Strolling the Croisette in Cannes during the Lions festival is a bit like walking a real-life version of the online advertising supply chain.
It’s an omnium gatherum of agency holding companies, ad platforms, ad tech vendors, brands, retailers and traditional publishers, including The New York Times, busily buying, selling and striking deals in the sunshine.
Joy Robins, NYT’s global chief advertising officer, was on the ground in Cannes last week with an HQ in First Croisette, a small Bauhaus-inspired luxury apartment complex that for one week every June is transformed into chilled-out private meeting spaces for advertising executives to network, do business, sip tiny coffees and host cocktail parties.
The comeliness of the venue aside, however, the same topics as always remain top of mind for publishers, including the Times. There’s the challenge of balancing ad monetization with subscriptions, overcoming brand safety concerns about hard news, the impact of made-for-advertising websites on legit publisher revenue and the intersection of copyright law and AI.
But hey, it’s a lot more pleasant to chat about these things on a balcony with ocean views than in a conference room or on a Zoom call.
Robins spoke with AdExchanger.
AdExchanger: The Times pulled open programmatic ads from its app in 2019 citing a poor user experience, but then you reintroduced them last year. Why?
JOY ROBINS: What we care about when it comes to our ad model is that we’re creating a premium environment for our readers. It’s the first thing we think about.
For a period of time, that led us to believe that direct sales would be our primary focus and programmatic would be secondary. Direct remains incredibly important to us, and we have direct relationships with thousands of advertisers.
But programmatic is also a really important part of our business. It’s the way a number of our brands choose to interact, which is why we continue to build relationships with DSPs and with our agency partners.
What’s the NYT’s split between programmatic and direct ad revenue?
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That’s not something we share. But I can say that we’re absolutely still evolving our sophistication within the programmatic marketplace and always with an eye toward keeping things premium.
What does it mean to “keep things premium”?
We have more than 150 million registered users, which gives us a lot of data and signal that’s really valuable in the programmatic ecosystem.
The way we work with partners has to be privacy forward, and they choose us because they want quality, well-lit trusted brands to work with. Sometimes programmatic ad inventory has an association with being “less than,” but that doesn’t have to be the case.
One reason that association exists is because there is actually a lot of low-quality and “less than” inventory out there. Is made-for-advertising content a concern for quality publishers? Some of the programmatic dollars going to MFA could be going to The New York Times, for example.
There’s been a lot of education, awareness and momentum recently to ensure the ad industry isn’t funding some MFA publishers, and agencies have taken some great steps to protect brands.
But I think you’re right, which is why we’re so dedicated to ensuring that the value of quality publishers is recognized.
Yet a lot of brands are still skittish about hard news from a brand safety perspective.
News avoidance is real and it’s a concerning trend in our ecosystem and in our industry. I’ve been encouraged by agencies and brands being more willing to have the conversation about why this is a problem, but blocklists have grown over time – and advertisers tend to only add to blocklists. They never subtract.
What this has done is to inadvertently threaten the business model of many news publishers and paint a picture of news as unsafe, which is just false. We partnered with Stagwell recently on research that proves running ads next to politics and hard news isn’t harmful to brands at all, particularly within trusted news environments.
Yet the emotional fear of running in news and having an unfortunate adjacency is something that a lot of marketers are having a hard time getting over. But the fact is that supporting news isn’t just good for democracy; it’s also good for business outcomes.
Driving online subscriptions is a top priority for the Times. How do you strike the right balance between subs and advertising without cannibalizing one or the other?
There’s been a perception that it’s a binary choice between subscription and advertising, but it’s about “and” not “or.” They can coexist.
The New York Times is a subscription-first business, and we’re not shy about saying that. But our advertising business is actually strong as a result.
When people are paying for a product – we’ve got 10.6 million subscribers now – you have to have a product worth paying for. Our strong first-party relationship with readers helps us create a premium environment for them that advertisers can also benefit from.
Subscriptions together with advertising makes the overall business stronger, because we can put ads in places that perform for buyers. This isn’t a zero-sum game.
The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft late last year over copyright infringement. Do you think publishers that license their content to AI companies are making a deal with the devil?
We believe that assigning fair value is really, really important, but that’s all I’m going to say.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
For more articles featuring Joy Robins, click here.
