Publishers know their competitors, and, more and more, they aren’t competing with different pubs; they’re competing with Huge Tech.
Belgian publishing home DPG Media made information final week for its choice to cease promoting in-app adverts on the programmatic open market, simply one among many strikes it’s made on its journey to disentangle itself from the affect of Google’s advert platform and compete for direct advert budgets.
DPG started laying the groundwork to part out open auctions 5 years in the past, across the time Google Advert Supervisor launched its Unified Pricing Guidelines, Stefan Havik, DPG’s chief digital officer, advised AdExchanger.
That was “the final drop” in a deluge of platform modifications that gave publishers “much less management [and] much less transparency,” he stated.
Scaling up
Across the similar time, DPG seen extra points with advert high quality, together with an inflow of movie star imposter adverts hitting its properties, Havik stated. Plus, GDPR had been in impact for a few yr, and DPG had knowledge privateness issues associated to broadcasting viewers alerts within the programmatic open market.
These issues led DPG down a path of media acquisitions and in-house tech growth to higher compete with social platforms.
“One of many first conclusions we had was, ‘We’re not sufficiently big to make it interesting sufficient for the market to undertake,’” he stated.
And so DPG purchased publishing corporations throughout Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands to extend its attain, together with Medialaan and Independer (2019), Sanoma Media Netherlands (2020) and RTL Belgium, Kidsweek, Samsam and Wikipower (2022). DPG’s deliberate acquisition of RTL Nederland, introduced in 2023, continues to be pending regulatory approval.
Having ticked the field on scale, DPG additionally invested in its personal in-house advert tech. Final yr, it launched its Advert Administration platform – an alternative choice to Google Advert Supervisor that works equally to Fb Enterprise Supervisor – and, in July, a knowledge collaboration platform with clear room capabilities. It additionally has a self-serve shopping for platform and an in-house inventive company.
By 2021, DPG had migrated its final domains off Google’s advert server and now makes use of FreeWheel for short- and long-form video and Microsoft Promoting’s Monetize advert server for all the pieces else. It additionally makes use of Microsoft Promoting’s SSP and works with Index Trade.
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In the present day, DPG makes use of Google’s advert platform solely to promote backfill stock on its net domains, which represents lower than 5% of its digital income, Havik stated. Greater than half of DPG’s gross sales are direct.
Doubling down on direct response
To drive adoption of its new tech stack, nonetheless, DPG additionally wanted to launch new, in-demand advert codecs that would solely be bought from it straight, Havik stated. It noticed a chance in performance-focused advert merchandise.
“Publishers have been notoriously dangerous at direct response,” Havik stated. “We felt we wanted to be extra aggressive with Meta and Google from a efficiency perspective.”
Up to now, DPG principally offered customary IAB banner adverts, which make sense for branding campaigns, however they aren’t nice at driving efficiency, Havik stated. In the meantime, DPG seen social media platforms driving efficiency with rich-media codecs that fell outdoors the IAB’s pointers and had been designed to seem native to their platforms.
That led DPG to introduce its “seamless” adverts format, that are shoppable adverts, carousels and video placements that really feel like they match throughout the circulate of DPG’s numerous in-app experiences. “The fairest comparability is what Instagram does, or Strava – adverts natively constructed particularly for that platform,” Havik stated.
As a result of these native codecs load from its content material administration system, DPG determined to not promote them by way of third-party advert tech for 2 most important causes: quicker loading and improved efficiency.
“Nevertheless it additionally helps make our Advert Administration platform extra enticing and boosts direct gross sales,” Havik stated.
Efficiency enhancements come from the direct integration with DPG’s advert server, which supplies advertisers with extra alerts to optimize towards, he stated, including that seamless adverts have a mean clickthrough price of between .5% to 1%, which is 5x to 10x higher than a mean banner advert.
And since DPG doesn’t acquire any additional advert tech charges for utilizing its Advert Supervisor or its knowledge platform, advertisers find yourself with a greater return on their advert spend than in the event that they’d bought adverts by means of different platforms, Havik stated.
Adopting the playbook
DPG is now in a position to appeal to the lengthy tail of smaller direct response advertisers, Havik stated.
Company companions akin to Matterkind have additionally begun shifting social budgets towards DPG. Matterkind, specifically, represents a whole lot of Dutch authorities contracts, he stated, and DPG’s investments in its personal advert tech stack permit the corporate to profit from the Dutch authorities’s efforts to spend extra straight with native publishers.
Nonetheless, it’s difficult to compete with the massive platforms, which might depend on trolls and different intentionally polarizing posters to drive engagement, whereas publishers threat damaging their repute for model security in the event that they publish divisive content material, Havik stated.
Plus, the platforms have made main investments in AI-driven optimization options, akin to Google’s PMax and Meta Benefit+ Purchasing Campaigns. DPG is exploring its personal optimization choices and is testing a conversion API internally that it plans to launch subsequent yr.
DPG acknowledges that its dimension and technical prowess place it in a privileged place as a writer, Havik stated. However he believes smaller publishers may comply with an identical playbook by banding collectively to promote their stock completely by means of a collective.
“You see all these [publisher] alliances and collaborations, they usually appear to not likely go anyplace, as a result of no one’s actually dedicated,” Havik stated. However publishers may “use our playbook and ensure they’re the default shopping for route for that market.”