Lauren Newman is well aware of the challenges facing news publishers trying to earn their fair share of the digital performance marketing pie.
She cut her teeth in sales for storied pubs like Time Out, Conde Nast, Reader’s Digest, Time Inc. and Meredith, and spent the past two and a half years as EVP of media and commerce at Red Ventures.
On Thursday, Newman announced a new role as CRO of Button, a deep-linking and commerce marketing startup that offers tech for optimizing mobile shopping experiences.
Although times are tough for news publishers and digital media in general, she told AdExchanger, there’s real opportunity for those that find a way to capitalize on commerce-focused marketing.
From paper to SaaS
Button isn’t Newman’s first stint on the software side of the publishing business.
During her time at Meredith in 2018 as president of beauty, she got interested in the performance marketing side of the business. The following year, she took a job as EVP of revenue at Skimlinks, a major affiliate marketing network that shortly thereafter was acquired by Connexity. (Connexity was later bought by Taboola in 2021).
Newman is coming to Button from Red Ventures, which operates a portfolio of media and mar tech publishers, including The Points Guy, Best Colleges, the Lonely Planet travel guides and, until recently, CNET. Red Ventures sold CNET to Ziff Davis late last year.
But before the sale, Newman had worked with CNET on a partnership with Best Buy, which integrated its product reviews and other content with Best Buy’s media and ad platform.
When she learned that Button was planning to start offering something similar for its content creator and publisher products, she decided to join and lead the sales effort.
What’s new for news?
Traditional publishers and newer online content creators have an issue seizing the revenue opportunity in commerce marketing, Newman said.
CNET and Best Buy have a unique partnership created to monetize CNET’s obvious value as one of the de facto product review sources for gaming hardware and electronics. But that type of deal takes months to forge and account teams to manage. It’s not feasible for smaller publishers or creators, or even for larger news companies trying to scale with retailers one by one.
What that means is that an intermediary with a network of retailers and ecommerce sites or apps can bring great value to the sell side, Newman said.
Creating value
Online content creators face the same problem as more established publishers.
“There are individual creators who are just as important and high-converting as traditional publishers,” Newman said.
Although Button doesn’t have its own homegrown creator product, the company kicked off the year by launching an integration with Linktree.
The “plumbing of retail media” is still in the process of being installed, Newman said.
On the other side of Button’s marketplace are the actual retailers and purchasing hubs, such as Sam’s Club, Expedia, Uber Eats and Etsy. One commonality between those very different types of companies is that each is aggressively building out its own data-driven ad platform business.
But integrating across those networks is the whole point, as Newman put it.
Publishers and individual content creators with engaged readers or fan bases know they’re moving the dial for retailers and brands with products to sell.
The opportunity with retail media, she said, “is to provide more revenue recognition within the channel that otherwise the retailer or manufacturer would just not have seen.”
