With the Cookie Crunch Nearing, Vox Media Flexes Its First-Party Muscle

The publisher of New York Magazine, The Cut and Vulture is making it easier for marketers to direct more ad budgets to publishers when audience targeting becomes more fragmented post-cookies. That’s thanks to making its first-party data segments and brand-safety tools available across not just its 13 titles, but also its broader publisher-focused ad network, Concert. While the goal is to help build a more vibrant publisher ecosystem, these updates will naturally help Vox’s bottom line.

“Within the broader machinations of the industry, we very intentionally and consciously create solutions that support all premium publishers and trusted creative communities,” said AJ Frucci, svp of media at Vox. “The thinking is very much that a rising tide lifts all boats.”

By September, Vox Media’s ad clients and Concert publishers will be able to use a few new tools, including targeting audiences using a brand suitability tool, a machine learning-based tool to improve campaign performance and its first-party data platform Forte. These tools, available through direct ad sales and through programmatic channels outside the open exchange, are open to all clients with no minimum spend threshold.

The events of last year have seen marketers look for new assurances, flexibility and scale.

AJ Frucci, Vox Media

The last year has spurred an increasing awareness of what Frucci calls media responsibility: where ad performance is as important as corporate values, brand suitability and ethical investment.

Publishers bent on releasing first-party data platforms help by targeting in privacy-compliant ways, but ad buyers want the option of using them across multiple publishers, where the audience pool is deep enough to warrant the spend. The Washington Post is another aiming to roll out these segments across multiple publishers with its Zeus network.

Eric Wheeler, CEO of supply-side platform 33Across, told Adweek that publishers like Vox Media are in “a position of strength.”

“They have the breadth and depth of their portfolio,” he explained. “The question is: Will this replace 100% of the revenue that was coming in this way?”

Forte drives ‘considerable’ revenue

Vox Media was one of the earlier publishers to get its ducks in a row, announcing Forte as the curtains closed in 2019 and citing the sometimes-shady $19 billion-strong industry that rides off the back of third-party data. 

Forte has over one thousand audience segments built off various first-party data signals (like site engagement, consumed content, commerce signals and creative metadata) across Vox Media’s 13 sites.

While Frucci wouldn’t share how much revenue Forte has driven, he said it has been considerable.

But there are signs of growth: Since late 2019, 250 brands have used Forte’s first-party data segments to reach audiences. By the end of 2021, the publisher expects north of two-thirds of the impressions it serves will use first-party data segments, up from half in 2020. 

For those marketers still intent on using third-party data, Vox Media suggests testing with first-party segments to see the outcome. It’s found that first-party data for targeting appears to be more inclusive. Working with a client recently to reach small business owners across the U.S., Vox Media found that with third-party ad targeting, only 27% of the impressions reached women. But when it used Forte’s segments, 40% of the impressions reached women, closer to the estimates that 38% of U.S. small business owners are, in fact, women. 

Solving for scale

A lack of scale is ad buyers’ common complaint when marquee publishers release first-party solutions.

Vox Media’s update opens up the 40 local and national publishers, including BuzzFeed, Penske Media and Hearst Newspapers, who are part of Concert, which Vox claims to reach 230 million monthly unique. Vox Media takes a revenue share of the ads served in the network, which launched in 2016. The tool builds the segments across Concert publishers’ content and audiences according to the IAB’s content taxonomy standard. Then, behavioral patterns are modeled and extrapolated out to target similar audiences across the network. 

With this update, Vox Media has thrown in a contextual-based brand suitability tool too, allowing “brands to more gradually and accurately find safe places,” said Megan Walton, vp of revenue product.

The publisher uses machine learning to ensure the campaign is running at its most efficient. For a campaign starting with broad audience targeting segments, the tool identifies the audience and page where that campaign is performing best and updates its focus while keeping a control group running. The upshot is that brands using this have seen an average of twice the lift in metrics like clickthrough rate and video completion rate.

“We will see more publishers coming together in the way they have with Vox Media and The Washington Post,” said Wheeler. “The problem is going to be in the wallet.”

With ad margins under pressure, there are other appealing tech vendors charging a lower fee. “Where does the next-gen ad network stop,” Wheeler asked, “and where does the SSP start?”

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