Introducing the Adweek Podcast Network. Access infinite inspiration in your pocket on everything from career advice and creativity to metaverse marketing and more. Browse all podcasts.
The last five years haven’t changed media monetization. Subscription and advertising channels have been active for decades, but they are forcing media owners to revolutionize the way their organizations are set up to successfully face the current challenges.
It’s not a philosophical nuance. Simply put, the alternative is death by the recent wave of privacy regulations and technical limitations.
A new, radical, structural transformation is needed.
From paper to pixels
For traditional media owners, the epochal shift from paper to pixels came with struggles to adapt and a serious blow to their finances. The approach to digital and the concept of “free” also meant, for most, a single revenue channel: programmatic advertising.
The commoditization inflicted by programmatic meant media owners had to run on a treadmill 24/7 to survive, often triggering a race to the bottom in terms of user experience, privacy and overall trust in the media brand.
In the meantime, subscription revenues generally kept a separate approach from advertising, with very rare exceptions. They were either left to the realm of print or managed by teams completely detached from the main revenue channel of programmatic and its strategy and operations. And vice versa.
From the audience’s perspective, this meant inconsistent, often conflicting experiences, as the two sides weren’t usually aligned. And an average user is not expected to know what team is responsible for great interactive coverage of a certain topic or an annoying auto-play video ad with sound on by default. They will just associate it with the media brand overall.
Hence, the two different souls of the company would offset each other’s efforts and affect the overall performance across all metrics.
Until privacy regulations, policy and technical changes brought by browser developers and mobile platforms changed it all.
The current era of privacy regulations
Today, the pillars of a successful media monetization strategy are two: trust and quality.
Without trust, there is no user consent, data collection, profiling, segmentation or personalization. Without quality, there is no engagement, subscriptions, memberships, newsletters or overall trust.
How does a consistent approach impact an industry with a habit for free content, huge competition for subscriptions and attention and an ever-increasing concern from citizens about the use of their personal data?
The solution lies in a word: strategy.
One team, one North Star
A media owner must develop a single, ambitious objective, common to the whole company. That North Star goal will have to be then broken down into smaller objectives related to the different areas of a media organization—objectives that, once achieved, will all roll up and contribute to reaching the company’s overall goal. The areas consist of the teams involved in the creation of content, the subscription and membership teams and the departments in charge of advertising, technology and product.
Media brands must recover a unified, purposeful voice. Each and every single touch point with the user—be it the tone of communication, the number of ads on a page or the ease to cancel a subscription—must fulfill and contribute to the mission of building the foundations of trust and quality.
Media owners are today in absolute need of their second pivotal transformation after the move from print to digital. It must be endorsed by the board and embraced across all levels. But it must also be reflected in the way all the teams, across the whole spectrum, are rewarded: through qualitative metrics rather than the quantitative approach.
In the “first-party web,” media owners have the privilege and the responsibility of being the recipients of trust and the gatekeepers of relationships. It’s through media brands that advertisers will have the benefit of higher quality engagement with audiences in environments of higher standards. But the path to building those relationships is longer and requires wider and more sophisticated strategies.
The media owner’s transformation must start today.
