News Corp’s Stephanie Layser Is Tired of Big Tech Bullying
The relationship between Big Tech and ad tech is becoming more adversarial
Covid-19 has hit publishers especially hard, from lost revenue due to keyword blocking and changing consumer news preferences.
News Corp has been deeply affected and suffered net loss of $1 billion in the third quarter of 2020.
Stephanie Layser, vp of advertising technology at News Corp, spoke with Adweek on the state of the industry ahead of her July 27 appearance at our NexTech 2020 summit.
The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Do you have any anxiety around using programmatic ads on News Corp sites?
Layser: There is a clear distinction between programmatic ads and open exchange.
Programmatic comes in many shapes and sizes; programmatic guaranteed-private marketplaces are still programmatic, and ultimately, what’s most important is that the publisher has control over how they use the pipes and what is shown on their sites, while also making decisions on how to best monetize their inventory.
This is why it’s crucial to have a competitive ecosystem where publishers can select partners that have all the bells and whistles—they need to keep a great user experience while also making money.
I will say, I do have some lingering anxiety about the open exchange. There is a lack of transparency in the value chain, incorrect assumptions by third-party vendors (brand safety, fraud) that affect publishers’ monetization with little recourse to change, and increasingly publishers have lost control of their ability to set rules for their inventory through things like unified pricing rules.
What is the relationship like between Big Tech and independent ad tech today?
The relationship of independent ad tech with Big Tech is definitely moving from frenemy territory to a more adversarial relationship, where there is little trust left.
Independent ad tech has experienced too many seemingly small product changes that have enabled anti-competitive behavior on the part of Big Tech that have hurt their businesses. It started in ad-tech pipes and has slowly moved into browsers and OSS under the auspices of user privacy.
For publishers, I believe many of us have grown weary of all our conversations with Big Tech where they tell us how much they love journalism and want to support it, and then they proceed to make a new product change that negatively impacts us.
Independent ad tech gets tied up in privacy arguments because they largely use third-party cookies for cross-domain tracking and retargeting. It’s a false narrative. When you start to look through a lens of, “What do users really dislike?” Big Tech hides behind their first-party relationship to do some of the most invasive tracking and targeting. These are things cookies could never do: listening to users’ conversations and then immediately targeting ads after the fact; creating potentially illegal segments; using search history; and checking emails. It makes ads for the shirt you looked at last week look like child’s play.
I do think we can make a more privacy-safe advertising ecosystem by limiting data coming in through the bid request so bad actors can’t thrive. But allowing Big Tech to create superprofiles off their user base and target ads using that data, no matter what kind of relationship they have with the user, is way more problematic.
In terms of taking back control, we have to start by acknowledging that Big Tech’s presence is everywhere. When we are trying to build a tech stack, we have to be creative, though even then, we don’t want to get pushed into data collection practices that don’t meet with our standards as a publisher. However, this dynamic is why our unwavering support of independent ad tech players is imperative. We know that their incentives are aligned with ours. Their success is our success.
