.TV series exploring the dynamic news landscape and opportunities for marketers.  The series is sponsored by CNN.  For more from the series, please visit this page.

Now the publishers are getting more vocal, however. In recent months, we have heard from the likes of BBC News, News Corp and The Economist and now Vice Media protest that news is actually a great place to be seen.

And Twitter is happy to fight in the publishers’ corner. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Twitter head of US news partnerships Nick Sallon says: “News organizations in general … create a tonof high-quality journalism … and that represents a large volume of content on our platform from the news organizations that we work with.

“I see it as an opportunity for brands to associate themselves with really great news content and target Twitter audiences at scale.”

Twitter sees itself as a platform that allows advertisers, as well as consumers and news organizations, to engage with breaking events at the speed of culture.

And Sallon made his pitch for why marketers should take part in the conversation.

“It’s an incredibly important time for news organizations to have options to build sustainable revenue and business model,” he said. “The combination of user engagement, users coming to discover, talk about what’s happening in the public sphere, combined with a really compelling model for news organizations to make money sustainably, that combination, I think is an important ingredient in the world today.”

Twitter’s Sarah Personette also recently told Beet.TV her social network “created over 950 content deals with unique publishers around the world over the course of the last year”.

This video is part of a Beet.TV series exploring the dynamic news landscape and opportunities for marketers.  The series is sponsored by CNN.  For more from the series, please visit this page.

“Marketers need to be part of the news environment because our consumers are engaged in the news environment,” P&G’s Chief Brand Officer says in this interview with Beet.TV. “They’re getting information about the world and about society and about trends, and therefore that’s an opportunity for them to get information about our products and our brands.”

Engaging with consumers beyond headlines and quick news stories can convey messaging that brief ads alongside such content cannot, according to Pritchard.

“We can create content that a journalist or a news company can do a better job of communicating. They can unpack it in maybe a more in depth way and create different views of that particular area that might be of interest to people.”

Last year, P&G partnered with Great Big Story on a 20-minute film titled Words Matter chronicling the venerable marketer’s journey to endorsing its acceptance of all things LGBTQ—a journey that took about 30 years. The film gave viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the internal process that ultimately produced its LGBTQ stance.

“That was a great story and it got a lot of interest from a lot of people,” Pritchard says. “It shined the light on our company in a way that we probably couldn’t have done ourselves. It was better and more credible for a news organization doing so.”

Those same capabilities are one reason why P&G has a partnership with Katie Couric Media. “She’s a great journalist. She’s told some of the best stories and done some of the best investigative journalism of anyone.”

Asked about the company’s brand safety guidelines for news content, Pritchard says the standards are the same across every piece of content or program in which P&G advertises “because you’re judged by the company you keep. If a line is crossed then we’ll pull our ads.”

He’d like to see a higher bar for expectations of news content in the areas of truth and transparency. Light needs to be shone on situations “in such a way that has multiple views as opposed to one skewed view.” In addition, Pritchard would prefer to see less focus on “those things that are sensational and focus on a range of things. Because the news has a huge impact on culture, on images, on portrayals of people and it’s really important that they get the right balance of both the positive and negative in their programming.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series exploring the dynamic news landscape and opportunities for marketers.  The series is sponsored by CNN.  For more from the series, please visit this page.

“There’s a lot going on and as a result, I think you as brand need a very clear and concise message. To make sure that what you’re portraying your brand to be, what the attributes are, what the value of that brand is to be very clear,” Sullivan adds in this interview with Beet.TV.

These are the attributes that people are looking for in the broader space of news and information. “They want clear, concise information” informed by fact checking. “They really pay attention now more and more.”

Research done by Omnicom shows that 60% of the people they polled “are paying more attention to where they get their news from, the credibility of that news organization, the fact checking that is done. From a brand perspective, make sure that you are also telling a very true and reliable account of who you are and make the message simple for the consumer.”

Noting that “the news sometimes is just hard to watch,” Sullivan points to vehicles like CNN’s Great Big Story and branded content studio Courageous as examples of how news is a very broad category beyond the minute-by-minute, oft-volatile headlines. Viewers desire “the ability to learn something new. The ability to get a story that you knew nothing about the topic. They have a voracious appetite to get out there, see the world that they can’t actually maybe physically see. I think as news organizations are branching out into that.”

The more that news organizations are able to tell great stories beyond just the headlines, the more they can satisfy the “tremendous appetite” for reliable information about things like health, fitness, travel, food, music and sports, according to Sullivan.

Research shows that 80% of all Millennials are getting news and information from apps and from social media. “That alone is telling you what’s out there. It’s not just about politics and not just about current affairs. It is about all those other things I just mentioned.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series exploring the dynamic news landscape and opportunities for marketers.  The series is sponsored by CNN.  For more from the series, please visit this page.