News UK Proves What We Know: Ads Next to Relevant Content Work

News Corp’s U.K. division, News UK, has carried out research into how relevant placement of ads next to content—you guessed it—improves the ad performance. Based on an analysis of 980,000 impressions on News UK property The Sun’s website, the study with Lumen Research, using eye-tracking, found that putting an ad in a relevant editorial context—a Sports TV package placed against sports-related content—can increase attention on that ad by 31%. In real numbers, that equates to an increase from 25 minutes per 1,000 impressions to 33 minutes. The timing couldn’t be better. “If you look at the news agenda, peoples’ demand for trusted journalism is at an all-time high,” said Ben Walmsley, commercial director, publishing at News UK. “The way ads are being targeted is undergoing seismic changes. This lets us understand the relevance of context, which is critical to the future delivery of advertising.” Hearst’s Good Housekeeping Boasts Record Affiliate Revenues As the use of third-party cookies fades into obscurity, and the tussle for cheap audience scale—regardless of environment—dies down, more publishers are amping up their contextual tools. Still, ad buyers rely on third-party ad verification vendors to identify brand-safe segments, which can be based on blunt keywords. As well as the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Ukraine spurring ad buyers to critically scrutinize ad placement, the ad industry was dealt another reminder last week with Gannett’s reveal that no one noticed where billions of ads wound up. News UK is taking this research out to its clients to encourage them to place more ad dollars with the media company. “No one is surprised," said Charlotte Taylor, head of publishing and audio at Publicis-owned agency Spark Foundry, but this is re-establishing and putting some weight behind it. This allows us to really quantify and highlight the importance of relevance.” Nucleus turbocharges ad revenue The research is the media company’s broader efforts to elevate its own first-party data platform, Nucleus, a years-long effort to collect, sort and monetize the various different data signals it collects across properties. These include logged-in subscribers from The Times and Sunday Times, email registrations from The Sun’s various brand extensions, Talk Sport and Times Radio, plus first-party data collected from its upcoming connected TV channel. There’s a massive range of variables that change the volume of data it collects, but it’s well over 1 billion events per day. Nucleus lets advertisers and internal teams understand audience behavior, preference, opinion and emotion across its properties. On emotions, for instance, News UK breaks content down into 12 different segments, including thrilling, adventurous or amused through to self-confident and In the Mood to Spend. All RFPs over the last year include some Nucleus data, equalling hundreds of clients. Nucleus has “turbocharged” ad revenue growth for the company, but it wouldn’t share specifics. Tying emotions to sales The real magic comes in News UK's ability to eventually fuse data signals from Nucleus, based on demographics as well as broader contextual attributes such as emotions, opinions and preferences, to brand uplift metrics to offer benchmarks to advertisers. The publisher has made the first steps here. A luxury auto brand’s traditional demographic target was high-net-worth AB males aged 45 and over, an in-demand and capped-out segment. News UK ran a campaign comparing this target demo with its own emotional contextual target by placing the ad next to content generating a thrilling emotional response, (this could be a Travel piece about extreme holidays or a Sports piece about a particularly closely run championship). Post-campaign analysis showed that the two targeting options generated the same results. Click-through rate for both traditional and emotion-based targeting was, on average, two times above News UK’s campaign benchmarks. Typically, brands looking to reach this standard demographic cohort have to pay third-party vendors to buy this audience off the shelf, a practice that won’t stand the test of time once third-party cookies are nixed. News UK’s contextual alternative opens up new ways to target hard-to-reach clients and still generate the same results. “We’re measured on merit,” said Walmsley. “To do that, we have to prove effectiveness with empirical evidence of premium environments to drive mid to upper-funnel marketing impacts for marketers.” But there is more work to be done. “Research like this is a step in the right direction,” said Henry Rowe, chief digital officer, Omnicom Media Group UK, “but equally we know we are near the start of the journey for attention planning, with much more work to be done on client-level data, creative impact and non-standard advertising.” Nucleus is also used internally, informing consumer road maps and powering ecommerce. Last year, News UK stopped working with most content recommendation companies and instead uses Nucleus to recirculate internal content instead, driving significant revenue. While not every publisher will have the resources to build out platforms like Nucleus, most are concerned with getting back control over their contextual, out of the hands of ad verification companies, as publisher frustration of profiteering through contextual data scraping grows. “In our terms of use, it states content should not be used for commercial gain, and we feel that is true,” Walmsley said. As cookies die out, some of that control is being ceded. “There have been many ways publisher data has been leaked in the past,” he added.