By Lee Kah Whye

At the session – moderated by Gabey Goh, Associate Director at TBWA\ – the audience learned about these trends from Mark Stenberg, Senior Media Reporter from Adweek in the U.S.; David Wightman, Global Head of Advertising from the South China Morning Post (Hong Kong); and Sandeep Rai, Group Account Director, MediaCorp (Singapore). 

“Connected television, digital video, vertical video. A lot of publishers in the U.S. are really starting to ramp up the amount of video content that they are making,” said Stenberg. This is because “social platforms have really increased the visibility that they give to videos.” 

“Instagram and Facebook, in an attempt to compete with TikTok and YouTube, are really prioritising video content, and as a result you are seeing a lot of publishers really crank up the amount and quality of their video offerings.”

Expanding upon video trends, Wightman added that streaming services like Netflix and Disney+ could be well-positioned to add advertising support to their business models. “Subscriber-based advertising video on demand would be positive for the industry,” Wightman said.

Opportunities for ad-funded streaming services

He noted that, according to Nielsen, 25 percent of people’s time online is spent on streaming services and that streaming services’ subscriber growth is slowing down. That creates an opportunity for ad-funded streaming services. Viewers could then choose whether they are willing to consume advertising as a value exchange to gain access to content. This could then boost ARPU (average revenue per user) for streaming services. 

However, Wightman cautioned that advertiser-supported streaming video services at scale could disrupt the continued growth of digital advertising. This is because advertising on digital video platforms has proven to be not as effective at brand building as traditional linear television.

Advertising on streaming video could be attractive because it would reduce brand safety concerns and provide potential for enhanced targeting and insights based on first-party data. This would have an impact on other, current digital video advertising methods on which publishers rely.

The rise of brand advertising

Still, he feels that, should streaming services like Netflix launch an advertiser-funded subscription service, it would be a net positive for the industry as it will open more opportunities for brand building advertising. 

Wightman had earlier in his presentation predicted the rise of brand advertising and said that the importance of sustainable advertising will grow, as well.

“The purpose of brand advertising is to build up the memory structures over a longer period of time to buyers’ behaviour in the future … brand building is probably the main driver of brand preference,” said Wightman. “It really helps brands with price sensitivity.” 

He said research shows there is an imbalance between brand advertising and activation by response (display) advertising, and that he expects this to shift in favour of brand advertising because of inflation. Brand advertising can justify price premiums and provides price differentiation. 

On the importance of sustainable advertising, he said that the production process of advertising will increasingly be scrutinised by advertisers. “It’s not just about the creative and production but encompasses the whole of the digital supply chain,” said Wightman. “For a lot of brands, it’s a strategic pillar for them.” 

“We are going to see advertisers in Asia-Pacific start to make more carbon-aware decisions about where they will advertise … Publishers have an opportunity to lead … and create their own path as well with this.”

Despite facing record inflation in the U.S. with the potential for a recession, Stenberg in his presentation said that it’s not all doom and gloom for publishers. 

Although “economic factors are causing publishers to look around nervously,” based on the publishers he has spoken to so far in his reporting, none of them have seen any advertising campaigns cancelled, although some have postponed campaigns to the second half of the year.

Some sectors like automotive and consumer electronics are advertising less, but others – like home goods and fashion – are spending more. 

“While last year, everyone’s fortune rose, at least in the U.S. – digital advertising pretty much across the board – success this year is going to be on a publisher-by-publisher basis,” said Stenberg. 

“Publishers are reporting flat traffic through the first half of the year, and this is due to news fatigue and a quiet presidential administration,” he said. “For the most part, traffic is on par with where it was last year, which was an above average year. Most publishers are looking at flat as a success.”  

Other trends Stenberg has observed include: 

• digital advertising spend continues to grow as a share of total ad spend but at a slightly slower pace
• publishers that have spent the last two years building ecommerce operations to take advantage of pandemic trends are trying to figure out how they can continue to still make their operations profitable as people return to their offices and stay home less
• major algorithm changes made by Google in 2021 and this year have affected some affiliate revenue programmes across the industry 
• publishers are investing in different ad vehicles – especially audio, newsletters and events – and this helps them stabilise their revenues and helps mitigate traffic fluctuations and traffic downtrends 

Preparing for the ‘cookieless’ future

All said, “the biggest trend in digital advertising in the U.S. is certainly publishers preparing for the ‘cookieless’ future.” Publishers are scrambling to figure out what they are going to do a year from now in May 2023 when Google is going to deprecate third-party cookies. 

“Most publishers are experimenting with a variety of solutions. Probably the only one that I’ve seen that is pretty universal is this embrace of first-party data. Just because it’s a pretty sure-fire way of making sure that publishers can continue to monetise those relationships with readers.” 

As an example, Rai discussed MeID, MediaCorp’s single sign-on solution to the problem with the sunset of Google’s third-party data. 

“We were reliant on third-party data management platforms (DMP),” said Rai. “We have gone ahead and built our own because we realised that there was a big push for our consumers wanting personalised experiences. There was a big push for future proofing our business and not caught off guard because we have multiple sites.” 

Matching content creation and content consumption

Through MeID, MediaCorp has a view of what their consumers want to read and watch. Additionally, content creation can match up with the pattern of content consumption on their sites. 

“First thing is you got to make sure this first-party data proposition is going to benefit us as content creators, as web hosts, as people who run digital websites, and then figure out how to monetise that and activate it so that your advertisers and your partners are going to benefit from it as well.”

MediaCorp used to have disparate data sources across their various properties. The data collected was not rationalised and user experience was different on different sites. The MediaCorp analytics and audience insights team were looking at multiple platforms.

A unified browsing experience

That all changed when they introduced single sign-on some years ago with the aim to have a unified browsing experience.

“We wanted to be really granular about behaviour signals beyond just the cookie because we were implementing single sign-on, and we realised that there was so much more data we needed to tap into to really get a good view of our audiences.”  

They had to make sure the recommendation engine was able to give the user a customised browsing experience.

Data portability allowed them to bring in data from external sources, and that “goes into what sort of insights and analysis can be developed over a particular period of time … and then build a much more strategic approach to tackle the problems that we are facing today, either from a news perspective or advertising perspective. “ 

Rai concluded by recommending that publishers who have not begun to seriously look into solutions for Google’s phasing out of third-party data to start doing so. 

“Make sure you have something planned. The worst thing you can do is nothing,” Rai concluded. 

About the writer: Lee Kah Whye is Director, Asia at WAN-IFRA. 

Edited by Bill Poorman: Bill is a US-based editor, writer, journalist and media producer. He lived in Singapore for six years until 2020.